I was going to write more, but I’ve decided to let the image speak for itself.

Last week I was asked to review a new book on gender and development. Since these things are usually turgid affairs, full of abstruse jargon (“registers of governmentality”, “idioms of sexualness” and “body reflexive practices” are just a few of the assaults on English perpetrated in this one) and nostalgia for the marxist utopias of yore, I was apprehensive. I envisaged long days of ploughing laboriously through paragraphs, trying heroically to decipher “essentially hetero-normative constructions”, “emergent rubrics”, and “positionalities”, and then having to pretend in my review that I’d both mastered this tangled tongue and maintained sufficient will to live to pass constructive comment on it.

But once you have hacked your way through the impenetrable forest of the introduction (which counts “decentring the traditionally unmarked male” and “normatively naturalizing potencies” among its most egregious language crimes), you emerge into a glade of sunny clarity. For Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities is no ordinary gender book – reading it will give you a new perspective on the social problems of the developing world.

The idea that gender equality is important to development is not new – efforts to educate women and girls are among foreign aid’s few relatively uncontested success stories, and microfinance programs, the development fad du jour, also mostly target women. Men, however, have largely been overlooked by practitioners and policy-makers; reading Men and Development, you begin to see what catastrophic effects this has had.

The problem lies in the expectations society has of men. In West Africa, for example, men are expected to set up a home, marry at least one wife, and accumulate and provide for children and other dependents. Those who fail to perform these duties forfeit the respect of their elders, women and their peers; they cannot become “real men”.

When the breadwinner role becomes impossible to fulfil – as it did for millions of men across Africa during the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s – men have other facets of masculinity on which to draw in order to recover their self-esteem. Some of these alternative masculinities are positive – think of the black South Africans who responded to economic emasculation by adopting the role of fighter against oppression and joining the liberation struggle.

But many traditional expressions of manliness are socially destructive. Physical violence is the most obvious of these. Economic insecurity, as one of the Men and Development authors Gary Barker notes in an earlier paper, can prompt men to turn to violence to reaffirm their power – many South African men have joined criminal gangs, for example, while domestic violence becomes more common as unemployment rises.

Alcohol and sex are other appurtenances of maleness whose allure increases when men are faced with threats to their masculinity. Sex is unproblematic by itself, but if manhood must be proven by sexual voracity or by demonstrating dominance through sexual violence, the effects on both men’s and women’s health can be severe. Linked to this is the man-as-risk-taker paradigm. Chimaraoke Izugbara and Jerry Okal’s chapter on Malawi shows how fear-mongering HIV prevention campaigns urging abstention from sex have often led to an increase in risky sexual behaviour (such as sex with multiple partners and without condoms), as men react to the challenge to their sexual potency – a marker of manliness in Malawi as elsewhere – by demonstrating their fearlessness (another important marker).

There is a danger when given a new hammer, of course, of treating everything you see as a nail – at the cinema last weekend I couldn’t help viewing The Artist as an extended meditation on masculinity, for instance – but Men and Development makes a convincing case for viewing social phenomena through a gender-tinted lens. In Africa alone, the spread of HIV, the Rwandan genocide, Sierra Leone’s seemingly pointless civil war, the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and no doubt many other events and trends can at least in part be attributed to threatened masculinities; as men are disempowered economically, politically or socially, they resort to harmful expressions of maleness to restore their pride and reassert their power.

Masculinities are constructed and sustained at all levels of society, from the family to the state. To date, most work to engage men in confronting harmful gender norms has focused on individuals and communities on the ground. Workshops held by groups such as Promundo in Brazil and Sonke Gender Justice in South Africa, for example, have helped reduce domestic violence, dissuade boys and men from engaging in risky sexual practices, and encourage men to question the patriarchal assumptions in which their attitudes to women are rooted. These programs endeavour to provide participants with positive alternative masculinities – to value their role as carers for family members, or as active community members, or as advocates for social justice (including gender equality) – so that when they feel that one aspect of their manhood is menaced, they have constructive outlets to turn to in order to restore their equilibrium.

But the state has a responsibility, too. Legal and institutional changes can embed or trigger cultural shifts, but in many cases the latter exacerbate gender inequality by entrenching harmful masculinity norms. As Andrea Cornwall notes in Men and Development, for example, laws that oblige divorced men to pay alimony without also obliging them to provide child care cement the notion that men should be breadwinners above all else, and that women should take responsibility for caring. Microfinance programs’ targeting of women reinforces the idea of the reckless, irresponsible man who cannot be trusted to invest in his family. And the criminalisation of sex workers’ clients, itself based on a misleading perception that all such men are perverted or violent, perpetuates the stereotype of men as aggressors and women as helpless victims.

The UK’s recent threat to withhold aid from Ghana if the latter continues to trample on the rights of gay men stands out as a rare example of a government challenging a gender norm (accepting homosexuality requires an admission that not all men conform to the heterosexual stereotype). In the book’s closing chapter, Alan Greig argues that such measures must become widespread, and that institutions at national and international levels should be consistently held to account for how their actions legitimise male dominance and sustain gender inequality. As Men and Development eloquently shows, however, it is not just all levels of society that must be engaged, but all genders. Half of the developing world’s population has been neglected in gender policy; this book is a timely call for a rethink.

I used to spend a lot of time arguing about big issues: trade liberalisation; industrialisation; national sovereignty.  Not that I’d necessarily want to go back to those days, but the nearest thing I could think of to anything that approaches that level of disagreement today is the spat between Jeff Sach’s gang and Michael Clemens’ gang about whether the Millennium villages project is working.  And it’s not even an argument about development policy or practice, but about research methods: essentially, if the project should have used the hugely fashionable randomised evaluation methodology, and identified a control group at the start to be able to see the impact that interventions are having compared to that control group. 

Important stuff, but surely not the be-all and end-all of the potential questions raised by this project.  Who, for example, is asking about the relative importance of improvements within rural areas and movement out of rural areas for development in the long term?  Who is asking about the limits of this kind of aid-based intervention in the absence of institutional and market changes at the national or global level? 

Randomised evaluations can tell you if your development project is likely to achieve its specified objectives among the target group. This has been a huge step forward for aid – knowing what works is better than throwing money at the latest fad because everyone says it works until it doesn’t.  I am a fan. But this method can’t tell you if a development strategy, of which this particular project is a part, is likely to be transformational for the economy in the long term, or what the effects might be on inequality, or indeed whether inequality is something you should worry about at all. 

Not that no one is asking these questions, but they’re no longer the bread and butter of development thinking.  This is partly because of a conscious push against the big ideas that were so hotly debated ten years ago.  Bill Easterly’s plea for people to do less planning and more, as he puts it, ‘searching’ has contributed to a fear of setting out an agenda for big change.  The focus on evaluation as the key tool for policy making is the logical next step – focus on what works now, not on bigger and inevitably vaguer questions about where you want things to go in the long run. 

But the lack of big ideas worries me (and I’m not the only one) and not just because I love a good argument. Policy making and decisions about resource allocation by governments, donors or NGOs, are not just a technical business.  It’s not a question of finding out what works and then doing it.  ‘What works’ for one group might not be what works for another.  Something might ‘work’ but still not be the best use of resources given the overall objectives of a community or of a country as a whole.  Someone really should be asking hard questions about the bigger picture.

It’s particularly disappointing that development thinkers seem to have given up on these questions just as the rest of the world starts to really address them.  British politicians love to talk about capitalism at the moment, and the media is full of debates about how wealth is created (or destroyed) and how it should be shared out.  The financial crisis and recession have opened up the space for new ideas and new thinking, but the micro-oriented development field hasn’t made much of this opportunity.

Small stuff is important.  But we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that the problems, or the solutions, of development are purely technical ones.  The big questions haven’t gone away just because we’ve stopped talking about them.

Playboy magazine is not the most obvious choice for those preoccupied with nuclear proliferation. Yet, Joshua Pollock’s article on “The Secret Treachery of A.Q. Khan” in the January/February 2012 issue has proved to be as titillating as the all-revealing photos that made the publication infamous.

The article, written in the whodunit oeuvre, uncovers that in addition to the three known customers of the Khan network—Iran, North Korea and Libya— there was a fourth hitherto unknown customer and reveals the “last country on the list: India, Pakistan’s foe.”

It’s worth reading the whole column.  But I want to know whether the publication of Pollock’s piece resulted in a big rise of sales of Playboy in news agents around the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Vienna headquarters.  Was some aspiring Hans Blix sent out in a grubby mack to purchase copies of the top shelf magazine for his superiors?   Did IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano have to flick through pages of poorly-clad minor celebrities to find the article (curiously, there is no mention of it in his “Director’s Corner”)?  Is the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has a slightly stronger pedigree on nuclear issues, going to change its approach to illustrations now?

These are all puerile questions.  But you know you want them answered.

Over the last few decades the religious Right has dominated the mainstream discussion around “morals and values” in the United States. Claiming to be the moral compass for the country, they have defined a radically conservative platform for issues including abortion, welfare, LGBTQ rights and more. The Left, for the most part, has let this happen. Rather than leading with our values and vision, progressives have focused on making rational arguments for what is “right.” No matter how skilled our analysis, we have been unable to speak to the complex and holistic experiences of everyday people, to resonate with their need to be a part of something deep in their hearts and spirits. While the Right has organized people around  fear, they have been even more powerful when they tapped into and met people’s desire for belonging. The Left has largely ignored these needs, contributing to our ineffectiveness in broad social change.

From Out of the Spiritual Closet: organizers transforming the practice of social justice.

Dear Mr President Barack

I am very happy to present you with this copy of The World Book of Happiness…with my best wishes for a ‘Happy New Year’ but also with my request to you as world leaders to make people’s happiness and well-being our political priority for 2012 [um...what about preventing the catastrophic collapse of the euro? No?]

Positive thinking is no longer something for drifters, dreamers and the perpetually naive. Positive Psychology concerns itself in a scientific way with the quality of life. At stake are not only the happiness and well-being of individuals, but also those of groups, organisations and countries. And above all, in today’s global world we can all learn from one another. It is time to make this knowledge available to the man and woman in the street….

People who think positive see more opportunities, perform better, possess greater resilience, take more often correct and sound decisions [sic], negotiate better, have more self-confidence, maintain better relations, take greater responsibility, have more trust placed in them and so on. In short, they give more hope to others because they can experience it themselves. In order to release this positive energy, people need oxygen. Society can offer this oxygen. Positive education, positive parenting, positive journalism and positive politics play a crucial role here. This oxygen we can also create ourselves by a balanced existence or a religious or philosophical rooting.

[I love this paragraph. My favourite line is 'to release this positive energy, people need oxygen', though I also like the idea of 'a religious or philosophical rooting' - 'rooting' is a slang Australian word for shagging].

Why not address women and men from all angles of their multiple intelligence? [Why not indeed!]...By addressing men and women who are on a growth path, we all become better and happier people. We then do not turn every incident into a trend and every anecdote into a general truth. [You've lost me Herman]. As a consequence our governing will stimulate self-knowledge, reflection, sense of responsibility and commitment.

Positively inclined people see everything in its right proportions. [etc etc for a few more sentences.]

Happy New Year!

Herman Van Rompuy

Chairman of the European Council

Woohoo! I love his cheery upbeatness in the face of chaos. And quite a plug for the book itself. The author, another Belgian called Leo Bormans, blogs excitedly: ‘Will Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in the near future read in the World Book of Happiness before going to sleep?’ You betcha Leo!

Now, a cynic might suggest Herman is reminiscent of the conquistador hero of Werner Herzog’s movie Aguirre Wrath of God, who dreams of ruling over new empires while monkeys swarm over his sinking raft. But that’s a cynical thought. Think positive. Think Belgian. Find a happy place!

Click here to view the embedded video.

We occupied the park and set up a few tents and facilities to serve food and coffee. The police soon declared an emergency closure of the park and came out in force, with full riot gear and all the weaponry. The line of riot cops soon forced us out of the park, so someone decided that we ought to march to City Hall. It was about 9 pm on a Saturday night, so City Hall was closed, but we marched there anyway, 800 of us blocking traffic the whole way. Once there, the riot cops once again lined up to disperse the crowd. However, since City Hall was closed and there was no point in staying there anyway, someone had the idea to march down to the area of town where all the clubs were, so we took off marching again. The riot cops were trailing behind us…

After marching for 3-4 hours, we eventually found ourselves a block away from the park that we’d been forced out of, so we took it again. The riot police lined up and prepared to take the park again, but the attempt was called off and the police just left. They realized that they would have to go through the standard military procedure of clearing the park inch by inch, only to have us go back out into the streets and march again while they, one more time, trailed along helplessly- their entourage functioning as a part of the march, creating an even larger disruption to traffic (the marchers covered a city block, the trailing police took up another city block, effectively doubling the size of the obstruction to traffic)…

H/t John Robb.