For this wrap-up episode we've switched sides of the microphone to interview our host for the last 39 episodes, Ian Quick. (With thanks to Sam Meikle for taking over interviewing duties.) He talks about his formative experiences in the development & conflict management sectors, and why oral history felt like a meaningful contribution at this point in time. We go on to reflect more generally on *why* these stories matter. What do they tell us about who “we” are in public service, and how does...
Jul 14, 2021•1 hr 25 min
"The only ethical way of doing this research is to stay involved in a profound manner, & to maintain these friendships and relationships." Judith Verweijen is a researcher who has spent a decade-plus interviewing soldiers and militias in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. We talk through what her process looks like, what men under arms actually do all day, and the complex social ecosystem that arises in protracted conflicts. We also talk a lot about the ethics of this work. Not just b...
May 25, 2021•52 min
Salma Ben Aissa Braham is a Tunisian humanitarian professional, and currently Country Director for the IRC in the Central African Republic. She spent half of her career (so far!) in her home country, and was entering her prime working years around the time of the 2011 revolution. We talk about that, naturally. We go on to discuss how she's approached her work in large-scale, seemingly intractable crises in C.A.R. and Yemen. Another major theme is the complicated relationship between the global S...
May 11, 2021•47 min
Josep is a career humanitarian who's spent 20+ years with UNHCR working with refugees, and on forced displacement. But alongside there's something a bit unusual. That twigged for me personally when we met a few years back in Central Asia -- and he started speaking in Tajik to a local community, despite never having worked in the region. It turned out that alongside a half-dozen European languages he's also invested in Persian and Arabic, and that's kind of the key to this one. What does it take ...
Apr 26, 2021•58 min
Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou is Director of the Politics and Governance Programme at the Overseas Development Institute. Past work has included academic posts, several development NGOs, and the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. With this in mind, it's interesting that the recurring theme of this conversation is a rather ambivalent relationship with the aid sector. She's worked with some of the marquee names in the sector, but specifically in roles that are critical or reformist in nature. Equal...
Apr 12, 2021•47 min
Polly Mackenzie is CEO at Demos, a cross-party think tank in the United Kingdom. She's also worked at the centre of government within the 2010-15 coalition, and run a charity focusing on money and mental health. In the current fractious political environment Demos looks at big challenges like wealth inequality, "building back" after covid-19, and social protection for the most marginalised. We talk a lot about how to "do" public policy in a complex democracy -- in particular how to bring more hu...
Nov 27, 2020•52 min
Dao X. Tran is Managing Editor of Voice of Witness, which develops oral histories and education programs to amplify the voices of people impacted by injustice. Recent projects have included the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, indigenous Americans, and settlement of refugees in Appalachia. (You can find all their projects at voiceofwitness.org .) We start with her early years in Philadelphia, as a child refugee in a working class neighbourhood split by serious divides, and a path into social justic...
Jul 30, 2020•59 min
Kumekucha is a program to help people process conflict and trauma, and to craft new narratives for themselves. It’s running at the community level in coastal Kenya and Nairobi, for people affected by police brutality, by gang violence, and a whole range of adverse personal circumstances. (I strongly recommend checking out the Green String Network’s channel on Youtube for some of their short participant videos, which speak much more eloquently than I can.) In this episode we hear from two of the ...
Jun 22, 2020•58 min
Kate Moger is Regional Vice-President for the Great Lakes region at the International Rescue Committee. She's based in Nairobi, although currently that’s in flux due to COVID-19. We start with her rather interesting route into the sector by way of a dubious Russian travel agency, some traumatic early experiences, and how and where this turned around into a fulfilling career. We then go deep on professionalisation and ethics in the humanitarian sector, and what this means for managing people in t...
May 06, 2020•1 hr 2 min
(Bonus coronavirus lockdown episode) Ahmed Famau Ahmed is one of the facilitators that works with the “Healing the Uniform” initiative that we discussed in episode #031. But he’s not a career professional. Instead he came into this because of his own history of being arrested, interrogated, and mistreated by the police. In this conversation he talks about his experiences growing up in coastal Kenya, police profiling on the basis of his dialect and appearance, and introducing that perspective to ...
Apr 21, 2020•26 min
Gitahi Kanyeki is a 36-year veteran of the Kenya National Police Service. His career spans operations against cattle rustlers in Turkana, to extraordinary violence in Nairobi after the 2008 elections, to internal action against serious misconduct. That history has entailed more than anyone’s fair share of traumatic experiences, both for him and for his family. In this episode we talk about what that was like to live and work through — and beyond that what can be done, and is being done, for trau...
Apr 09, 2020•57 min
Wangui Kimari is an urban anthropologist, currently affiliated with the African Centre for Cities. She’s done a range of interesting things but this conversation focuses on work in her home town of Nairobi—and in particular the Mathare area, which if you know the city is often labelled as a slum or sort of den of iniquity. The recurring theme is the attempt to do things differently in the face of a stifling, or broken, status quo. What does public authority and urban planning when seen from the ...
Mar 24, 2020•53 min
Donata Garrasi has worked on conflict dynamics for twenty-five years, in a career spanning operational, policy and consulting roles. She presently works as Director of Political Affairs for the UN Special Envoy for the Great Lakes. In one sense this might sound like a straightforward story. But walking through the steps, it really wasn’t. It was a series of self-starting, purposeful and often risky moves to find ways to make a contribution. What drives and sustains that kind of motivation? What ...
Mar 03, 2020•1 hr 7 min
Babatunde Afolabi has worked on mediation and conflict transformation in West Africa for pretty much all of his adult life—first at the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and then with the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue. This experience spans the full range of political conflict: “democratic reversals” and refusals to leave power, military coups, contested elections, the rise of extremist movements, and entrenched sub-national violence. With this as background we get into the ...
Feb 18, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Johnny is a photographer and activist who's based in South Africa. (You can find much of his work at millefoto.com.) He’s best-known for his drone photo series Unequal Scenes. These images are striking and almost violent: shanty towns abutting stately suburban homes; a slum wedged in beside a gleaming financial district. In this interview we talk about his broader ambitions to shift the narrative around stark economic inequalities, both in his adopted home of South Africa and further afield. We ...
Dec 30, 2019•1 hr 7 min
Preeti Thapa has led community justice and conflict transformation programs in her native Nepal for about sixteen years, working with the Asia Foundation. That experience spans an extraordinarily turbulent period -- the tail end of the Maoist insurgency, a drawn-out and highly contentious transition to multi-party politics, a transformative new constitution, and the 2014-15 earthquake. As a consequence we get into many of the central dilemmas of conflict transformation work. Structural and commu...
Dec 08, 2019•55 min
Marc is a journalist who has developed a number of graphic novels with people in extraordinarily tough situations. These include kids affected by conflict in the Central African Republic; returned combatants of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda; and people targeted for witchcraft in Nigeria. (You can find his work at http://www.marcellison.com/) We talk about the process of responsibly developing these stories; the importance of developing new approaches on these very complex issues;...
Oct 28, 2019•53 min
Wale is acting senior director for the governance technical unit within the International Rescue Committee. He works to protect the rights of people affected by crises to influence the political issues that matter to them. (Background link for more on this: https://www.rescue-uk.org/outcome/power.) We talk about getting people to think intelligently about the political context for humanitarian response, how the sector is evolving over time, and a few sacred cows that need to be left behind. We a...
Oct 10, 2019•1 hr 1 min
David is the Africa editor for the Financial Times. In January 2019 his team broke a story on massive fraud in presidential and parliamentary elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The reporting was impressive for its depth, based on the systematic review of leaked electoral data. It was also striking because it was so unusual, following years of superficial and crisis-driven engagement with the DRC by the international press. With that in mind, this episode is about when and how the...
Sep 05, 2019•49 min
Gemma pivoted away from a career in programme management and human rights advocacy to undertake a PhD in how we think about stress and meaning in the aid sector. That done, she is now an independent consultant and facilitator on how aid agencies can become more healthy, inclusive and caring work spaces (blog: http://gemmahouldey.com/). With this in hand, we have a conversation that touches on some of the most critical and under-discussed issues in the sector. Show notes: [02:20] Personal experie...
Aug 09, 2019•57 min
Kathryn managed monitoring & evaluation for cross-border “stabilisation" programmes in Syria over the last five years (working with the development consultancy Integrity). These initiatives aimed to support functioning services and local governance in opposition-held areas, and to check the influence of extremist groups, in parallel with diplomatic processes. The goal of her own work was thus to track how these approaches were working out in an extraordinarily complex and violent operating e...
Jul 25, 2019•59 min
Rabih Omar is a proud citizen of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second city, and has worked there on humanitarian and peacebuilding challenges for his whole career. We talk in depth about his experience working for different international organisations that have come to his city, what foreign “experts” tend to get wrong, and how he keeps his motivation up despite near-constant political destabilisation. Episode notes: [04:45] What it was like growing up in Tripoli, through the end of the Lebanese civil war ...
May 13, 2019•1 hr 4 min
Roshan is co-founder of the Amani Institute, which supports talent development for the social sector. Over the last seven years it has graduated some 450 students from its hubs in Nairobi, Bangalore, and Sao Paolo. We talk about the merits of coming from an emerging market perspective when talking about social innovation, the gaps that Amani sees in the education market, and Roshan's own journey with a startup. Episode notes: [2:10] Why the co-founders felt there was a gap in the education marke...
Apr 25, 2019•1 hr 2 min
A short one to share some reflections on the first year of the podcast, and talk about where we're going next. (Including a name change!) We've had a wide range of people on so far -- human rights defenders, community organisers, clinicians, aid workers, and more. I share some of the moments that have really stuck with me, and talk about what I think unifies this disparate group of people.
Apr 14, 2019•6 min
Nick van Praag founded and runs an organisation called Ground Truth Solutions. They work with people affected by crises to get their feedback and perspectives on emergency response. In practice this means door-to-door surveys, over time, of how people feel about the timeliness, quality and fairness of humanitarian service provision. This is shared with service providers and funding agencies to benchmark what they’re doing, and encourage greater responsiveness. What is particularly intriguing is ...
Mar 19, 2019•53 min
Hani al Rstum is a Syrian living in Lebanon’s second city of Tripoli, and the conductor for the SADA playback theatre troupe. They engage with communities affected by serious conflict, with the goal of recognising and affirming life experiences, and opening dialogue. Playback draws on psychodrama therapy, and Hani himself is a psychotherapist. He “conducts” events to create a safe space for people to share experiences, and to begin to connect and empathise. The troupe is based in a social innova...
Feb 19, 2019•55 min
Tripoli, Lebanon’s second city, has experienced considerable violence ever since the end of the national civil war in 1990. But this escalated dramatically with the onset of the Syrian civil war. Pitched neighbourhood-level fighting led up to the shock car-bombing of the al-Taqwa and al-Salam mosques in 2013. The central government responded with an army-imposed security plan which tamped down violence, but there’s been little progress since on the underlying conflict dynamics. Stepping into thi...
Jan 31, 2019•58 min
Christine Williamson runs a consultancy firm called Duty of Care International, and has spent twenty years in human resources management in the aid world. It’s well-known that this is a very difficult area. The sector puts large numbers of people into tough operating environments, with a tiny fraction of the support that’s available for diplomatic or military personnel. It’s built on short-term funding contracts which interfere with efforts to professionalise and plan the workforce. Perhaps most...
Jan 14, 2019•53 min
Jean-Paul is part of the generation that was fundamentally shaped by the Lebanese civil war, but had no responsibility for it. In his words, when he left the country in 2006 after the brief and calamitous war with Israel, he never wanted to come back. While abroad, however, he found a sense of agency and possibility. He did come back, and founded an organisation called Peace Labs, which aims to facilitate the difficult conversations that need to happen if the country is to move forward. Show not...
Nov 19, 2018•1 hr 7 min
Assaad is best-known in Lebanon for an open letter in 2000, in which he apologised for what he’d done with the Lebanese Forces, a prominent Christian militia responsible for its share of atrocities. This has been followed by nearly twenty years of philanthropic work. Much of it has been in partnership with other former combatants, through the organisation Fighters for Peace. He has also been involved with a range of initiatives seeking to unblock social dialogue more broadly. His auto-biography ...
Oct 24, 2018•59 min
