EMMA CREWE

The total absence of the healthcare provision in Mursiland remains one of the biggest challenges for a community of over 12,000 women, men and children living in South Omo, Southern Ethiopia. This absence, the remoteness of Mursiland, and lack of public transport or roads for ambulances means when a Mursi family faces illness or a medical emergency, they have no options for professional treatment, care or advice. Children are particularly vulnerable to preventable diseases, so child mortality is shockingly high….

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When you encounter potential conflicts in organisations, which are inevitable because groups always have different needs, interests and intentions, diplomacy is needed. Management involves diplomacy if we assume that this is political work between groups that enables some kind of movement towards a merging or at least intertwining of goals. Diplomacy is normally seen as negotiation between nations.  Claude AI claims: ‘Diplomacy is the art and practice of managing international relations through dialogue, negotiation, and peaceful means. It serves as…

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This article, written with political scientist Michelle Taylor-Robinson, is about co-operative and polarised politics in Texas. Political work requires alliance building, but antagonism and divisions dominate legislatures and society in many democracies. In Texas legislators are pulled in both directions simultaneously in surprising ways. We use the anthropological method of ethnography and the political science method of network analysis and show how their combination enhances understanding of cross-party cooperation among Representatives even when such work is not depicted in the…

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I recently wrote an article about the UK Parliament’s role in creating, maintaining and delaying the abolition of Transatlantic African Trafficking and Chattel Enslavement. If Parliament were to face up to this history and its impact, it could contribute to the repair that is needed in a world that remains racist towards Africans both on their continent and in the diaspora. I discovered that at least one of my ancestors was an enslaver. John Crewe was compensated £5,102 for 234…

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Texas politics is a harbinger of what is to come or decades behind the UK. Or both. The long tradition of bipartisanship in the Texas House of Representatives, whereby elected Representations in both political parties collaborate to get bills passed, is under attack. The Republicans have dominated Texas politicis since the 1990s. But while their ideology and aspirations have been moderate, and mostly focused on the economy and providing services, in the Texas House of Representatives they worked with Democrats…

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In universities we face the triple burden of: a financial model that no longer works well because we are not funded by government and want to resist the push to become businesses; a mental health and economic crisis facing staff and students; intense (and often uneven) workloads, taking us away from what we want to be doing: teaching, researching, writing and contributing to public good. I am typical in trying to do too much. In my case I’m head of…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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