A bit of background in case you are interested:-
Professional
I am Secretary General of International Alert, the London-based international peacebuilding organisation. I also chair the UN Peacebuilding Fund‘s Advisory Group. Before moving to International Alert, I was Director of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. I have written books, articles and reports about conflict and international politics for 30 years and I have worked with divided communities so they could try to enhance their prospects for peaceful relations.
Blog
I started blogging in September 2008 on another site – Myriad Editions’ State of the World blog, linked to my State of the World atlas, whose 8th edition was about to come out. In January 2009 the Myriad team and I agreed that setting up my own blog would let me range more widely than the themes covered in the atlas.
Me
I am British, a Londoner, of the baby boom generation and, like three-quarters of boomers, I fondly think I look younger than the rest of that generation.
In July 2009 I started out on what a friend called Fatherhood v2.0. For those of you who noticed a reduction in the frequency of my blog posts after the mid-year point, that was one reason why (verbosity was the other).
It’s amazing what you forget and what you remember from the first time round. One thing I’d forgotten is just how time-consuming the first months are; the excitement and elation, the focus onto the very simple things of life, the tiredness – all that I had remembered – but the whole where-does-the-time-go feeling was something that had slipped my memory. So: sorry about the blog but from time to time (like every week)there is a bigger priority.
And by the way, thanks for asking: while still uncertain about my future as a septuagenarian father of a teenager, I am still loving Fatherhood v2.0.
Reading
The statistic on boomers’ self-perception comes from one of the really striking books of 2008 – The Unthinkable, by Amanda Ripley, about how people respond to disaster (published by Random House).
If you want my recommendation for 2009 it is indubitably Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History by Douglass C North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R Weingast. Although the title is just begging for a competition to be launched – either for proposing equally modest titles, or perhaps for most jokes about this title in a 60-second period (to digress, the bit I like about the title is the authors’ emphasis that it is only recorded history they are going to explain and, oh yes, only human history at that) - yes, despite all that, this may be one of the most important books of this period. The truth is that it fulfils the ambition of the sub-title. While the arguments are necessarily dense the intellectual architecture as a whole is refreshingly accessible. The book provides a clear and straightforward idea of what development is. Expect my blogging to make numerous references to this excellent work in the near future.
Photo
The picture at the top of the page is of the main reading room in the Library of Alexandria. It’s the modern one, obviously, not the ancient one that was founded about 283 BCE and whose destruction remains an unsolved mystery. The building is beautiful and the institution and the way it is run reflect an inclusive, reflective idea about education, learning and civilisation. Visit it if ever you have an opportunity – it really is wonderful.
(Updated March 2010)
