Going from silly to deadly serious in descending order. Apologies for the jarring cognitive dissonance, but it’s an accurate reflection of my timeline these days. What’s your favourite band name from the 1978 Scarfolk Youth Indoctrination Festival? For Adam Sharp, it’s a three-way tie between Arrogant Sandwiches, Pavlov & the Dribblers, and Hitler Likes Twix ‘Can we change the world?

Why did the Street Movements of the 2010s fail? What Tactics are most Effective in Non-Violent Protest? Think tanks are struggling. They need to change. Whoop Whoop. Just made a personal Webpage it’s super easy. RIP Saleemul Huq, a true climate hero Why a “humanitarian pause” or “humanitarian corridors” are simply not the answer in Gaza Pracademics: just a clunky

Pracademics. Horrible word, interesting concept: people who straddle, however uncomfortably, the worlds of practice and academia. This week, I spent an hour talking through pracademia with fellow pracs Tom Kirk (LSE) and Willem Elbers (Radboud University), who’s editing a Development in Practice double issue on the topic as part of a new initiative to promote pracademia (they were inundated with

This post by Oxfam’s Richard Stanforth and Magnus Corfixen went up on Oxfam’s Views and Voices blog on Friday Why are Oxfam and other humanitarian organisations not welcoming calls for corridors, pauses and so-called “safe zones” to address the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza? Richard Stanforth and Magnus Corfixen explain – and set out why a ceasefire is the only credible

Over the weekend, the horrible news came through of the death at 71 of Saleemul Huq, a scientist and activist who attended every single global negotiation on climate change since 1992. Saleem was a lovely man, a remorseless but invariably polite campaigner for climate action, both as Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh

Prodded by my LSE department, I finally got round to creating a personal webpage this week. As well as an exercise in gross narcissism, it’s super helpful (for me) to have a single place to direct any enquiries, and remind myself (and perhaps others) about stuff I’ve done and forgotten – distant past, random interviews, papers I’ve co-authored but didn’t

Guest post by Enrique Mendizabal of On Think Tanks Just 15% of respondents say it’s getting easier to operate as a think tank, according to the 2023 Think tank state of the sector report. And over 50% of respondents in Latin America & the Caribbean, the USA & Canada, and Africa say it is getting harder to operate. I think

Continuing on yesterday’s theme of the ups and downs of mass protest, I met (albeit via zoom) with Srjda Popovic, one of my protest heroes, last week. Srdja’s a Serbian political activist who cut his activist teeth as a leader of the student movement Otpor that helped topple Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. He established the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in 2003 and

Been reading some interesting (and challenging) reflections on protest movements recently, so the next two days will cover what I’ve learned. First up a Guardian ‘long read’ from Vincent Bevins, a journo, on ‘Why did the Street Movements of the 2010s fail’. The piece is based on his new book,  If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing

Links I LikedWhich book should I review next? You decide please!How do we talk about Older People in Development and Activism?Be Care-full. A poem for the timesLinks I LikedWill growth be enough to end poverty? New Projections of the UN Sustainable Development GoalsWhat would make an Atheist spend a day discussing Faith and Development?

Had a good chat last week about one of my enduring hobby-horses: the role of faith in development, and the aid sector’s massive secular blind spot. The conversation was with Christian Aid’s Lila Caballero Sosa, who (with Islamic Relief, the Joint Learning Initiative and the University of Leeds) is putting together a big event on faith and development for next

Guest post by Arief Anshory Yusuf, Zuzy Anna, Ahmad Komarulzaman and Andy Sumner Today, October 17th is the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (you already knew that, right?). In new analysis for UNU-WIDER, we assess progress towards the global poverty-related SDGs, specifically monetary poverty, undernutrition, child and maternal mortality, and access to clean water and basic sanitation.