The New Passive Activism?

Revolution at the click of a mouse? Photo: Brian Leadingham/flickr

  “Dear incredible Avaazers,
Just a few hours ago, our community reached 10 million people!”

Last week’s announcement by Avaaz, an online pressure group, speaks volumes for the continued enthusiasm for a form of political action that requires little more than a couple of mouse clicks. Once you’ve registered on a site like Avaaz, all you need to do to support a cause is enter your email address and click a button – or two, if you want to advertise your deed on your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Political Economy and Development

Cars with megaphones to educate the public: the best fit for Timor-Leste, photo Valerie Sticher/ISN

Next Tuesday, October 25th, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) is hosting a free evening event examining the interplay of politics and development aid from a political economy perspective. Called “Putting Politics into Practice? Political Economy Analysis and the Practice of Development”, the event is being held at ODI’s London headquarters. Members of the public are welcome to attend.

What is political economy analysis? According to the DfID, it is the bridging of the traditional concerns of politics and economics, focusing “on how power and resources are distributed and contested in different contexts, and the implications for development outcomes. It gets beneath the formal structures to reveal the underlying interests, incentives and institutions that enable or frustrate change.”

“Putting Politics into Practice?” builds upon a previous dialogue convened by ODI in 2010 on how development actors might go about incorporating political insights into their work. While there has been growing recognition that aid effectiveness is intertwined with political context and culture, translating these insights into real changes in development practice has not been easy. This would mean, for example, that instead of working to rigid guidelines of ‘best practice’, development programs and projects should instead be based on models of ‘best fit’.

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Keyword in Focus Humanitarian Issues

Keyword in Focus: Uganda & Conflict

Kampala
A view of Kampala.  Photo: hamoid/flickr

On Friday, the 14th of October, the State Department announced that the US was sending 100 military advisers to Uganda.  Their purpose: to help African troops pursue the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its leader, Joseph Kony, whom the ICC accuses of 21 counts of war crimes and 12 counts of crimes against humanity.  The deployment follows the unanimous passage and signing into law last year of legislation which makes it American policy to kill or capture Joseph Kony and defeat his army.

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Uncategorized

This Week at the ISN…

It's week 42 of the ISN's 2011 editorial coverage, Photo: Eva the Weaver/flickr

We’ll highlight the following:

  • In ISN Insights on Monday, Dr Harsh Pant from the Department of Defense Studies at King’s College London comments on India’s faltering counterterrorism policy
  • We’re featuring another ‘keyword in focus’ on Tuesday
  • In Wednesday’s ISN Insight, Denis Burke of The Broker magazine analyzes the path to political succession in Tibet
  • We’ll feature an upcoming event being held by our partner, the Overseas Development Institute on Thursday
  • In Friday’s ISN podcast, Drs. Oya Dursun-Oksanca and Odysseus Cristou will discuss political perspectives on Cyprus

And in case you missed any of last week’s coverage, you can read up here on: the Viktor Bout trial; our content holdings on Liberia; Black Sea geopolitics; the origins of ‘international’ thought; and the work of identifying the missing

Would You Download a Weapon?

AR-15 lower receiver and ‘print file’. Images: Wikimedia Commons, Thingiverse

 

3-D printing, while unknown to most of the public, has been around for quite a while. Its industrial applications range from rapid prototyping and archaeological reconstructions to medical uses in implant technology and custom-fitted hearing aids. Now, the technology is becoming affordable for the average consumer: while an industrial-strength 3-D printer that can use materials like bronze-infused steel, or even titanium, still costs more than $10,000, desktop machines for printing hard plastics are being sold in kits available for little over $1000.