I've been privileged to attend this year's Skoll Forum at the Said Business School in Oxford (and a privilege it is: Jimmy Carter last night and Al Gore today is no small feat for any conference), which just wrapped up a few hours ago. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya of The Princess Bride: "Let me explain. There is too much. Let me sum up."

The theme for this forum was "culture, context and social change." The obvious points about lasting change arising from local entrepreneurs who respond organically to local demand (rather than a policy brief or the whims of donors) and are in many cases subject to constant correction from market forces were discussed. But I found the most interesting cultural gap at the conference to be the one so clearly manifest between the Activists and the Pragmatists.

Many speakers I heard on the Activist side of the spectrum have done remarkable, innovative things (Jody Williams, Nobel Laureate for her campaign to ban landmines; Paul Farmer, Partners in Health), but they expressed some doubt about what exactly it means to be a "social entrepreneur." The Activists emphasized hope and optimism about the prospect of tackling old problems in new ways as the key component of social entrepreneurship. The Pragmatists tend to emphasize that social entrepreneurs offer more than hope and an inspiring call to action: they offer sustainable business plans that carry the prospect of lasting transformation in the sectors in which such entrepreneurs operate.

There is tension and uncertainty about which aspects of the market should be included in this new world of social entrepreneurship. After all, this conference exists to drive social change; forays into the business world can quickly lead to mission drift.

Anthony Bugg-Levine of the Rockefeller Foundation made a good point toward reconciling these two. We should be very careful with the idea of social investment, he said. Foundations are fond of using the word "investment" to describe the grants they make. But the business of social change is inherently different from the business of business (and investment). The terminology is confusing and it often leads foundations to impose unnecessary measurement requirements on their grantees, in the name of investment, that really have very little to do with the core justification that the foundation has for making the grant. If those metrics do not drive the leadership at the foundation, it would be better to call a spade a spade and be honest that what philanthropists desire is powerful stories of change, not "return on investment." There will always be an emotional and moral component to philanthropy and social work.

Marguerite Baker, blogging on the session exploring evaluation of impact (which you can watch by clicking through the same link), notes that, "It's an interesting juxtaposition to consider --- on the one hand is a social investment bank that believes in market-based solutions to social challenges (and measures accordingly), while on the other hand is a social worker trying to account for market failure by installing toilets in rural Indian homes. So how do we decide what to measure?"

As I chew on the many sessions, focus groups and consultancy clinics (would that every nonprofit got the chance to pitch their ideas to a panel of venture capitalists, professors and experienced managers who probe, question and re-formulate their ideas in front of a live audience of peers! Quite something to watch), I'm sure more thoughts will bubble up. Like Lord Anthony Giddens' incisive outline of the three core problems that entrepreneurs can innovate around to do something worthwhile on climate change at last. Or the online library of case studies (successes, failures and best practice resources) that Kim Alter is building for social entrepreneurs.

These and many other topics deserve their own discussions. You can and should read about them on Social Edge, where MBAs from various business schools have been blogging the many sessions. I also recommend the video of President Carter's speech of last night.

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Uber-blogger Jason Kottke catches a January item in urban design/architecture mag Metropolis about the Navy Federal Credit Union's new green call center in Pensacola. The chunk Kottke excerpts is the surprise. The building is mostly in compliance with green building principles (shorthanded LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). But there are times when the designers didn't follow the green building consultants recommendations. Why? They were balancing the efficiencies of the green building with keeping employees happy. The greening of the building contributes hugely to this outcome. And the bottom line is pretty impressive:

"Well, we definitely have energy savings: we've had one study that said 25 percent and another that said 40 percent. We pay a lot of attention to the energy model because we want to be efficient, because that leads to less pollution. But that's not where the savings are. The savings are all related to productivity." Navy Federal's wealth (they don't exactly have trouble getting long-term financing) means that Ebbesen could swallow higher up-front costs if it means a longer life span -- and indeed this building is designed for a 40-year cycle (generous for its type). But to be conservative he sticks to 30 years for the following calculation: over that time 92 percent of the organization's costs goes to employees, 6 percent go to maintenance and operation, and a mere 2 percent are represented by the initial construction investment. "When I show that on a slide," Ebbesen says, "it's kind of like, 'Duh, now are you paying attention?'"

When they set out to build these new call centers, they had staff turnover of about 60%. They weren't pleasant places to work. The Navy Fed builders employed the LEED guidelines because, as the project's leader said, it "helped us make decisions that would continually reflect on this idea of 'employee focus.'" The proof is in one statistic:

Today Navy Federal's Heritage Oaks campus, in Pensa­cola, Florida, has a turnover rate of 17 percent...

It's an impressive story that bears wider dissemination. Inside DC, we hear not exactly encouraging stories of organizations with an energetic commitment to clean/sustainable/green behavior in lots of ways but which don't turn their attention to the human face of doing business. They are all related.

In an attempt to improve the quality of the work environment, and with an absolute absence of ide­ology save a commitment to the work task at hand, Navy Federal stumbled onto sustainable architecture as a strategy and then--in a petri dish of their creation--implemented it with a rigor and scale difficult to find most anywhere. They drank the green Kool-Aid because it tasted good. They may appreciate the financial savings and planetary benefits, but their primary rationale couldn't be simpler: green building is good building, and good building is good business.

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As we've discussed here and others have chronicled well, somewhere between the media covering this presidential campaign and the candidates themselves, we've lost a lot of important coverage of global issues.

Foreign Policy In Focus this week features a piece by Howard Salter of Citizens for Global Solutions. It pulls together public statements, questionnaire responses, and excerpts from the Foreign Affairs essays from all the current candidates and assembles a thorough run-down of the feelings of Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama on key global issues. These include the genocide in Darfur, torture, the UN and the International Criminal Court, and nuclear proliferation.

While I would have liked to have seen some coverage of global climate change, the piece is solid. And while many of the folks inside the policy universe may feel they know what they need to about these candidates, many Americans who don't live these issues daily would benefit enormously from seeing these responses collected in one place.

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Our own Josh Weissburg is attending the Skoll World Forum in Oxford this week, so we won't read his words on the blog. I was going to do a little teaser of all the exciting things he'll see and hopefully write about, but then WRI went and did a great piece doing just that. Read it and enjoy.

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I am at sea about Matthew Yglesias' reading of Mark Helprin's Times op-ed entitled "Make Sudan an Offer It Can't Refuse."

Yglesias characterizes Helprin's piece as "let's bomb Sudan and everyone who doesn't want to do so immediately is obviously complicit in genocide in Darfur." He takes his cue from a post by Mark Goldberg at UN Dispatch, but seems to have missed Goldberg's point as well.

Helprin's piece -- which does largely advocate for a bombing campaign or at least the articulated threat of a bombing campaign to make Khartoum do something to end the genocide -- is, as Goldberg indicates, wrong for the situation on the ground today. It doesn't, however, sound like Helprin is pointedly attacking the UN. He nastily characterizes the Africa Union troops -- undermanned, underfunded, friendless as it is -- as "a camping trip to the tower of Babel," but it's true that they are a product of an system that has left Darfur in such an international peacekeeping no-man's-land. Few of us would defend the way the international community has handled Darfur.

The bigger danger, of course, is that failures like these -- in Darfur, in Haiti, and on and on -- are exploited for the purposes Yglesias sees in Helprin's piece. "The UN couldn't end a genocide that the whole world agrees is an abomination. Let's bolt," is a common trope of opponents of international organizations. But in this case, Helprin seems misinformed rather than malicious.

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(If for some reason this embed doesn't display some of the maps mentioned below, you can go here to see the whole thing, in English.)

Via Boing Boing, I found these amazing histograms of news coverage by country. Information like this is sometimes predictable (Australia is big in the map of "The Australian's" news) but eye-opening at times. BB notes that Israel/Palestine with an 8M population but a heaping helping of the world's problems is almost always around the same size as India with it's whopping 1.2B population.

Some interesting observations: Russia's changing face hardly pays credit to the nation's importance -- for good or ill -- in the world today. For all we discuss China, it seems disproportionately small in many of the maps. The creator of the maps, Nicolas Kayser-Bril, wants to keep them updated continually as a way to push editors to improve their coverage. But he notes that the blogosphere map is the closest representation of a media landscape that looks like the actual landscape. He credits the unbeatable niche reporting talents of blogs. I tend to agree.

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The Chicago Reader's Hot Type column by Michael Miner features an interesting discussion with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' Richard Longworth. Longworth, a former Tribune foreign correspondent, has written a book entitled Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism.
The interview is worth reading. The problem, in a nutshell, is a Middle America disconnected from the world it must understand to survive. An illustrative anecdote:

"I've got a staff here of really smart newspaper people and almost none of them have probably been outside the United States. I've got to name one of them the foreign editor, and that person is going to have to edit the AP foreign wire, and there's nobody here with the world view, the international sophistication, to take that wire and turn it into something meaningful for my readers."

Unfortunately, even papers that do try to tell this story find their readers in denial. "Every once in a while a paper will rear back and really try to do a job--a big series on economic changes," Longworth told me. In the last few years, "the Cleveland Plain Dealer did this, with a long series called 'The Quiet Crisis.' . . . An editor at the paper told me the series was generally well received, 'but the two pieces specifically on globalization and immigration landed with a dull thud.' The Dayton Daily News did a good series, which most of the local leaders seem to have put down as useless negativism. This is a town that has already lost more than half its population."

I think that's a brilliant idea. I don't blame newspapers, necessarily, for going hyperlocal and abandoning the national news to elite, coastal publications that middle America can feel comfortable ignoring. People at newspapers large and small are trained to make a story local and relevant. If anything, papers in this part of the country missed the opportunity to make big stories local, instead choosing only to cover local stories.

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Jonathan Greenblatt started off pitching a very unusual idea to investors. He proposed a bottled water company that would, as part of its core business model, donate half of its profits and focus all of its marketing on the need for clean water in the developing world. This strategy would itself drive sales and help it to beat out luxury brands like Fiji and Evian, which rely on water from exotic locales (shipped thousands of miles) to burnish their brands.

Investors, unsurprisingly, viewed Greenblatt's business proposition as dubious. He and his business partner had to build Ethos Water (now owned by Starbucks) on credit cards and loans from friends. But the idea proved to be a brilliant business--and a very effective advocacy tool. Ethos' founders recognized the growth of bottled water as an industry, but they also recognized that there was an opportunity to connect the act of providing water to consumers in rich countries with the need to do so for people in poor countries. If you click through to Ethos Water's website (which may dazzle you or frustrate you, depending on your tolerance for heavy Flash), the focus is entirely on the needs of children for clean water.

Greenblatt (who since left Ethos to found GoodInc.com) spoke on Monday as part of the CSIS series featuring people doing interesting things in the area of smart power. He told Ethos' story as an example of how "ethical brands" can be both viable businesses and powerful issue drivers.

Ethos made a conscious choice to treat customers as constituents. The company makes clear that while buying Ethos Water helps to deliver clean water around the world on the margins, no matter how many bottles of water the company sells and how big its profits get, it cannot solve the problem. So it encourages -- via its website and packaging -- customers to become active on water issues as advocates in their own right. Greenblatt told stories of Whole Foods clerks creating their own marketing materials and displays for Ethos because they believed in the brand so strongly. Ethos directs this enthusiasm toward a group of partner NGOs that work on water issues.

Something to keep in mind as you consider your advocacy options: are there (or could there be) strong connections to actions consumers take everyday in the marketplace?

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I don't dwell on the Iraq War a lot, here on the blog or elsewhere in my life. I think for me as for most Americans who don't have a loved one fighting there daily, the war in Iraq is a distant thing. But at times I fix on little things. I have two small children, a four year old boy and a girl who is nearly two. They know nothing of this war, of course, but they haven't lived a day when it wasn't happening. Since they were born, my dad, an Air Force reservist, has done a brief tour in a field hospital in Northern Iraq.

For a variety of thoughtful pieces about the war, see the National Magazine Award-winning Virginia Quarterly's collection, including the stunning Art Born of the Need to Tell by Daniel Heyman.

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Patricia Olsen tells the story of Jim McCann, founder of 800-FLOWERS, in the New York Times. Maybe I'm seeing things, but the core lesson Olsen pulls from McCann's story sounds eerily familiar: "If you look at highly successful people, they make the same number of mistakes as others, but they recover quickly."

Many nonprofits assume that when they are evaluated, whether by foundations or anyone else, they should emphasize a great track record, a history of strong wins and few missteps that will set them apart. But the GII's evaluation tool, Continuous Progress, preaches a different route to success: you should expect mistakes and missteps along the way -- the trick is detecting them, adapting and making continual improvements along the way.

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From James Surowiecki, writing in The New Yorker on the limits of microfinance:

Thinking that everyone is, and should be, an entrepreneur leads us to underrate the virtues of larger businesses and of the income that a steady job can provide. To be sure, for some people the best route out of poverty will be a bank loan. But for most it's going to be something much simpler: a regular paycheck.

Surowiecki focuses his piece on the idea of the "missing middle" -- finance and growth opportunities for small and medium sized firms in the developing world -- as a strategy to create a regular paycheck for more people in poor economies. This idea is catching on -- an economy composed of huge MNCs and microentrepreneurs isn't going to reduce huge income disparities very fast or build a viable middle class. As Aneel Karnani commented last year, we shouldn't romanticize the poor as entrepreneurs, though there are remarkable examples of those. But for most, the value of a regular paycheck -- and the value of bigger businesses able to cut a regular paycheck -- is not to be underestimated.

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Speaking of better foreign assistance, thoughtful commentator Steve Radelet of the Center for Global Development has written a thorough plan for "Modernizing Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century: An Agenda for the Next U.S. President."

In this new essay, adapted from a forthcoming CGD book The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President, CGD senior fellow Steve Radelet analyses the recent increases in funding and new organizational changes such as the MCC, PEPFAR, the growing role of the Department of Defense, and the F process. He then proposes a five-point strategy for modernizing U.S. foreign assistance: develop a National Foreign Assistance Strategy; create a new cabinet-level department for development policy; rewrite the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act; place a higher priority on multilateral assistance channels; and increase the quantity and improve the allocation of funding.

I have not read through all of Radelet's recommendations, but it will be interesting to compare this advice with that of the HELP Commission report, which also offers a comprehensive update to the structure, mechanisms and delivery of foreign aid to the next administration.

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Yesterday the American Enterprise Institute hosted Deepak Lal and Sarath Rajapatirana to discuss their recent paper, "The Triumph of Hope over Experience: A Marshall Plan for Sub-Saharan Africa?" The GII's own David Devlin-Foltz shared the podium and offered a response.

Authors Lal and Rajapatirana aim to challenge recurrent calls for new Marshall Plans by examining just what the MP was and why it worked:

Politicians have long invoked the MP as a rhetorical device, clamoring for Marshall Plans in the Caribbean, East Asia, Egypt, and even in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. British prime minister Gordon Brown has taken up the banner, calling during his chancellorship for a Marshall Plan for Africa.[9] Prominent figures such as Bill Gates, Bono, and economist Jeffrey Sachs have likewise swelled the ranks. Unlike past advocates, however, many of these new Marshall Plan proponents use the phrase literally and call for vast increases in aid.

...the European Marshall Plan and post-independence aid to Africa were responses to entirely different situations, so drawing parallels between the two is not justified. Some fifty years of accumulated experience about outcomes for Western Europe and Africa informs the contrast...

Instead of assuaging their collective guilt by transferring their taxpayers' money into aid programs, rich nations should keep markets for African goods open, allow foreign capital to flow freely, and let Africans find their own route to development. For too long Africa has been a theater for Western ideologues' pet panaceas, with disastrous consequences for long-suffering Africans. It is not as if Africa cannot develop: Botswana and Lesotho, to name two countries, show that Africa can produce spectacular growth.

In the paper, you can read a host of very good reasons why it is not accurate to compare the MP to most of the aid that's been given to Africa. But how do we know that something like the MP could not work in Africa? After all, we just proved it's never been tried. In fact, scholars from AEI proposed a "real" MP for Africa last year.

But these questions surrounding the way foreign aid is structured beg a bigger discussion about what we advocates expect -- and promise -- from foreign aid. David's response ties these together with the ongoing debate about how aid should be structured -- or if it should be given at all.

Whenever we talk about whether foreign aid "works" in Africa or elsewhere, let's immediately clarify the question: Works to do what? For whom?

...the goals of aid to Africa have been extremely mixed. They include maintaining or strengthening geostrategic alliances during the Cold War. And as is more common during these days of the 24 hour news cycle, we find aid aimed at helping to alleviate the immediate famine, drought, disease and civil war that my cousin Donna and other westerners see on their televisions...

I would argue that the most marked successes of economic development aid in Africa have come - not surprisingly - when the purpose of the aid was, well, aid. That is, not simply a transfer of funds intended to, as the authors assert, "[keep] governments in power that ignored the general welfare of their populations."

This conversation that we're having here today is important, not because I wish to defend aid in the myriad dumb ways it has been given or the many counter-productive goals it has pursued. Nor is it my intention to defend terrible decisions made by African leaders. But this conversation is valuable precisely because it can help us get to the bottom of what we expect from foreign aid. If we give to alleviate suffering, we must be careful not to promise - or even let the expectation persist - that we will create Western European style free-market democracies in Africa. We won't. We're not very good at creating Western European free-market democracies in the Middle East, as no less an authority than AEI's own Danielle Pletka acknowledged in her NY Times op-ed contribution this past week. Sometimes we're not even good at creating Western European free-market democracies in... Western Europe. So it's time advocates for large-scale aid programs spoke a bit more humbly, and a bit more clearly, about what they aim to achieve.

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I think Andrew Kohut dwells too much on Iraq at the expense of other items not instinctively top-of-mind when one says "foreign policy" in his assessment of the public opinion landscape presidential contenders will need to confront between now and November. Still, it looks like candidates will find themselves dancing to multiple tunes as they try to keep everyone happy and paint the country their particular media-assigned color eight months from now:

Issues have hardly played a dominant role in the nominating races, especially on the Democratic side. Still, the public has a clear domestic agenda for the next president. Fix the economy, reduce health care costs, improve the environment, reform education, deal with rising energy costs and so on. This hearty appetite for an assertive domestic approach arises in no small part from the discontent that large majorities have with the Bush administration's handling of nearly all of these issues.

This disapproval holds true with respect to foreign policy, too -- just 30 percent approve of President Bush's stewardship of it. But the public is far less clear as to what it wants with respect to foreign policy.

Opinion surveys show that American views about the world will not only challenge the presidential candidates of both parties in the general election, but will force the winner in November to deal with a citizenry that is downbeat about the world and fractured along partisan lines.

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David Bosco at FP's Passport comments on remarks by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner that America's reputation has been badly damaged and that, in his opinion, "the magic is over." Bosco notes:

It's easy to forget the depth of antipathy to past American policies. After a 1983 U.N. Security Council meeting at which dozens of countries condemned America for its forays in Central America, the Libyan ambassador crowed that "America has no friends!" It has often seemed that way. America's "magic" will ebb and flow, but it hasn't run dry.

One small way to start this is with the amazing resource that is ordinary Americans, doing extraordinary things as citizen diplomats. As Josh mentioned earlier this week, the GII with our partners at World Learning and Georgetown University's Mortara Center will host a talk by former president of Ireland Mary Robinson about the potential this unique form of human diplomacy represents. Look for a report about Mary's talk next week.

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I found Benjamin Skinner's story in Foreign Policy, "A World Enslaved," very sobering. But it is not exploitive of the victims he writes about. Skinner sets himself a difficult task in writing about slavery, particularly child slavery, a topic that easily becomes fantastical to the reader for its horror and strangeness. So Skinner starts by telling the story of how, five hours after standing in the heart of New York City, he negotiated the sale of a child slave. In fact, you can hear the actual negotiations here.

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If you're familiar with the US in the World approach to advocacy, you know that we at the GII favor advocacy that addresses first and foremost the "persuadable middle" on an issue, rather than preaching to the choir of the issue base or relying on harangues aimed at opponents. This strategy stands the test of time -- it wins supporters on an issue for the long-term by moving the "center" of the issue toward your goals without drawing sharp lines that create unnecessary adversaries.

An article in the spring issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, "Aim for the Middle" (subscription required), provides yet more empirical evidence that "to persuade a whole group, start by changing the minds of a few moderates."

Economists Bernard Caillaud and Jean Tirole reach the same conclusion in the December 2007 issue of the American Economic Review. Using mathematical models, the authors explore how best to persuade a group of people. They write that the most effective method is "to engineer persuasion cascades in which members who are brought on board sway the opinion of others." The first people in the cascade, they find, should be fence-sitters - moderates who are neither so opposed to a proposal as to be unmovable nor so enamored of it as to be incredible to the unconvinced.

"The value of getting an endorsement by someone who is neither an ally nor a resolute enemy is exemplified by the impact of the Financial Times' endorsement of Tony Blair in his accession to the prime ministership," says Tirole, who is a professor at the University of Toulouse. Also, "when pursuing reforms, European governments try to get moderate worker and student unions on board."

To turn the hearts of the first moderates, the authors write, a persuader must use hard information - evidence, reports, material proofs, and other facts - to convince them of the proposal's reasonableness. Using hard information to persuade everyone is impossible, though, because both persuaders and targets have to exert a lot of effort to convey and understand the message. But the newly convinced moderates can rely on soft information - simple endorsements and perfunctory explanations - to convert the remainder of the group, who already trust the moderates' judgment.

Anyone who's been doing advocacy for a while knows how difficult it is to "raise awareness" about the facts among the general public. Those facts and proofs are important, but successful advocacy efforts target them carefully to resonate specifically with the persuadable middle.

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David will hate me for writing about a Yankee, but indulge this line of thinking for a second. Stephen Dubner writing at the Freakonomics Blog points to Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez and cites the lessons of what is loosely termed the "expert performance" community. Why A-Rod? Because natural talent aside (and all of these ideas are based on some sort of correcting for natural talent), A-Rod reflects the "expert performance" folks' concentration on deliberate practice. As Dubner paraphrases it in this post and in a NYT magazine piece with his "Freakonomics" co-author Steven Levitt:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

Of course this caught my eye because there isn't a huge amount of difference between the precepts of deliberate practice above and the thinking behind a certain philosophy of planning evaluation I could name.

"Set specific goals" and "get good, prompt feedback and use it" see self explanatory.

"Focus on technique, not outcome," to me, talks about the importance of capacity building. This is an area where we, when we're talking about CP, often encounter some pushback. People say, "if you don't reach your goal, what difference does it make." The answer, of course, is a huge difference. As I look out on Dupont Circle, I can practically hear the advocacy campaigns being hatched in darkness in converted townhouses and mid-tier office buildings. But even if each advocacy campaign employed a brilliant planning strategy, they still wouldn't all succeed. And if those campaigns didn't think about improving their ability to advocate in the future, investing in smart capacity that will pay off soon, then those failures wouldn't doubly depressing. Few advocates get into the business because they love capacity building. Alex Rodriguez probably doesn't play baseball because he just loves working on technique (though some would disagree). This precept then is important because even a little bit of progress on it could be an indicator of success.

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Carol Pineau is at it again: recasting Africa and Africans as ambitious innovators with a vision for the future. Pineau is a veteran journalist on the Africa beat, but over the last several years she's taken a turn toward documentary filmmaking. Several years ago she filmed "Africa Open for Business," which profiled ten thriving African businesses (in countries ranging from "good governments to no government at all") and the people behind them. The film was fresh and upbeat in the way it approached Africa; it enjoyed airtime on the BBC and PBS and screenings at Cannes and other festivals.

I love Pineau's second incarnation of the project, a film called Kenya Stories. This time around, Pineau has taken her concept to young entrepreneurs in Kenya who aspire to run thriving African businesses. Kenya Stories documents a business plan competition (think American Idol meets The Apprentice - but with class) that winnows down to six finalists from a pool of 5,000. The beautifully shot video segments on the site bring you right into the stories of these six finalists, and the "what you can do" page of the site gives the viewer a chance -- actually, many different ways -- to become a part of that story by supporting a business or entrepreneur.

Kenya Stories is a good example of how static "awareness raising" advocacy can be much more (and much more interesting) by focusing on solutions and enlisting everyone involved as an active participant.

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Via Chuckumentary, this post started as an excuse to show you this incredible picture of a protesting lawyer leaping Tom Cruise-like over barbed wire as he escapes a tear gas volley from police in Pervez Musharraf's crumbling government.

Upon closer examination, however, this piece is an important step in the road toward some kind of new Pakistan. For my money, the problem with the US relationship with Pakistan has been abiding by the sweeping, staggering reversal of the rule of law instigated by Musharraf to retain power. That the two leading vote-getters in the recent polling have agreed on a government, and agreed on restoring the sacked judiciary that would surely begin the process of ending Musharraf's grip on power, means the beginning of restoring the rule of law is apparent in Pakistan.

Not a second too late. I don't these these lawyers can afford much more special effects wizardry, and that tear gas looks awfully real.

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More people cross international borders as students, migrant workers, businesspeople and visitors than ever before. As the flow of people grows, so too do the opportunities - and risks - for citizens to act as diplomats in their own right.

This Friday, World Learning, Georgetown University and The Aspen Institute will host Mary Robinson, who will draw on lessons from her time as President of Ireland during the return of many Irish citizens; on her work to promote better understanding of the pulls and pushes behind global migration as co-chair of the Global Commission on International Migration; and on her role as a member of The Elders, a new alliance of senior leaders (Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Yunus and Kofi Annan among them) dedicated to solving thorny global problems. Robinson's speech will offer particular insights to Americans as we consider how international migration and cultural exchange enriches societies and impacts the way cultures and governments interact.

The event, to be held in Georgetown University's Intercultural Center on March 14 at 11AM, is open to the public. You can RSVP here.

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From the Economist:

If it were possible to develop a turbine that did not need such a water-head to operate, and that could sit in the riverbed, then a dam would be unnecessary. Such turbines could also be put in places that could not be dammed--the bottom of the sea, for example. And that is what is starting to happen, with the deployment of free-standing underwater turbines.

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As usual, Christopher Hitchens is upset. This time, it's because we're arguing over whether Barack Obama's campaign did in fact plagiarize from Deval Patrick. Hitchens worries, though, that we've missed the real shame of Obama's (and Clinton's) campaigns: they are rife with cliche:

It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be "charisma"?) it exerts.

I understand Hitchens disgust. What does "We Are the People We Have Been Waiting For" mean, coming from the mouth of a presidential candidate? Vacuous indeed. Wonders Hitchens, "Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together."

But while disgust is not unfair, there is a reason candidates return to the same words over and over. These are the catalysts for any participation in politics for a great many people who don't know the ins and outs of the issues, nor are they likely to sit down and learn them. To the extent that a candidate can convince the electorate that she really has a way to further such ideals, she will reap the rewards at the voting booth.

Though writing on a somewhat different topic, Jeff Brooks warns against rejecting unsophisticated arguments that sound cliched. To do so outright, he argues, is navel gazing. Just because you have a feel for the workings of government and the issues at play doesn't mean that phrases that sound half-baked to you won't be more convincing to the public. Writing about nonprofit donors, Brooks cautions:

They are drawn to simplistic, even incomplete descriptions of your work--and the strongest philosophical argument can leave them cold... Donors are interested in you because of what you help them do. You are their agent in their personal mission to make the world better. That should be the topic of all your fundraising. Not the inner workings of the organization. Not the accomplishments of notable others. Not the need for raised consciousness or philosophical buy-in.

Like it or not, I suspect the same is true of voters and presidential candidates.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We preach "smart power" at the Global Interdependence Initiative and the Switchblog. In our earlier research and training in support of the US in the World communications guide and in the years since, we have yawped frequently about "using all the tools" in the foreign policy toolbox. We have trained and collaborated with many advocates who want us all to think of the world in "3-D" terms: striking the right balance among defense, diplomacy and development assistance.

We've yawped and preached to lots of advocates. And we've trained lots of people to speak this language. Few of them sported stars on their uniforms. Now comes Wednesday's impressive launch of the National Security Advisory Council to the Center for US Global Engagement's Impact 08 campaign. More than 50 retired three-star and four-star generals and admirals endorsed increased support for diplomacy and development in terms that frequently came right out of the US in the World playbook. General Anthony Zinni and Admiral Creighton Smith struck the same notes in their testimony earlier that day to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, viewable here - after the usual extended preliminary throat clearing by Senators Biden and Lugar...

The distinguished military leaders at Wednesday's public event were impassioned in their call for more attention - and resources - for the civilian complements to military force. But all acknowledge the budget constraints that will require politically painful changes in where those resources go: Which agencies? Structured how? To which countries? Getting the priorities and the funding right will take some careful research. Stewart Patrick of the Center for Global Development and Susan Rice of the Brookings Institution weighed in this morning with an op-ed linked to the new index of failed and failing states they have co-authored for Brookings.

We'll need all our yawping and preaching and rigor to make the case for re-balancing our spending among the Three D's: new Gallup polling shows the public's deep ambivalence about defense spending. On the one hand, almost half of the public believes that the military is not strong enough - perhaps a product of our concern that the military is over-stretched. But a growing percentage - though still fewer than half - believe that we are already spending too much on the military. Sounds like the public is ready for some realignment of priorities as well.

Posted by David Devlin-Foltz at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was in college I remember watching a short film following Michael Ignatieff's adventures in the former Yugoslavia. The film was part of Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff's seminal work exploring what drives feelings of nationalism -- and how such feelings drive conflict. Ignatieff wanted to know why people fight so viciously to defend their view of who belongs where, so naturally he sought out places of conflict. The nationalism Ignatieff finds is often nasty -- more concerned with defining who's out than who might be allowed in the mental affinities that define a national identity.

But Ignatieff's approach only gets you so far. After all, people do need to feel that they belong, but that instinct often does not lead to violence. On the contrary, a shared feeling of belonging can glue societies composed of disparate people together. Kavitha Rajagopalan, a friend of the GII and InterAction alum, recently released a book, Muslims of Metropolis, that flips Ignatieff's approach around, following Muslim immigrants in their efforts to fit in in a Western context.

Rajagopalan takes a much needed step in personalizing and humanizing our understanding of the Muslim diaspora. Tracing the stories of three very different families-a Palestinian family moving to London, a Kurdish family moving to Berlin, and a Bangladeshi family moving to New York-she reveals a level of complexity and nuance that is seldom considered. Through their voices and in their words, Rajagopalan describes what prompted these families to leave home, what challenges they faced in adjusting to their new lives, and how they came to view their place in society. Interviews with community leaders, social justice organizations, and with academics and political experts in each of the countries add additional layers of insight to how broad political issues, like nationalist conflict, immigration reform, and antiterrorism strategies affect the lives of Muslims who have migrated in search of economic stability and personal happiness.

There are other ambitious efforts to rethink the evils of nationalism. Gustavo de las Casas wonders, "Is Nationalism Good for You?," in the latest issue of Foreign Policy. Casas says academics have cherry-picked their case studies of nationalism for too long: we should spend more time looking at nationalism gone right, because it holds important keys to answering the evils that Ignatieff points out and the questions that Rajagopalan raises.

Those who feel left out can vent their frustration anywhere, at any time. Understanding how and why people feel they fit in has never been so important.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nick Kristof, who we note sometimes dwells on the negative side of the ledger, finds a nut:

The farm families living in these rocky hills in central Sudan confront every disease imaginable, from leprosy to malaria, and perhaps one-quarter of children die by the age of five.

Yet this is a "good news" column. Karlo will live.

The number of children who die worldwide each year before the age of five has dropped below 10 million for the first time in recorded history -- compared with 20 million annually in 1960 -- Unicef noted in a report last month, "Child Survival." Now the goal is to cut the death toll to four million by 2015.

Think about that accomplishment: The lives of 10 million children saved each year, 100 million lives per decade.

Voters should remember this: A president may or may not be able to improve schools or protect manufacturing jobs in Ohio, but a president probably could help wipe out malaria. Compared with other challenges a president faces, saving a million children's lives a year is the low-hanging fruit.

Karlo, bouncing in his mother's lap, underscores the hope. With the medicine, he recovered quickly and was sent home from the hospital after a few days. The news here is simple and giddy ... he's alive!

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I know, I know: America's reputation is in the crapper and it needs more than a marketing whiz to run a brilliant re-branding campaign. Rather, the U.S. needs to "undertake the sorts of policies to earn the reputation it feels it deserves." But humor me. The marketing executives have spoken, and you can read their take on Salon.com. The piece, "Brand-aid" (many thanks to Craig Charney for the tip), likens the presidential vetting process on this point to "an ad agency review -- a chance to put a set of potential stewards for "Brand America" through their paces, to see the creative and strategic directions in which they'd take our product." Author Jeff Yang compares key ideas and slogans and matches candidates up with companies that rely on similar associations to sell their product (Clinton: Microsoft; McCain: Hummer; Obama: Apple; Huckabee: Applebee's).

More to the point, Yang argues that Clinton and McCain, to various degrees, are both "anxiety brands" -- "the whole appeal of familiarity and experience is rooted in this notion that the unknown is frightening." Obama, on the other hand, is about "uplift and humanity." This, argue marketing specialists, is where America shines in the first place. Obama is the clear choice, from a marketing perspective, and it's hard to argue that his instant appeal wouldn't be of real value to the United States.

But alas, as Simon Anholt has argued, major powers cannot rely on brands. Such countries do too much in too many areas, and their effect on the world is felt too deeply for marketing campaigns to build a brand that can compete with the policy choices leaders make. Fareed Zakaria calls to question, not only from his own perspective but from testimony he collects abroad, whether Obama or Clinton would be able to build much goodwill if they turned back the clock on trade as they regularly threaten to do.

A senior Latin American diplomat, who asked to remain unnamed because of the sensitivity of the topic, says, "Look, we're all watching Obama with bated breath and hoping [his election] will be a transforming moment for the world. But now that we're listening to him on trade--the issue that affects us so deeply--we realize that maybe he doesn't wish us well. In fact, we might find ourselves nostalgic for Bush, who is brave and courageous on trade and immigration."

Zakaria encounters similar views in Kenya, Thailand and India. It's hard to get around the fact that policies matter. In some sense, they are the "product" we are offering the world -- and they had better be good if we expect to sell them.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)