I was reminded of this story yesterday during a conversation with someone from the ignore the experts and subsidize fertilizer for the country's farmers. This story was written in December 2007:

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children's Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. "We will not be able to use it!" Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef's deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi's extraordinary turnaround -- one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa -- with one word: fertilizer.

Farmers explain Malawi's extraordinary turnaround -- one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa -- with one word: fertilizer.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 4:35 PM | Permalink

Just as I was pulling some thoughts together for a forthcoming (stay tuned) article about the Global Philanthropy Forum held two weeks ago in Redwood City, CA, I came across this pithy little reflection from Raj Desai and Homi Kharas at the Brookings Institution:

"Approximately 800 press credentials were issued for the World Bank-IMF "Spring Meetings," as they are called. A Nexis search yields over 400 news articles reporting on the meetings. Meanwhile, at the Global Philanthropy Forum few, if any, members of the press were on hand; Nexis turns up not a single major news story on the proceedings (although one blogger did report on the forum's discussions).

This lopsidedness is unfortunate."

Indeed: the media missed an extraordinary gathering. The speakers - drawn from five continents and ranging from young social entrepreneurs to The Elders - brought plenty of inspiration to the ballrooms and break-out sessions. Archbishop Desmond Tutu shook off a raging flu and led off the conference, inspired by adrenalin or his deep and compassionate faith. The level of discussion stayed remarkably high throughout. The primary audience included a blend of established and emerging funders looking for inspiration. It's a conference built for networking, and more than 80% of past participants report following up concretely with other participants.

Desai and Kharas go on to assert that "American foundations, charities and philanthropies" gave $10 billion more to "international causes" last year than the World Bank and IMF disbursed in loans and credits.

I'd like to know more about the definitions behind those figures, but i do like the basic premise: enduring solutions to poverty need to take full account of the financial resources and creativity offered by philanthropy and its fashionable young cousins, social enterprise and "mission-related investing." And the contributions of the global philanthropoids merit sustained coverage in the global media.

Full disclosure: I had the honor of speaking on a panel at the Forum.
Full disclosure, too: The Forum's endlessly energetic founder, Jane Wales, has just joined us at the Aspen Institute as vice president for philanthropy and society.

Posted by David Devlin-Foltz at 2:40 PM | Permalink

It's customary (and not undeserved) to chortle when the vice president says things like, "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it," as he reportedly did in 2003 while discussing North Korea. But, as Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Sunday's Washington Post, "the question of talking to villains is hardly simple."

On one hand, it is entirely appropriate, writes Gelb, not only to think of certain governments and groups as "evil," but also to publicly tell the world what you think of them. They will not like it, but it may be effective diplomacy if handled correctly. Gelb traces a lineage of successful diplomacy, from World War 2 through the Cold War, following such bald accusations. But calling bad regimes evil is not the main, or the stopping, point. Gelb's article is titled "Every President Talks to Bad Guys." It's hard to argue the point:

Even as the powerful veep was excommunicating evildoers in his 2003 pronouncement, the Bush administration was cavorting with many of the world's biggest devils: negotiating with North Korea on its nuclear-arms program, with Iran on efforts against the Taliban in Afghanistan and with Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi on a historic new relationship. Washington sages are now debating whether to negotiate with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran or with Hamas; some are considering trying to reconcile with supposedly repentant Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Contrary to Cheney's dictum, chest-thumping congressional resolutions and op-ed pieces, the United States almost always deals with devils at some point or another. There is no alternative if a president wants to test nonmilitary solutions to the nastiest of problems. Forget the inevitable posturing. The real issue is not whether to talk to the bad guys but how -- under which conditions, with which mix of pressure and conciliation, and with what degree of expectation that the bad guys will keep their word. When figuring out how to go about negotiating with devils, the questions get very basic.

Gelb is far from naive about what the U.S. will get out of such discussions. We may end up further entrenching the bad guys -- but we can often extract important political and security concessions from them while "exploring the cracks and crevices [among members of the regime] who are disillusioned, tired or just plain ambitious."

"Even devils have interests other than threatening the United States," writes Gelb. "Simply put, if you won't deal with bad guys, don't go into the foreign policy business."

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:04 PM | Permalink

I enjoyed Joel Achenbach's piece in the Washington Post Outlook section, "What Does a President Really Do All Day?" As he notes at the outset, voters hear about candidates' views often, and they are deluged with information on their chances of winning. But we seldom talk about the day-to-day experience of the presidency. What used to be a manageable job (the president had no assistant until FDR created the Executive Office of the President) has become immense.

We have three applicants still in the running [for president]. What we don't tend to do, despite obsessive attention to this contest, is talk much about what the job entails. We talk instead about hot-button issues, the latest gaffe, the new sound bite, the polls, the electoral map. Presidential campaigns glancingly deal with the institution of the presidency while focusing on the more urgent issue of winning.

The closest thing we've seen to a job description on the campaign trail has been the 3 a.m. phone call ad, a caricature of the president as the national guardian, and one that still doesn't quite tell you what a president does during working hours.

"There's endless months of debating about this job and almost no public discussion of what the job is," Robert Caro, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer now working on his fourth volume about Lyndon Johnson, told me last week. "There's no other job like it. I'm sitting here watching Lyndon Johnson grapple simultaneously with riots in the streets, budget problems in Congress, are the Chinese going to come into Vietnam, what's going wrong with the model cities program, how are we going to get the funding for Head Start, what's Bobby Kennedy doing today, how are we going to blunt what he's saying?"

Achenbach describes the difficulties presidents face making frequent, far-reaching decisions while trying to stay out of the weeds. Not everyone is good at it (LBJ studied terrain maps; Carter supervised the White House tennis courts and parking assignments). It's quite something to read the minute-by-minute notes on the habits and routines of Reagan, Clinton and (the current) Bush.

One thing that comes through clearly: the job is incredibly difficult. Frequent reliance on a wide range of able helpers is a must:

With all due respect to Hillary Clinton's signature slogan, no one is ever completely "ready on Day One" for the job of the presidency. There's no job like it. Anyone who becomes president is making a daring leap -- and asking the country to make the leap simultaneously. To run for president is an ostentatious act.

Here's what is certain: Next January, we'll have a new president. And the president will need help.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:44 AM | Permalink

To build on Tarek's Earth Day thoughts about a summer of water shortages, see this thought-provoking article in Wired magazine, "Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping." A tidbit:

Freshwater is the ultimate renewable resource, but humanity is extracting and polluting it faster than it can be replenished. Rampant economic growth -- more homes, more businesses, more water-intensive products and processes, a rising standard of living -- has simply outstripped the ready supply, especially in historically dry regions. Compounding the problem, the hydrologic cycle is growing less predictable as climate change alters established temperature patterns around the globe.

Water being renewable, the idea of "peak water" is different than "peak oil." We won't just run out. But we can and do overuse. And, unlike oil, there are no substitutes.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:36 PM | Permalink

I just can't help myself today; so much to write about in the Economist. Mercifully, this piece on the rise of cycling as a legitimate form of transportation in the UK is light on analysis. I like it simply because it envisions better prospects for cycling, my own chosen method of commute, as more than a hobby. I'm under no illusions that the world can switch its commuting habits writ large to accommodate cycling, but more cyclists (and better infrastructure to encourage cycling) would seem to get at quite a few tough problems that developed and developing countries face:

Cycling England, a government-funded outfit that promotes pedal power, will see its budget increased from £10m to £60m by 2009. The cash will be spent on connecting schools to the national cycle-lane network, training for children and propaganda aimed at motorists. Six towns have already been singled out as test-beds; 11 more are planned.

Besides helping to reduce congestion (a growing problem on the roads in most places) and air pollution, the ambitious argue that bicycles can help to save both the nation and the world. Cycling is hard work and therefore likely to cut obesity in the fattest country in the European Union. And carbon-free bicycles could help ministers meet their elusive climate-change targets.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:15 PM | Permalink

Andrew Leonard at Salon's How the World Works blog finds a interesting wrinkle in the skyrocketing global foodstuff pricing story. He writes, "According to a report in Monrovia, Liberia's The News, the chief executive officer of China's China-Africa Development Fund pledged 5 billion dollars of investment in African agriculture over the next 50 years -- including, specifically, rice production."

He concludes:

The announcement isn't going to move the price of rice this year, or next, but it's a pretty clear indicator of which way the world has to go if global food production is to be boosted to match world demand while keeping prices affordable. The developed world, (and in this case, we'll include China in that category, with its $1.68 trillion dollars worth of currency reserves) must find ways to invest in Africa, where there is labor, and land, and a desperate need for inputs, both financial and physical. How about it -- Africa: breadbasket of the world, instead of basket case?

China's move is clearly strategic. Despite the prevailing wisdom that China is firing on all pistons for the foreseeable future, costs are rising there and agriculture isn't keeping up. Outsourcing agriculture to Africa, so China can focus on more high-yield activities like electronics manufacture and the like, is a sound move. Only time will tell if the outsourcing will be a source of wealth or a new source of misery.

Photo courtesy Flickr user JVick Images and used under Creative Commons

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:18 AM | Permalink

Development organizations like MercyCorps have lately been switching gears toward relief operations because of the recent spike in food and commodities prices worldwide. MercyCorps reports:

In Niger, prices of bread, powdered milk and wheat flour have spiked, exacerbating the West African nation's precarious food situation. Currently about two-thirds of the population is at serious risk, with shortages pushing the country closer to famine.

In Syria, spiraling food prices have forced Mercy Corps to cut back on the amount of food we can buy and distribute to hundreds of Iraqi refugee families.

In Tajikistan, where we recently distributed blankets and generators to help residents keep warm during an unusually harsh winter, about 40 percent of households are down to no more than one warm meal a day. Neighboring Kazakhstan has suspended wheat exports -- shutting off Tajikistan's primary supply of the grain.

This is a shame; the spike in food prices will probably spur demand for relief deliveries from abroad to afflicted areas. That will depress local production and put rural producers in many poor countries further behind as they try to compete in local agricultural markets. The Economist expounds:

In the short run, humanitarian aid, social-protection programmes and trade policies will determine how well the world copes with these problems. But in the medium term the question is different: where does the world get more food from? If the extra supplies come mainly from large farmers in America, Europe and other big producers, then the new equilibrium may end up looking much like the old one, with world food depending on a small number of suppliers and--possibly--trade distortions and food dumping. So far, farmers in rich countries have indeed responded. America's winter wheat plantings are up 4% and the spring-sown area is likely to rise more. The Food and Agriculture Organisation forecasts that the wheat harvest in the European Union will rise 13%.

Ideally, a big part of the supply response would come from the world's 450m smallholders in developing countries, people who farm just a few acres. There are three reasons why this would be desirable. First, it would reduce poverty: three-quarters of those making do on $1 a day live in the countryside and depend on the health of smallholder farming. Next, it might help the environment: those smallholders manage a disproportionate share of the world's water and vegetation cover, so raising their productivity on existing land would be environmentally friendlier than cutting down the rainforest. And it should be efficient: in terms of returns on investment, it would be easier to boost grain yields in Africa from two tonnes per hectare to four than it would be to raise yields in Europe from eight tonnes to ten. The opportunities are greater and the law of diminishing returns has not set in.

Relief and development organizations, coops and ministers in affected countries should pay close attention to this advice. This is a chance to wean many countries from dependence on subsidized imports and make way toward local small-scale production that empowers communities and creates jobs.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:03 AM | Permalink

So I wrote here that I had an epiphany about Earth Day and the fight, such as it is, against climate change. I hope I made it clear that I'm not running out to buy a Ford Expedition or anything, but rather just personally un-investing in the idea that people and the American government will change their course. I'll keep being as responsible as I can (I'm a light turner-offer, I ride my bike to work whenever possible, we wear sweaters, build efficient winter fires and keep the temperature low in winter, etc).

What I've decided, however, is that this will be the summer of water. We are such a people of water waste. We don't treat it like the precious commodity it is. I try, but it's difficult with two small children in the house making horrendous messes that require lots of cleaning. And of course, there is nothing more fun to a child than running water. I don't understand it.

Nevertheless, I take steps where I can, and the last few years this has meant not watering grass or doing other optional things that are simply not a smart use of potable water. I've investigated a graywater system for the house, to capture water from everywhere but toilets and reuse it for irrigation. There are problems with this (detailed excellently at that site above), so I've looked elsewhere.

Our yard slopes down into a creek. The previous owners did an excellent job of planting lots of hostas and other shade-friendly plants, but we've got to irrigate them or the intense heat (if not direct sunlight) of summer will fry the plants and the grass. I've decided to investigate a small, solar powered pump to draw relatively small amounts of water from the creek into the slow-flow drip irrigation system I jury-rigged last summer.

The solar pumps are relatively cheap. I found one designed to work with a fountain for $130.. We have a shed near where I plan on housing the pump, and it gets reliable sunlight about four hours a day in the summer on the roof, so I'll install the external solar panel there.

It's a small thing, I know, but it is so satisfying just to think it's possible to do something that seems luxurious in the world of scarcity we're in now. The water from the creek flows through mostly suburban land, so there is no impact on wildlife or water usage downstream. It eventually empties from the Accotink into the Chesapeake Bay. Minus my little tiny draw.

UPDATE: Just so this isn't a post about my latest hare-brained scheme, do check out this and other resources at the website of the Pacific Institute. I heard Pacific Institute President Dr. Peter H. Gleick give a talk a few years back that really opened my eyes about water. The biggest irony was Gleick was giving the talk in an Aspen, Colorado restaurant while a light rain fell and simultaneously sprinklers kicked on to water the grass. And there was a bottle of water on the table in front of each person in attendance.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Wickenden used under Creative Commons.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 10:25 AM | Permalink

GII's recent work with clients has given me the occasion to think quite a bit about prospects for improved U.S. public diplomacy in the coming administration. There is an innate temptation, evident in the way parties who are out of power campaign in elections around the world, to believe that new leadership will be able to fix it all, or nearly all. When opposition parties take power, they usually find a steeper climb than they had anticipated -- certainly steeper than they promised voters.

It's a few weeks old, but I just caught up to the Economist's in-depth look at how American foreign policy could change with the next administration -- and where the next president will have a tough time breaking with current policy. Even the "easy wins" -- closing Guantanamo, stepping up on climate change, joining the ICC -- won't be very easy, and the list beyond these is long and difficult.

Closing Guantánamo may require America to try the suspected terrorists it can build a case against but let the others go free--free, if nobody else takes them, on American soil. And although it is easy for a president to promise international co-operation on climate change, it is hard to make Congress enact laws that trample on vested interests, threaten to hamper growth or price Americans out of their huge cars. The Senate would not have ratified Kyoto even if Mr Bush had asked it to.

Besides, these "easy" early wins do not come close to encompassing the broad sweep of policy that the wider world wants the new broom to change. Millions of Europeans (including the faithful Brits--see our poll) want America to stop playing world sheriff and submit to the same rules as everyone else under the United Nations. A billion or more Muslims want America to boot Israel out of the West Bank, if not dismantle the Jewish state altogether. Strong constituencies at home and abroad are impatient to see America quit Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not just Russians who find America's plans for missile defence in Europe provocative, or Iranians who say the sanctions against Iran's nuclear programme reek of double standards. Most of the world sympathised with America after September 11th, but a large and prickly chunk of it now sees its war against terrorism as a war against Islam.

You have only to inspect this catalogue of things different parts of the world want America to do or to stop doing to see that the new president's honeymoon will be short. No president can satisfy this great welling up of external demands.

And none, of course, should try. Showing a decent respect for the opinions of mankind does not mean competing in a global popularity contest at the expense of sound policy. Much of the next president's foreign policy will, rightly, continue the present one. Its central aims will include preserving the NATO alliance (see article), holding the line against nuclear proliferation, and undergirding the security of allies such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea in Asia and Israel and the Gulf Arabs in the Middle East. America under a new president will need to adapt to the relentless rise of China without seeking refuge in a self-defeating protectionism, keep a weather eye on a newly obstreperous Russia and--yes--continue to seek out and fight al-Qaeda and other terrorists.

I appreciated this holistic look at American foreign policy going forward. Advocates, by the nature of their focused work, often tackle issues piecemeal. But context like this a good check. That's not to say that a window of opportunity to push meaningful change through on certain foreign policy issues may not open during the next administration -- inevitably it will on issues that no one can predict -- but it helps to have the whole picture in mind.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:03 AM | Permalink

Human behavior is fascinatingly difficult to predict. Throw a new element in the mix, and who knows what you'll get. The introduction of a serious, middle-class car market in China is confounding analysts' predictions. The New York Times tells a story today that traces the rise of the car as social capital in the lives of families in China. The minds of Chinese entering the car market for the first time are a million miles from either the economic and environmental concerns that we hear in Washington or the predictions of analysts who thought Chinese would start small and gradually, if at all, work their way up to Western-style class conscious cars:

Western attention to China's growing appetite for automobiles usually focuses on its link to mounting dependence on foreign oil, escalating demand on natural resources like iron ore, and increasing emissions of global warming gases.

But millions of Chinese families, like millions of American families, do not make those connections. For them, a car is something both simpler and more complicated...

Chinese car buyers, including first-time buyers, have become more discriminating about the comfort, styling and reliability of the cars they buy. As a result, instead of planning to conquer overseas markets, local manufacturers are having to redouble their efforts in this market.

"Customers are moving up, they want the bigger, more established brands," said Michael Dunne, the managing director for China at J. D. Power. "They'd rather wait, save and buy higher on the ladder instead of buying a smaller car."

Why? Because the right car can literally translate into a better marriage for a consumer's children, access to social and financial circles that would have been otherwise unreachable.

I'm always amazed at how the dream of a better life for one's children plays out. As author David Rothkopf noted at The Aspen Institute yesterday, without China, the U.S. doesn't stand a chance of doing anything meaningful on most global issues, most notably climate change. From that perspective, the story of what drives car sales in China is pretty important.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:16 PM | Permalink

I read a fair number of news stories and headlines parsing Iran's activities and interests in the Iraq war. Certainly, we hear a lot from the White House and intelligence services about Iran supplying IED components, backing rogue militias and generally doing everything possible to disrupt prospects for a workable Iraqi government and stable Iraqi politics.

I don't doubt that much of this is true. But, writes Fred Kaplan in Slate, keep in mind that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki controls a Shiite militia/army that shares more in common with Iran's goals than does the Mahdi militia under Muqtada Sadr. In other words, the U.S. and Iran are on the same side of the fighting happening in southern Iraq, particularly Basra, not by design or decision but simply because disparate interests sometimes align politically. What does this mean for the U.S.? Says Kaplan:

One thing is for sure: It is time to start talking with the Iranians. First, they control too many of the pieces for us not to engage them diplomatically. Second, it turns out that we do have some common interests (for instance, crushing Sadr in Basra). Might it be possible to leverage those interests to induce cooperation, or extract concessions, in other realms where we have differences? Third, Maliki clearly has no qualms about talking with the Iranians when it suits his purposes. Why should we?

Finally, there is so much to discuss with Iran that unless we're at war with each other (and nobody has suggested that we are), it's stupid--unfathomably self-destructive--not to make a serious effort.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:18 PM | Permalink

Monday morning, I stood at the bus stop outside an Exxon station in a drizzling rain, thinking about Earth Day. Car after car rolled past, empty save for a driver, motoring in to work without a care in the world.

I'm sliding dangerously toward believing that we're pretty much screwed when it comes to curbing U.S. consumption of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gases. I'm pretty sure we won't change our behavior.

Take this Earth Day. Oil is selling for $118 a barrel, gasoline is hanging out at around $3.50 a gallon, the economy is slumping, millions are losing their homes to foreclosure, and on and on, and Americans' habits aren't budging.

I'm not a fatalist, and maybe it's just years and years of inaction that's leaving me cynical. But I don't think we have it in us to really make the kinds of massive, sweeping changes necessary to curtail some of the national habits most linked to climate change.

This isn't dogma. I'm not making a binding decision to write off the environment. (Though I did notice that the long-sought goal of new CAFE standards -- an issue I worked on during the Clinton administration -- were finally announced by the Bush administration IN THE FINAL EARTH DAY OF ITS TWO TERMS, and the environment community said, "Eh.") This is rather a personal decision to release my personal investment in the possibility that America and its government will do this job.

It's somewhat like being let down by a sports team so often that you just have to say to yourself, "I expect them to lose, and if they win, I'll be pleasantly surprised." I expect us to keep on doing nothing about climate change, and if we do something about climate change, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Lately, anyhow, I've become more interested in water issues. Potable water just about drives me crazy. When I see potable water being wasted, hosed onto a sidewalk, run (by my children, unfortunately) for no reason into the sink, I see red. People are suffering today because of western irresponsibility about climate change, this I know. But every single day, people are getting sick and dying for lack of clean, drinkable water. For some reason, I feel like individual decisions about water add up more effectively than individual decisions about energy. Maybe it was my Earth Hour experience that started this all off.

Tomorrow, I'll explain (in what I hope won't be too humorous a post) my plan to grow grass without using water from the tap.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr user Alex Kess and used under a Creative Commons license

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 10:10 PM | Permalink

Counter-terrorism is a strange business, particularly for the military-minded. Policymakers and defense specialists who came of age in a Cold War environment are used to thinking of a professional enemy who takes calculated risks for a specific payoff -- a balance of power.

Of course, this far into the "War on Terror," everyone knows that the classic model does not apply to the motivations behind terrorism or the tactics it employs. The military has sought out and digested new frameworks; there is much talk of "hearts and minds." High-level military and policy decision-makers even talk of staunching the desperation that can give rise to terrorist sympathies (witness AFRICOM). But it still seems a stretch to believe that new generations of terrorists may be more bored, slighted and uninspired than anything else. These simply cannot be good enough reasons to turn to terrorism, can they? Or, as a staffer to Vice President Cheney commented in Newsweek during a briefing by an anthropologist who studies the children who keep Al Qaeda and its spinoffs going, "Don't these young people realize that the decisions they make are their responsibility, and that if they choose violence against us, we're going to bomb them?"

On Tuesday Newsweek profiled Scott Atran, the anthropologist in question, because he thinks so differently about what drives these young people and how to communicate effectively with them. Atran was dumbfounded by the staffer's question. "Bomb them?" he responded. "In Madrid? In London?"

When Atran looks at the forces driving terrorism, he does not, first and foremost, see religious zealotry, desperate poverty or a calculated desire to change policy (though those factors are present). He sees a desire to be cool.

Atran studies young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005 and hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006.

[He] has looked at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them. And he's reached an unconventional but, to me, convincing conclusion: what has inspired the "new wave" terrorists since 2001 is not so much the Qur'an as what Atran calls "jihadi cool." If you can discredit these kids' idols (most notably Osama bin Laden), give them new ones and reframe the way their families and friends see the United States and its allies, then you've got a good shot at killing the fad for terror and stopping the jihad altogether...

So when Atran went back to Washington [after the aforementioned trip to the vice president's office] to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed--with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration's warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called "The 99."

Yep, he showed them comics with Muslim superheroes. There's nothing magical about the idea. What makes the comics different is that they are crafted to bring out the best, not from the outside but within the Muslim narrative; they do not read like a marketing piece.

Mainstream comics in the West have drawn heavily on Judeo-Christian narratives and iconography, he says. Why not create a cast of characters whose powers echo Muslim history and traditions? And because his company, Teshkeel, is the distributor of Marvel and DC comics in the Middle East, Al-Mutawa knows just where to find top writers, pencilers and inkers to make his new publications as polished as any on the market.

The core conceit of the series is that when the Mongols sacked the great city of Baghdad in A.D. 1258, their main target was its magnificent library. They "planned not only to conquer the greatest empire the world had ever known, but to eradicate its hope--its potential--thereby destroying its future," the narrator tells us in boldface block letters. "That would require more than sword and club, sinew and blood. That would require destroying the empire's true base of power ... that would require destroying its knowledge."

This is not, I imagine, the sort of challenge young Muslims often receive: knowledge, rather than violence, as the source of pride, of cool. From this place, we can start a conversation where none was possible before.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:08 AM | Permalink

I appreciate the way MercyCorps is providing a thoughtful glimpse inside the tea industry in South Asia.This project is not about rejecting the industry outright for its persistent injustices but instead "re-making a world too often governed by colonial strictures."
The tea business traditionally places workers "behind the fences of tea estates." Workers are not encouraged (or, in some cases, allowed) to take the initiative. That is the piece that MercyCorps wants to change, and it's doing a good job of telling that story.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:30 AM | Permalink

I've been thinking a fair bit lately about what sets this idea of social entrepreneurship -- or entrepreneurship at all -- apart from "ordinary" development work. What is it exactly that has caught my imagination and those of many of my younger peers? Why does the idea of charity, for all its long pedigree and noble purpose, seem so inadequate?

Today I came across a blog posting, "The Difference between Entrepreneurship and a Lack Thereof in Rural South Africa," on NextBillion.net that sums it up well.

While the Republic of South Africa is the 25th richest country in the world, there exists a stark juxtaposition between first-world lifestyles and Base of the Pyramid poverty. I stayed for a few days in the town of Sawale with a former ANC councilor named Patricia who owned a pick-up truck, two televisions and a surround sound system. Next door in all directions were mud huts.

The fundamental differences between the elite movers and shakers of this rural community and those who had resigned themselves to charity were exposure to critical thinking and knowledge that demystified the world beyond their horizon.

At the heart of business is the principal of reciprocity. But as fundamental as this principal is to any social interaction, it was conspicuously absent from much of our conversation with the local people. Almost everyone that I spoke to in Sawale wanted to know "what are you going to do for us." We met with the village Headman who wanted my four colleagues and me to build a village meeting house. When we met with the chief's cabinet, they told us that they were "ready to be developed." But we had not introduced ourselves as a development NGO; we had introduced ourselves as students.

I do not know whether these gentlemen's knowledge of English was sufficient to understand the subtle difference between passive and active voice, but the meeting with these people who were supposed to be the community leaders stressed how pervasive the victim's mentality was in this particular community.

The author of this post, Ryan Baebler, goes on to suss out the effects of lopsided, well-intentioned development work in the area:

It was obvious to us as outsiders that this community had been habituated into accepting government and NGO handouts. In other words, they had been exposed to the physical manifestations of development without the underlying community development necessary to foster an entrepreneurial spirit. There would not have been anything wrong with the question of "What can you do for us" if it had been prefaced with "This is what we have to offer." But their disempowerment was so complete that they had not identified that which they had to give.

There's a reason NGOs talk so much these days about creating "real partnerships" with the communities in which they work; reciprocity is a slippery, yet irreplaceable, element of effective development. We need to pay more attention to it.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:58 PM | Permalink

Noah Feldman's new book, "The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State," is the sort of thing we hope policymakers, who will need help differentiating between constructive and destructive forms of Islam as they consider how to engage the Muslim world, will read twice. From the book's cover jacket:

Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia--the law of the traditional Islamic state--in the modern Muslim world. Western powers call it a threat to democracy. Islamist movements are winning elections on it. Terrorists use it to justify their crimes. What, then, is the sharia? Given the severity of some of its provisions, why is it popular among Muslims? Can the Islamic state succeed--should it?

These questions piqued my interest immediately. Besides the fact that I've found Feldman to be a creative-thinking sort of law professor (not common) in his past work, I'm not sure many other people -- particularly in the policy arena -- are really trying to understand which elements of sharia constitute a threat to democratic societies and which do not. Now, I'm keenly aware that reading a blog post and reading a book are two vastly different activities. I strive to find a middle ground for our readers. In this case, there was an useful synopsis of Feldman's research and ideas on this subject in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back.

Much more interesting than the opening hook tying Feldman's NYT Magazine article to the the recent uproar over Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams is his subsequent exploration of the roots of sharia and his story tracing how it changed.

Feldman is interested in challenging our stereotypes, our use of sharia as "a foil" to make us look good:

To many, the word "Shariah" conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them -- hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system -- like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases -- are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.

Personally, I'm not convinced that all of Feldman's arguments hang together very well. Should we be punishing adultery then, if we have enough witnesses? If Western courts concerned themselves with personal and family law the way sharia does, we probably wouldn't have time for drug-related offenses either. But that brings us to a bigger question: shouldn't we be proud of the advances Western case law has made in such a short time -- proud that it has embraced universal human rights in the space of a few decades?

Even so, Feldman is right to plumb the beginnings, the middles and the present state of sharia law. If Western law can change quickly -- and if Islamic law was once the most liberal and humane -- these facts should change the way we pursue policy and treat our Islamist neighbors. Why not a legal race to the top if there is a proud heritage to reclaim? That is a powerful idea for the many young, aspiring minds that are presently drawn to sharia.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:23 PM | Permalink

I wish the interface and final product weren't so clunky. That said, the New York Times Environment Blog Dot Earth's innovative Annotated Climate Speech item today is quite an interesting read. Basically, blogger/reporter Andrew Revkin posted the White House text of Bush's speech and then inserted flags and remarks as comments came in from his readership. Blog comment threads are always a mixed bag, but there are some extremely thoughtful pieces in the long thread for this piece. That's what makes the annotation process so useful, even if it is clunky. Revkin links good comments to specific parts of the speech so you can jump down to an on-point comment as you read.

As I said, I'd like a better interface for doing this, and then I'd like the ability to do it everywhere. I'd grab swatches of newspaper articles, speeches, archive material and anything I could get my hands on and annotate it to my heart's delight. I'd start a whole new blog just called "Annotate This."

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:59 AM | Permalink

The NYTImes Magazine previews a piece that will publish Sunday on the impressively forward-thinking approach Nokia, the Finnish cellphone maker, takes to the future of its products. The story is told through the work of a "user anthropologist" who roams the developing world snapping photos and preparing reports for folks back in Espoo (seriously, the town outside of Helsinki where Nokia is headquartered is called Espoo) about the ways people use their phones.

So rather than pack all sorts of "things you can do" into the phone based on some marketers idea of what people might be interested in doing, they look for ways to build and improve on the ways people use the phones now. The impacts on livelihoods and the development potential are well-documented:

Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone's ability to increase people's productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There's the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people's loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move -- displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies -- can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

It may sound like corporate jingoism, but this sort of economic promise has also caught the eye of development specialists and business scholars around the world. Robert Jensen, an economics professor at Harvard University, tracked fishermen off the coast of Kerala in southern India, finding that when they invested in cellphones and started using them to call around to prospective buyers before they'd even got their catch to shore, their profits went up by an average of 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went down by 4 percent. A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated the effect even further, concluding that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country's G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.

In February of last year, when Vodafone rolled out its M-Pesa mobile-banking program in Kenya, it aimed to add 200,000 new customers in the first year but got them within a month. One year later, M-Pesa has 1.6 million subscribers, and Vodafone is now set to open mobile-banking enterprises in a number of other countries, including Tanzania and India. "Look, microfinance is great; Yunus deserves his sainthood," Hammond says. "But after 30 years, there are only 90 million microfinance customers. I'm predicting that mobile-phone banking will add a billion banking customers to the system in five years. That's how big it is."

This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear that responding to me was going to require patience. "People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?" he said. "But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they'd probably say: 'You're going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?' And maybe you can't put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it's quite viable as a fundamental right." He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, "People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either."

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 2:48 PM | Permalink

We spend enough energy bemoaning poor leadership in Washington; I like to applaud when possible, too. This blog has chronicled Robert Zoellick's tenure at the World Bank from its promising get-go and through its first months. Thanks to the Center for Global Development for helping we advocacy types to keep an eye on Zoellick's initiatives at the Bank; from their continued reports, he appears to be striking that fine balance between improving on the Bank's past portfolio of activities and blazing a trail to make it a relevant and useful institution in the future.

Zoellick is looking for ways to use the World Bank to drive the immense capital that countries are deploying abroad in the form of sovereign wealth funds toward investment that would promote development. "In some ways, the bank is becoming more of a venture fund for development," he said. "Part of my message today is we need to be agile in addressing what comes up in the market place. . . . So part of the governance issue will be whether we get the freedom to do that."

He also articulated a role for the Bank on other pressing economic fronts:

On rising food prices, Zoellick also called for a New Deal for Global Food Policy.

"The World Bank Group estimates that 33 countries around the world face potential social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices. For these countries, where food comprises from half to three-quarters of consumption, there is no margin for survival," he said.

Zoellick said the immediate priority was for the United States, the European Union, Japan, and other developed countries to provide the United Nations' World Food Program with the $500 million it needs for emergency food supplies. For its part, the bank is backing feeding and cash programs for vulnerable people and public work-for-food programs, he said.

But he said a New Deal for Global Food Policy also required a shift from traditional food aid to funding programs that help to build local food markets and boost farm production in order to create a "Green Revolution" for sub-Saharan Africa.

Zoellick also warned the time was "now or never" for breaking the Doha Round impasse and reaching a global trade deal, and he criticized rising protectionism in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:45 PM | Permalink

When someone asks what is -- among all the things one could do to have an definitive social impact on impoverished, unjust societies -- a surefire strategy, what do you say? Chances are -- whether you focus your advocacy lens on universal human rights, corruption, microfinance, governance, or some other aspect of development -- that you highlight the importance of enabling women. In principle, there are few who would disagree with you. But how do you drive this case home? Rigorous case studies certainly help. The Initiative for Inclusive Security has compiled several of these comprehensive cases over the past three years as part of their Rwanda project, released this week.

Rwanda provides a backdrop to conduct some impressive, dispositive research on the before and after impact of women in leadership:

With nearly half its parliament composed of women, Rwanda provides a compelling example of how women leaders helped rebuild society, 14 years after a genocide that left nearly a million Rwandans dead. The Initiative's comprehensive body of written work documents the significance of women's leadership following conflict. These papers reveal that women legislators have:

• Led parliament by drafting the only substantive bill to emerge from the legislative rather than the executive branch, a far-reaching law to combat gender-based violence;
• Spearheaded efforts to eliminate discrimination and enhance human rights protections; and
• Fostered cross-party and male-female collaboration through the Forum of Rwandan Women Parliamentarians, Rwanda's all-party legislative women's caucus, and by involving men in efforts to craft legislation.

As I understand it, the Initiative for Inclusive Security was founded on similar research that identified the positive effect once a quantifiable critical mass of women take on positions of leadership. It's much easier to understand how change happens when there are good examples that can be broken open and explored; the Initiative is doing we advocates a service with these cases -- let's take them up on the offer!

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:15 PM | Permalink

An excellent complement to the smart wiki on the foreign policy advisors to the three major presidential candidates is today's NY Times piece on the maybe-battle going on inside the McCain campaign over which Republican foreign policy philosophy carries the day. Let's see, what's good here? Oh, how about:

"It maybe too strong a term to say a fight is going on over John McCain's soul," said Lawrence Eagleburger, a secretary of state under the first President George Bush, who is a member of the pragmatist camp. "But if it's not a fight, I am convinced there is at least going to be an attempt. I can't prove it, but I'm worried that it's taking place."

In addition, Mr. Eagleburger said, "there is no question that a lot of my far right friends have now decided that since you can't beat him, let's persuade him to slide over as best we can on these critical issues."

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this piece is the way McCain currently makes foreign policy decisions: he phones friends, chats about stuff, then shoots from the hip. This clashes with "the John McCain Story" as it's often told, where he's a foreign policy expert:

One of the chief concerns of the pragmatists is that Mr. McCain is susceptible to influence from the neoconservatives because he is not as fully formed on foreign policy as his campaign advisers say he is, and that while he speaks authoritatively, he operates too much off the cuff and has not done the deeper homework required of a presidential candidate.

Unfortunately, the piece comes off as something of a Hail Mary play, an attempt to sew the seeds of rebellion against a neoconservative policy direction for McCain when it sounds like that ship has already sailed. Conflating the idea of McCain as a hip-shooting maverick (something I'm sure he and his campaign don't mind) with an un-formed foreign policy, versus one you just don't like, doesn't sound like fair play. If McCain's a neoconservative, then let that stand, and voters, hopefully, will figure it out.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:03 PM | Permalink

Everyone insists the country is becoming more polarized and political. A way to slice through that idea, when framing big ideas about changes you may want to see happen in the country, is the concept of seeing the earth from space, absent the artificial borders and political barriers that divide us.

This graphic, however, puts even this mild notion into dizzying perspective. I found it via New Yorker pop music critic Sasha Frere Jones.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:09 PM | Permalink

There is a big debate building about how to treat evaluation in the social change space. It goes something like this: If nonprofits, foundations and social entrepreneurs want real change to happen, they need to get serious about whether their activities measurably contribute to the changes they espouse. They need rigor, RIGOR, in their evaluation methods! Once a critical mass of nonprofits gets serious about measuring its work, the marketplace of donors will leave those who lack rigorous reporting behind.

BUT, say others. But what are we really measuring? Can we reduce social change to indicators that are valued the same by everyone the way everyone agrees when a business reports its profits? In the words of one Skoll Forum speaker who I quoted week before last, isn't there something fundamentally different about philanthropy and social change? Unlike the marketplace, isn't a personal connection and a compelling story an imperative part of a successful transaction in the work we do?

So argues Shelagh Gastrow, who directs a nonprofit in South Africa.

I have no problem with measurement if it is done for the right reasons. These reasons will include that it comes from within the organisation, that it is done to assess the effectiveness of the organisation and that it is used as an organisational learning tool. The problem is, however, who is measuring, why are they measuring, what do they want to achieve by measuring and finally, can they effectively measure what they claim to want to measure?

Gastrow also takes on the idea of a marketplace for giving.

Why should grantmakers shop for the organisations that they want to partner with? It does offer a short cut, but as we know mail order brides are not always what they appear to be on paper. Unfortunately, there is no short cut. Getting to know organisations well enough to feel confident that funding will be well spent with levels of accountability is critical to the success of philanthropy.

This argument reminded me of a Skoll Forum delegate who participated in one of the consultancy clinics, pitching an idea for an online marketplace that philanthropists could use to discover new organizations in their areas of funding interest. The panel of consultants shot the idea down, citing similar attempts that failed in the past such as SeaChange (read the Kellogg Foundation's postmortem here) and noting that donors want to build relationships.

I think there is a middle ground in this debate. Organizations must not lose sight of what their end-goal is. More rigorous measurement that feeds back into an organization's efforts and helps it to stay on course toward its goals is indeed valuable. There may be commonalities between groups of organizations working on a particular social problem, but these measures will not be the same for everyone. Donors should get used to crafting measures specific to each grantee. With the exception of very specific goals, we'll probably never get to a place where everyone in the social change space values a set of common indicators enough to allow a meaningful social change marketplace. Powerful stories and strong relationships will continue to give meaning to the work we do. Just so long as there is substance enough to back them up.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:35 PM | Permalink

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that we like a healthy dose of solutions to accompany any discussion of global problems. This is particularly true in the area of big, fuzzy problems like climate change that seem to dwarf any individual efforts we might undertake. But a focus on the problems -- when it really does serve to focus our work -- isn't always unproductive. I've been meaning to post the key points from a speech that Lord Anthony Giddens gave at the Skoll Forum on Social Entrepreneurship last week. Giddens was a chief adviser to Tony Blair on the subject of climate change, and he had some very useful ideas to help social entrepreneurs focus on innovating around particular problems that arise in the course of trying to "do something" about climate change.

We must find a way to unravel three obstacles, said Giddens:

1. Cope with the free rider problem. Find a way to reward those who cut back -- and shame those who do not. Make energy consumption levels public and visible on cars, houses, buildings, for instance. Develop a branding/labeling system to make clear which energy consumption practices are helping and which are hurting.

2. Take the future seriously (hyperbolic discounting, in economic parlance). Show how the risks exist in the here and now, in the next five years, in your community. Specific vulnerability studies are a good start. What's a better way to advocate around them?

3. The law of increasing returns. Studies show that when people save some energy by means of tax incentives, better insulation, hybrid cars, better light bulbs, they end up driving more, getting a bigger TV, leaving the lights on longer. There must be a way to aggregate the absolute value of energy saved/spent and set some benchmarks. Otherwise, we're just on a merry-go-round of energy consumption that keeps changing -- but also keeps increasing.

You'll notice that all three of these have only a partial relationship to science and technology. They are mostly problems of human behavior, and as such, advocates can and should have a profound impact on these obstacles. As a physicist at the forum noted: "Molecules stay the same. I can come back and study them tomorrow. People change their behavior. We need it to change for the better."

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:38 AM | Permalink

Speaking of presidential candidate advisers, if you're in the DC area you have a chance to hear what they have to say on the much-discussed question of how America will bounce back from our late image pummeling. (Interestingly, see how the numbers measuring what people think about the U.S. in various parts of the world are actually beginning to climb back up. Anticipation of presidential change? Hegemon protest fatigue? You tell me.) Local NPR affiliate WAMU 88.5, America Abroad Media, and The American Interest magazine will host senior foreign policy advisors from the presidential campaigns of Senators Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama to discuss strategies for (hopefully further) improving America's standing abroad. The event will take place at the Kay Spiritual Center on the American University campus at 7pm.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:35 AM | Permalink

You may have heard that enterprising farmers in East Africa use their mobile phones to set optimal prices as they bring their produce to market; or how fishermen in southern India swap information on where their catch is least available up and down the coast and where they should go to sell it. The social cause space is coming around too, it seems, developing ways to use mobile phones that add up to something more than a two or three-way conversation; these innovations are beginning to add up to real "social capital," notes the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog. The same way that mobile phones are changing the way markets work in developing countries, they have the potential to create social value writ large as a platform for advocates.

"It's about people, community-based groups basically, better leveraging their social capital to do good," says Jeremy Liu, executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, in Boston, which has created a service called Speakeasy that enables people with knowledge of a foreign language and a cellphone to become part of a network of volunteer translators. "People talk too much about social capital these days, and it's all in the abstract," he says. "This makes it very concrete."

The Chronicle post mentions "Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive.org, a network for organizations that use cellphones for activism." At the Skoll Forum for Social Entrepreneurship last week, I had the chance to hear Verclas pitch an idea to create a clearinghouse for new mobile applications. MobileActive would serve as a platform for entrepreneurs -- social and otherwise -- to put out calls to mobile software developers who could take contracts to develop mini-applications that would be useful for specific purposes -- an impromptu event to highlight human trafficking, say. Sort of an open-source, project-based way of building software specifically for advocates and entrepreneurs, who may need something a bit different. Keep an eye on MobileActive -- you may want to do some downloading (or commissioning) soon.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 5:14 PM | Permalink

I have a confession to make. Without signing up, without doing anything major to signify my participation, I joined what I hoped was millions of folks taking a stand against wasting energy by turning off my lights for an hour beginning at 8 pm on 3/29. My kids were in bed, my wife was out of town, so I only needed to convince the dog, who is blind. I clicked the lights off and began thinking about our consumption of energy.

This was not an easy process. There are lights all over your house, and I decided to personally interpret the rules to mean not doing much else, like watching TV, endlessly checking my email, and noodling on the web. I know I missed some lights as well. There are night lights in the kids' rooms, and one at the top of the stairs. My son wasn't quite asleep yet, so the light on the landing outside his door remained lit. I realized afterwards that I didn't flick off the motion sensor light in front of our house, so it's possible a deer or fox triggered the light for a bit.

Earth Hour was begun last year on 3/31 by the World Wildlife Fund in Sydney, Australia. This year, it spread across the globe, including major cities around the globe and throughout the United States.

As I sat in the silent dark, I felt pretty proud. I am constantly shutting off lights in our house. My son likes to turn them on, and the previous owner was a real zealot about adequate lighting, so there isn't an unlit corner to be found. We've been in the house for less than a year, so we're waiting for attrition to claim the old bulbs and slowly replacing them with compact florescent bulbs. So this will really help, I thought, and millions of us doing it will be something.

I wasn't slipping. I maintain my skepticism of direct action and feel-good maneuvers (even in the dark) that don't really mean anything. But it just seemed like, well, if people just turned off lights they weren't using, really made a conscious effort to do that, it could be great, right?

Wrong, I'm afraid. Or at least preliminary data from around Australia, where Earth Hour had a one-year head start, would indicate that assumption was wrong. A blog called Scientia potentia est, which could be the rantings of an Australian scientist/madman for all I know, does have some convincing data (via Freakonomics) that shows people increasing their consumption of energy in advance of Earth Hour. They were preparing to save energy by expending more energy.

This is tremendously depressing. I don't know if data is available in the states, because it belies a transparency we've effectively killed off in the post-9/11 era. But I have to admit it deals a blow to the gentle, non-malicious sense of satisfaction I had sitting in the dark last week. Sigh.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 4:30 PM | Permalink

You are most likely reading this blog post because you're interested in -- and know something about -- global issues, politics, messaging and the like. You probably care deeply who wins the presidency this November -- his or her actions will affect the issues you work on and care about in a profound way.

But flip the equation for a minute; imagine you're the aspiring president. You have hundreds of communities, working groups, lobbying campaigns, issue boosters hounding you for your attention. They each have an idea to pitch, a change they want made. How do you decide who to listen to and how to respond to this cascade of demands? This gets a little easier when you actually become president and you have the full resources of the United States government at your disposal. At that point, your time is scarce but your talent pool is not. But as a candidate, you have tough choices to make. You may personally know something about many of the issues on which you will be expected to take a position, but you must rely heavily on advisers. This small group (advisers are expensive, so it will probably be small) needs to be conversant with very complicated problems -- regulating the mortgage and financial securities markets more effectively, for instance (these advisers are now front and center).

Advisers have a chance to influence candidates in a way that will be impossible once they are elected. They are the favored few, the inner circle that decides what a candidate is about. I've found it fascinating to read who is in Barack Obama's inner circle and from whence they come.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 5:17 PM | Permalink

I try not to post items like this without doing some thinking about the frame. (We're always thinking about the framing.) I could throw it up there and say, "one more depressing thing," and leave it at that.

And to a degree, the author of the item I'm about to post did that. He kept it straight right up until the end, when he wrote, with understandable exasperation:

What's depressing is the fact that this only took me 30 minutes to write, and you 2 minutes to read. Yet most people in the United States, including those in the media, the house of representatives, and probably even the Pentagon, lack even this cursory level of knowledge...

It covers the difference between Sunni and Shia, what we mean by "Arab" vs. "Muslim" and the like. I'm an Arab American, and I studied a lot about the history of Islam and the Arab world when I was in college, so I'm not really a solid measure of this.

But without lamenting our dumb world, I wonder how we got here. And if we're still getting more of the same.

When I was a kid, Shiite terrorists were a bad thing, too. Shiites in Iran took hostages and gave us the Islamic Republic of Iran and "Nightline". Shiites were at large across the Arab World causing mayhem, and were the bad guys of the Middle East bar none.

But I wasn't taught anything about the split in Islam that created the two strains after the death of Mohammed in high school. AP courses in history gave me as rich an understanding as possible (for a 17 year-old) of the underlying causes of the American Civil War, the Great Depression, and even the cultural divisions surrounding the US involvement in the Vietnam War. But nothing about the religious groups taking hostages and hijacking planes in the newspaper accounts throughout that turbulent period.

So I'm part of a generation that, without the intervention of a international studies degree, is quite unaware of the ethnic and religious differences inflaming many in the Middle East. The question I have is this: Is anyone doing anything about this for the next generation?

I hope so. There are definitely more opportunities available than when I (or Senator McCain) were in high school:

• The Asia Society's Education programs create opportunities for studies of other cultures.
  
• The Choices Program at Brown University has a rich curriculum that creates modules from current news items, and also puts students in the daunting but rewarding position of teaching their state representatives a thing or two about the world we share.
  
• CP-SS client World Learning is a leader in high quality, high road student exchange, perhaps the best way for people to learn these lessons.
  

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:14 PM | Permalink