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One more post on last week’s Transformational Public Diplomacy symposium (see the others here and here), where the most incisive presentation was given by Sir Peter Marshall, the UK’s perm rep to the office of the UN in the 1980s, and now on the staff of the Diplomatic Academy of London. Sir Peter argued that:
Whereas [...]

I’m over in Geneva, where I’ve just been presenting to the IASC, which is composed of the heads of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies (including UN agencies like WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP and the WHO; NGOs like Oxfam; and the Red Cross / Red Crescent movement).  Here’s my presentation, which uses food prices as a springboard from which [...]

I am at the Diplomatic Academy of London for a conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (programme- pdf).
As the title suggests, the launch pad for the conference is US one - the agenda Condoleezza Rice first set out in a speech at Georgetown University in 2006:
I would define the objective of transformational diplomacy this way: to [...]

Last night I was at Gresham College where their Professor of Commerce, Michael Mainelli, was lecturing on global risks (read his lecture here).Mainelli concluded his lecture with this neat throwaway line:
I sometimes think global risks keep us from attacking each other by providing a common enemy. So, if we get started attacking global risks collaboratively, [...]

What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically [...]

For English policy wonks walking along Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC, the experience is invariably bittersweet.  On one hand, they are (they must admit) slightly awed by the concentration of great engines of think tankery within a stone’s throw of where they stand: Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, SAIS, CFR and plenty more besides.
But then their [...]

Nice to see an integrated approach to UK operations in Afghanistan…
When I asked the men of 3 Para what their first tour had achieved, they all fell silent. “It was very frustrating,” said [Major Paul] Blair. He believes that his men could have achieved something in the town of Gereshk, where they were first [...]

I had meant to write something wildly insightful about Gordon Brown’s visit to the U.S. and his rather good speech at the Kennedy Library on world order - a distinct improvement in terms of both intellectual clarity and phrasing on his previous outings on the subject in London and Delhi. But then Daniel Korski [...]

Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

In our Progressive Governance paper, Alex and I argued that ad hoc ‘shared platforms’ are a vital part of the management of a globalised world, particularly at times of rapid change. In Newsweek, David Rothkopf provides a glimpse of how these platforms have swung into action during the current financial meltdown:
To get a sense of [...]

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On Saturday, Alex and I presented our paper on multilateralism and global risks to heads of state at the Progressive [...]

As David mentioned yesterday, Downing Street’s asked us to prepare a paper on reform of international institutions and present it to various heads of state and international agencies at tomorrow’s Progressive Governance Summit outside London. 
Our central argument is that the international system’s core challenge is to get better at managing global risks like climate change, [...]

On Saturday, Alex and I will be at the Progressive Governance Summit, where we’ll be presenting a new paper on multilateralism and global risks to twenty or so heads of state.
The summit’s website has just been launched on the Downing Street domain. Our paper will be published there on Saturday morning. Hopefully, we’ll have a [...]

Google is working with US intelligence agencies in a bid to connect the dots.
Many of the contracts are for search appliances - servers for storing and searching internal documents. Agencies can use the devices to create their own mini-Googles on intranets made up entirely of government data. Additionally, Google has had success licensing a souped-up [...]

A new report by the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief (Acbar) says the international aid effort in Afghanistan is in large part “wasteful and ineffective”, with as much as 40 per cent of funds spent going back to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries. This is worrying but not really news…
As far [...]

Ian Katz’s Observer interview with Jonathan Powell - chief of staff to Tony Blair throughout his time at Downing Street - was definitely worth a read, if for no other reason than that this was, incredibly, Powell’s first media interview since 1997.  You get the impression that if Powell gave more such interviews, it might be [...]

Who set out this admirable vision of decentralised policy coherence?
Without democracy, you have no understanding of what is happening down below; the situation will be unclear; you will be unable to collect sufficient opinion from all sides; there can be no communication between top and bottom; top-level organs of leadership will depend on one-sided and [...]

In late 2006 Manuel Miranda accepted an offer by the Department of State to join their diplomatic mission in Baghdad as a Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Prime Minister’s legal office and the Government of Iraq on legislative process.  In the following year he established the Office of Legislative Statecraft. When he left in 2008 [...]

And so to Network Weaving, a blog by and for people who use network mapping tools.  Network mapping folk like nothing better than to, y’know, network, and so it was clearly with a swing in his step that blogger Valdis Krebs went off to the 28th annual conference of the International Network for Social Network [...]

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
Here’s an excellent video with which to while away the next nine minutes and thirteen seconds.  The speaker is Clay Shirky, an American writer on the social effects of internet technologies.  He says:
What is happening in our generation is that we have a set [...]

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