Featured
Living Democracy: an exhibition of research on parliaments

Living Democracy: an exhibition of research on parliaments

An exhibition on the relationship between politicians and people! Taking place in the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, 9am to 5pm, 13 January to 16 March 2024, it features research findings from six countries: Brazil, Ethiopia, Fiji, India, the UK and the US. Living Democracy – Frayed entanglements offers films, photography, installations, audio and text that reveal riffs, rhythms and rituals in Parliaments. It is an explosion of creativity by a team of researchers and film-makers from Brazil, Ethiopia, Fiji and the…

Read More Read More

Featured
The Mursi encountering the other

The Mursi encountering the other

The Global Research Network on Parliaments and People, at SOAS’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology, has initiated a new research programme with the Mursi (or Mun), a group of agro-pastoralists living in the Lower Omo Valley of southwestern Ethiopia. They have found encounters with outsiders mostly painful, and often violent, in tune with most indigenous groups globally. This new GRNPP initiative will support members of the Mursi community to promote more peaceful encounters with the outside world and advise their…

Read More Read More

Confusion in Westminster

Confusion in Westminster

If you have ever been through an organisational restructuring, you might not have been surprised that disentangling the UK from the European Union was going to present huge difficulties. Add the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, climate breakdown and chronically under-staffed state organisations, and you have a context that creates impossible challenges. So much for the bigger picture. Within the Westminster Parliament politics is supposed to work in certain ways. MPs show loyalty to their party, which often means those…

Read More Read More

Shapeshifting fission and fusion in the Tory leadership contest

Shapeshifting fission and fusion in the Tory leadership contest

Mud-slinging between rivals in the Tory leadership election sounds like more of the same old ‘tribalism’ in UK politics. But this is not just politicians behaving badly because they are unpleasant people or politics is dirty. Choosing a new leader reveals how much politicians are forced to shapeshift into different groups, improvising into new alliances and enmities to further their interests and causes. To dismiss the way politics enacts as tribalism, is to disparage both politics and the societies around…

Read More Read More

Ethics under threat in Westminster

Ethics under threat in Westminster

In a New Statesman podcast released today, I discussed ethics in Westminster with writer Armando Iannucci, MP Anum Qaisar and journalist Ailbhe Rea. It is clearly time for a debate about our expectations of politicians. How did the UK get itself into a situation where the Prime Minister is still in post although he lied to parliament. Apparently when Hemingway was asked how he went bankrupt, he replied: “Gradually, then suddenly.” That does seem to be the way of important…

Read More Read More

New research: political truth-telling and lying

New research: political truth-telling and lying

I’m embarking on new research about how politicians, journalists and researchers tell truths and lies and how knowledge travels around political worlds. I was once tempted to lie in research about MPs. Or was it a lie? In the run up to a UK general election, the Guardian phoned my publisher and said that a well-known academic had written a blog about how I found cheating in the previous election. If they ran with a story about it, would I…

Read More Read More

Challenging harmful partnership practices

Challenging harmful partnership practices

Global coalitions tend to be constrained by hierarchies of knowledge and harmful partnership practices. I wrote about how this plays out between international NGOs and national/local NGOs in Whose Development? (1998), with co-author Elizabeth Harrison, and some years later about some strategies for challenging  these inequalities in an article called Doing Development Differently (2014). At a small INGO working on child rights we questioned our assumptions about where expertise lies. We once claimed that we were experts in child protection…

Read More Read More

To be or not to be an anthropologist

To be or not to be an anthropologist

Since I trained as a social anthropologist at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s I have been wrestling with whether I wish to be defined by that disciplinary orientation. Whatever work I was doing, the label seemed to stick in my mind – often with me joking about being a recovering anthropologist even when I was trying to be a social development worker, policy wonk or manager. At last I have concluded that like so many binary choices, a yes…

Read More Read More

Complex leadership

Complex leadership

We face various emergencies – climate change, inequalities, conflict, mental health and now pandemics – as well as attacks on peace, democracy and justice – white (and other) supremacy, Kafkaesque bureaucracies, cuts to public services, and attacks on the rule of law – that require intelligent leaders. And yet if we don’t rethink how we conceive of leadership, then poor leaders thrive and decent leaders don’t stand a chance. I’m editing a volume about leadership (part of a series with…

Read More Read More

Anticipating recovery anthropologically

Anticipating recovery anthropologically

In my last blog I wrote about evaluating the past; this note asserts that politicians fail to anticipate the future with sufficient imagination.  Politicians in democracies are often brilliant at anticipating what they need to do to win the next election, in most cases staying in close touch with their local party members and as many electors as possible. One British MP told me he has canvassed every Saturday of his life for decades and puts a letter through the…

Read More Read More