It feels a bit odd to be reviewing a book when you’ve just had breakfast with the author, but I finished reading Hugo Slim’s overview of the Humanitarian system and its future on the way to a workshop we are both delivering in Nairobi, so good to write it up while it’s still fresh. First, the weird title: Solferino 21:

One lesson of recent times is that countries’ global reputations often have little to do with their underlying realities. The Netherlands is not all a happy liberal paradise of coffee houses and cyclists. And Brazil is not all sex, carnival and footballing genius. In the case of Brazil, the world has woken up to this through the rise and chaotic

Understandably, perhaps, progressive researchers often prefer to try to understand the lives, challenges and struggles of the poor. Who wants to spend their time talking to sleazy fatcats? But if you want to change things, it’s often necessary to understand the people in charge. So I was very happy when public philosopher and political scientist Roman Krznaric sent over the

Not sure if this is normal behaviour, but holidays is when I tend to read the big heavy tomes – see previous posts on Piketty, War and Peace, or other random novels. Last month’s holiday saw me chow down on Linda Colley’s The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, a Big Book with the grandest of sweeps on warfare, constitutions

In the second of their four-part blog series (first published on Global Policy), which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor (two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort), use Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to ask how activists can use the internet to achieve new forms of power and

This is the first of a four-part blog series first published on Global Policy, which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism. Written by two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor, it uses Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to interrogate power: asking how activists can use the internet to

Back in the day, when I was doing advocacy on trade and globalization, I was struck by the extent to which the underlying assumptions of International NGOs resembled those of their governments – the liberal Anglo-Saxons targeted European subsidies, or northern tariffs, both of which they argued damaged southern producers. The French and Germans often seemed more interested in protecting

Finding myself having a repeat conversation with a number of different colleagues is usually a sign that a blogpost is warranted. In recent months I have had a series of chats with people either planning or already well into writing a book. The conversation usually goes something like this: Me: have you thought about Open Access? Them: Gimme a break

I’ve come to recognize a certain format for ‘inspirational books for activists’: big sweeping statement about What Needs to Happen, then what I call ‘thousand points of light’ – breathless accounts of some activist-led efforts to achieve those goals. On to the call to arms, invoking political will. Job Done. I must be getting (even more) jaded. What’s wrong with

Charles Kenny is a wonderfully fluent and accessible writer. He’s also quick, judging by his latest book, The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease. Here’s how it opens: ‘The two leading killers worldwide at the start of the twenty-first century are heart attacks and strokes. That is evidence of humanity’s greatest triumph: until recent decades, most

Guest blog by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, co-authors of The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed, which is published next week The debate over development, so vibrant in the 1960s and 1970s, is being reinvigorated around the world with the rise of self-proclaimed “water defenders.”  And, while largely off many people’s radar, that debate

Guest post from Kevin Watkins Have you ever wondered what links Bono and Bill Gates to Moses, Socrates, Basil the Great, a 4th Century AD bishop in Asia Minor, and the ‘gilded age’ industrialist Andrew Carnegie? Me neither. But Paul Vallely’s magisterial book Philanthropyprovides the answer. Tracing the ties that bind contemporary philanthropists to the Ancient world, the book raises