GII has paid special attention over the past two years to a question that increasingly concerns advocates and policy makers working on issues ranging from the environment, to development to nuclear proliferation: what does a balanced approach to national security look like?

In late March, we hosted a mix of communications and policy people as part of 3D Security's effort to present Congress and the public with a fuller picture of the policy options available as we all think and talk about what makes us safer. And over the past year, several meetings in our Effective Aid, Effective Advocacy series and many online musings have focused on what it means to have a national security policy that effectively uses all our tools, not just the military ones.

But all this conversation needs to be grounded in facts: how do we spend our security dollars now? What do they buy us? Is this picture changing? How could it change for the better? These are the questions that Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) set out to answer in creating its Unified Security Budget. Every fiscal year FPIF updates this Unified Security Budget to keep it current and apply these questions to current debate. You can read the executive summary (and click through to the full report) of the 2008 edition here.

If you're involved in efforts to help Congress rethink its security spending across categories, we highly recommend you take a look:

One useful, currently missing tool to ground this debate, we argue, would be a Unified Security Budget (USB). It would pull together in one place U.S. spending on all of its security tools: tools of offense (military forces), defense (homeland security) and prevention (non-military international engagement.) This tool would make it easier for Congress to consider overall security spending priorities and the best allocation of them.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm still chewing a bit on this thoughtful piece from the Christian Science Monitor about Why genocide is difficult to prosecute. A surprising amount of attention is paid to the tension between politics and justice. The weight of the act of accusing a country of genocide is set against the deep emotions of victims and their advocates, and the ICC's ability to seek truth in this atmosphere appears minimal.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There are a lot of ways people in Washington and in the international development business have imagined things would end for the career of Randall Tobias and the sweeping reorganization of America's foreign aid infrastructure. This is certainly not one of them.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our own David Devlin-Foltz will be joining an Advance Practice Institute on Evaluating Advocacy Grantmaking next week at the Council on Foundations annual conference in Seattle. While the conference is invitation-only, a half-dozen bloggers will be participating and potentially (nobody is making any promises) will live blog the event as time permits. You can check out the COF conference Blogger's Banquet here.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A top headline in the Onion this week, Middle East Conflict Intensifies As Blah Blah Blah, Etc. Etc., is funny because it rings so true.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In evidence that environmental issues in general -- not just global warming -- are making their way slowly but surely beyond public debate and into business plans, see the Washington Post's story about McDonald's and Greenpeace teaming up to "jointly pressure the biggest soy traders in Brazil into placing an unprecedented two-year moratorium on the purchase of any soy from newly deforested areas." Read the full story here.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amidst reports that more than 70 percent of Egyptians, Pakistanis, Indonesians and Moroccans believe the United States is trying to weaken and divide the Islamic world, the story that the Guardian published about Iraq students showing support for Virginia Tech students is especially moving. And a reminder of why efforts like those of Seeds for Peace, AFS and Amigos de las Americas are so valuable - and still possible despite it all.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Takes a while to reach its punchline, but this is a terrific outgrowth of a project at the Center for Global Development: tracking the impact of every powerplant, worldwide, and using it to leverage advocacy via partner organizations to whom data will be furnished. The cool idea here is to compare the estimated dollar cost of CO2 emissions with the estimated dollar cost of hurricanes. It's a great bit of social math -- and the graphics in the blog posting help bring it home.

For the global community, the view from [the power plant at] Mt. Storm turns out to be shocking. This single facility, ranked only 36th among US power plants, is accountable every year for global damage equivalent to the concentrated destruction from a category 3 hurricane. And the parent company, ranked 10th among US power companies, is accountable for category-5-level damage.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I couldn't help but marvel, when I read what Barack Obama "took away" from reading Reinhold Niebuhr.

I marveled that a leading Democratic presidential candidate was quoting my favorite political philosopher, whose thoughts I grew to appreciate at Wheaton College under the tutelage of my old-guard political science professor, whose stints in the Navy and intelligence gave him (and by extension me) an unshakable sense that whether or not we wish it were otherwise, realpolitik will always define the way the world really works. Notwithstanding, I think Niebuhr attracted my professor because he did not yield to the cold, calculating world of Bismarck and Kissinger. Apparently, Niebuhr drew Obama for the same reasons. David Brooks quotes Obama describing Niebuhr's contribution:

[He has] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.

The irony of this Brooks column is that Reinhold Niebuhr would no doubt poll below Lyndon LaRouche in the name recognition department (most unfortunate), but the essence of Niebuhr -- the striving for a way to be in the world that's neither cynical calculation nor credulous idealism -- comes up again and again as something that unites Americans.

As Tarek notes in a post below, many's the person inspired by a candidate's vision but disappointed by his execution of that vision. It remains to be seen whether Obama can translate this fine balance into practical policy steps that remain more or less faithful to his vision. But it's refreshing to see that while Obama has struck the right tone to connect with a broad swath of Americans from a messaging standpoint, he's got more than politics on his mind.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Presidential contender Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) has been moving aggressively to establish his foreign policy credentials in the early going of this long, long campaign. Probably because the standard line about Obama is that his short time in the Senate means he has no experience, the candidate has begun to flex his muscles with several speeches culminating in one this week on his home turf to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Taken together with the comments from this morning by David Brooks (Josh will hopefully have more on this shortly), Obama's speech outlined a somewhat muscular look at the military, a collaborative response to threats, and a leadership role in building security through stability. Much of this meshes with advice the GII and others have been offering and with the prevailing view of much of the public about how our foreign policy should be (see here and here).

Obama contrasted his approach with that of the current administration. As the Times wrote:

“America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, but the world cannot meet them without America,” Mr. Obama said. “We must neither retreat from the world nor try to bully it into submission — we must lead the world, by deed and example.”

From my perspective, a rap on Obama -- that he is triangulating to win votes but not actually thinking about leading the country -- isn't all that much of a complaint. For a lot of Americans, it is probably something of a breath of fresh air to hear a candidate speak in this manner about foreign policy (though it's worth pointing out that Obama may be swinging for the fences early in this game, since his rhetoric seems aimed at the casual voter and not the party elite who he needs to get him through the first stage of this contest next February).

I believe that candidates do have an important job during campaigns, even ones as long as this one. And unfortunately, I concede that this job -- connecting with people first in your party's base and then across the country (though mostly in key states) -- involves a lot of saying what people want to hear, giving the public what it wants, so to speak. What's most unfortunate is that this phase of the work is so disconnected from the part about running the country later. I know I'm not alone in thinking back to a candidate I supported because of the things he or she said and the way those words made me think about the type of leader this candidate would be, only to be disappointed with the execution.

We'll try to check in on all the candidates foreign policy big-principle speeches on the blog as we continue. We've already heard this type of speech from not-yet candidates like Chuck Hagel, and we'll be writing up those and other perspectives as the blog grows and time permits.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• MarketingSherpa's Viral Marketing 2007 report
• Billionaires band together to push America's ailing education system to the front of the agenda for 2008.
• Some interesting thoughts on anonymous foundation blogging

  Posted by Tarek Rizk at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The NetSquared community selected 21 projects to 'feature' in the year ahead with a remarkably democratic process of nominating and voting.

I spent some time trolling through the candidates and was thoroughly impressed with the diversity of the participants in this non-profit community. The featured projects list can also tell us a lot about the trends rising to the surface where technology and social change intersect.

First and foremost, there's a focus on individual human contact, versus the big institutional characteristics of many aid and development organizations. (See NABUUR, mykenyanspace.net, Kabissa and Yankana.org.)

Local farming -- educating and connecting -- was popular. (See FamilyFarmed.org and Farmer2Farmer.)

Open source, scalable technology was also a hit. (See TakingITGlobal and Participatory Culture Institute.)

None of these trends are surprising, of course, but it is worth watching the entire list of featured projects for exciting things in the future.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apropos of nothing much else, the Donor Power Blog returns to John Dodds' Branding Myth for a bit of a refresher. Dodds noted all those years ago that:

...it is not faux emotional associations that consumers want. It is whatever a product actually delivers that generates real emotional attachments. This originates not just from its functionality but also in terms of packaging, delivery and convenience. Despite what many gurus aver, it is not true to suggest that the vast majority of products/services are actually satisfactory and thus interchangeable.

Branding hype is not what people want. They want results.

Branding is not something created by marketing. It's not a color palette or a positioning statement. It's something real. Something that happens out there in the world, not just in your marketing and PR.

So next time you get the urge to "improve" your brand, start with this question: Is what we do and how we do it unique, remark-worthy, and materially better than what anyone else does?

If you can say yes to that -- and it's not just mutual back-patting, but really true -- then you can start asking if you're expressing it is power and clarity.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You'd think with that headline, this would be a gigantic post. Nah. Just a little one.

Several movements are converging around the idea that there is powerful momentum to be gained from an effort to divest from businesses supporting the Sudanese government. Most often, this covers investment banks here and abroad who have holdings in Chinese energy companies which have extensive extraction interests in Sudan. (Learn more here and here.)

The underlying idea of these campaigns are that there is and ought to be a good deal of shame around the pursuit of filthy lucre which props up a corrupt government which has declared war on its own people. Surely, few of these companies -- Fidelity Investments and Warren Buffets' Berkshire Hathaway have Chinese investments under scrutiny, as do the British bank Barclays -- wish to be known as a supporter of genocide. Many when directly confronted claim that their investments are merely business decisions, not endorsements of policies here or there, and on and on.

Such protestations fall flat when it's revealed that PACs funded by these and other corporations targeted for their complicity in the Darfur genocide contributed more than half a million dollars to members of Congress in what looks almost transparently like an attempt to loosen regulations on companies dealing in Sudan:

Corporations targeted for doing business with the Sudanese government, which faces sanctions for its complicity in the Darfur genocide, gave more than $580,000 to congressional candidates during the 2006 cycle through the political action committees (PACs) of their U.S. subsidiaries, according to federal disclosures.

Sudan-linked PACs sent contributions to 13 House members who backed a plan by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) requiring public companies to reveal the nature of their ties to Sudan and barring them from federal contracts until the ties were severed. Eight of those House members, all Democrats, received contributions from Sudan-linked PACs within two weeks of signing on to Lee’s bill last year.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At all:

More than 70 percent of Egyptians, Pakistanis, Indonesians and Moroccans believe the United States is trying to weaken and divide the Islamic world, a poll released on Tuesday showed.

The survey by WorldPublicOpinion.org also showed more than 40 percent thought that was the primary goal of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, while only 12 percent believed Washington's aim was to protect the United States from attack.

"While U.S. leaders may frame the conflict as a war on terrorism, people in the Islamic world clearly perceive the U.S. as being at war with Islam," Steven Kull, editor at the Washington-based group, said in a statement.

The whole report is available here. Mostly grim.

UPDATE: GII Director David Devlin-Foltz noted a story about students in Iraq showing support for victims of the Virginia Tech massacre last week, and when I contrasted that positive story with this one about the Muslim belief in a US war on Islam, he said, "[Kull's findings] underscore why student-to-student, youth-to-youth exchanges are more necessary than ever. Though I don't for a moment believe they are sufficient. Just necessary."

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tales of missed chances and bungled planning in the development field are not hard to come by. The public supposes that most development assistance is wasted anyway. So it makes for an especially interesting story when citizens and the advocacy groups representing them intervene and help to get it right.

On April 12 the Government Accountability Project leaked word that the World Bank's new strategy for health, nutrition and population would make virtually no reference to sexual and reproductive health -- even though the bank spent almost $2 billion on such programs over the past ten years. The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), together with some creative people at the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) moved quickly to point out the disconnect between bank president Paul Wolfowitz's statement addressing the issue and the bank's official strategy document on the same subject.

IPPF and CHANGE did not stop at putting out press releases. They enlisted NGOs and individuals, along with their networks and listservs, to write letters to key decision-makers at the World Bank. At first, drawing on their networks' international reach, advocates urged constituents to send letters to their respective countries' health and finance ministers, asking that ministers follow up with the bank. When health advocates realized that they could build more momentum within the bank by sending letters directly to World Bank executive directors (board members), they shifted their strategy in response.

That shift paid off. Letters from advocates around the world have helped to get new language into the official strategy document, now under review by the board. That should enable countries that specifically requested family planning assistance -- like Madagascar, where the bank's managing director had struck those plans out -- to include them back into the Country Assistance Strategy. And an abundance of phone calls from World Bank staffers thanking advocates for their efforts have confirmed that the letter-writing campaign has struck a chord and strengthened voices for a comprehensive reproductive health strategy within the bank.

This would be a remarkable story if only as an example of timely, coordinated advocacy -- health advocates immediately seized the opening when the story was leaked -- and coordinated between networks. But timing is tricky; sometimes it works for you and sometimes it doesn't.

Just as noteworthy was the way the campaign evolved: IPPF and CHANGE acted out a truism that emerged from the Activation Point recently: rather than trying to convince everyone, find the smallest group needed to cause change and take your message to them. When advocates responded by narrowing their focus from health ministers to World Bank board members, they echoed a key lesson reflected in Continuous Progress: monitor your benchmarks and indicators; they help you stay on course towards a successful campaign.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've got to admit that there are times when certain turns of phrase are enjoyable -- mostly in a humorous context. I enjoyed ironic riffs on meetings to plan "strategery" for a while, but find them tiresome now. I join the Chicago Tribune' Eric Zorn in being tired of "Meet the new boss/same as the old boss." Fortunately, these pop-culture references will eventually fade (though I'm afraid the line from the Who song is here to stay), but there are shorthands that deserve to stick around. Since the 2000 election, discussions of the majority feel loaded to me. A majority of American voters picked a different president than the one who took office, a majority of Senators (including all the current presidential candidates who were in the Senate in 2003) voted to give the Bush Administration a thumbs up to invade Iraq, and a majority of Americans gave President Bush a positive favorability ranking until around the beginning of 2004.

So "the majority" doesn't have a lot of meaning, I guess, in a binding political sense. Any kind of measurement is a snapshot, not an enduring fact about life. That said, the recent political history of America has been an interesting study in the tyranny of the minority rather than the majority. As we and other the-values-make-the-message types have been preaching for a while, America's foreign policy has been out of step with the wishes of the majority of Americans since before the Iraq war began. The majority of the American public believes, actually, in a foreign policy that is engaged with the world around it and not solely in a confrontational way. They believe America should be a leader -- not the only leader -- in making the world a safer place, but that we should do so with the assistance of our fellow-nations.

More recently, the majority of Americans have moved beyond the opinions of a majority of their leaders in Washington to advocate something very much like the end of our war in Iraq. Paul Krugman mentioned it ($$) this week when writing about the relationship between the Democratic base and Democratic politicians:

But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party's base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party's leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.

The disconnect, of course, is that the "highly popular" opinions aren't politically popular. Indeed, the relationship between public popularity and political viability is tenuous at best. But followers of public opinion and the longer-term trend analysis that allows us to draw conclusions about the values held by the public know that these underlying factors are susceptible to attack from all sides. Candidates and thought-leaders who don't agree with you on the real policy implications can forge a connection, using key language cues and frames to send a message, and by the time the real question is asked -- by the time we get down in the weeds, as people say -- much of the public has made up its mind, and has moved on to the business at hand of going to work, raising their families, watching "Dancing with the Stars" or a baseball game.

So it seems America's political reality is realigning with the values and underlying policy ideas that the public has made pretty clear they embrace. In this moment, for a short time, we're seeing a tyranny of the majority -- a hackneyed phrase I could get used to after so long in the wilderness.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continuing the theme I started back here, I'll pull a quick update on the situation in Somalia from the BBC:

been killed and more than 200 injured in three days of fighting in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, a human rights group says.

The Elman Peace and Human Rights agency said it got the figures from hospitals, other humanitarian groups and counting bodies abandoned in the streets.

Heavy fighting is continuing, as Ethiopian troops clash with Somali clan militiamen and Islamist fighters.

The UN says more than 320,000 people have fled the fighting since February.

The new figure represents nearly a third of the population of the capital and is significantly higher than previous estimates

Well, for one thing, the Bush administration has made noise about shadowy al Qaeda elements being at large in Somalia, which explains why were engaged in some cruise-missile exploits there earlier this year.

Sadly, this lack of attention sets the stage for an all-too-common sequence of events. Somalia isn't just another African crisis left on the stovetop to boil over. Americans will miss low-key news reports about hundreds dying in the clashes in the capital until something too massive to miss comes along; then they will see another African scene of terror and devastation and it will fit all too perfectly into the frame they already have for Africa: chaotic, unmanageable, disaster-prone, and useless without our help.

While all these assumptions are careless and easy to make, there is a grain of truth here. But better informed Americans can understand that these nightmares have causes and smart thinking about better stories to tell in Africa can help us find solutions. And that's what we're missing.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ostensibly as a budgetary move, most US news agencies have closed their Canada bureaus. In response to the news that by this summer no US newspapers will have reporters in our northern neighbor, journalism professor Edward Wasserman takes a look at the unique and disorienting power of American exceptionalism. It's a disturbing trip.

H/t Romenesko

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From the Google Blogoscoped site we learn this week about Million Souls Aware. MSA is a non-profit entity focused on raising awareness through intensive coverage of single issues that bear better notice from the world at large. The first issue is refugee camps.

Interestingly, the founder of the site, a Dutch programmer named Yvo Schaap, uses Google maps to highlight information about the issue. Check out the interactive map of refugee camps (bigger pins mean bigger camps) and how many total refugees there are in the world. The only currency Yvo's site is attempting to amass is awareness. The site counter will tabulate visits and he will change the issue when a million people have visited Million Souls Aware.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)