Caroline Jaine's blog

I do not have to be Indian to feel the sense of sorrow and unfathomable injustice as this month the world remembers the Mumbai attacks of a year ago.  Many times we seem to have shaken our pitiful heads and said “never again” after a grand scale terror attack, but still man continues to kill man for an increasingly bizarre list of reasons.  Political pressure, ignorance, social emasculation, brainwashing and drug addiction are amongst the culprits.

In the year since Mumbai, across the region we have seen murderers in Pakistan turn on their own people – with a recent gruesome blast in a Peshawar market killing over 100, mainly women and children, with no real explanation that I could fathom. Again, I do not have to be Pakistani to feel a sense of sorrow. 
 

Up until very recently I was very sniffy about corporate and government engagement online.  I always figured that the real strength in new media lay in the credibility born from broadcasting the voices of the unheard.  I associated digital engagers using blogs and micro-blogs, social networks and chat forums to be identified with the individual, with community journalists wishing to distance themselves from mainstream media, and with speaking free from constraints of institution or authority.

Until last week in fact, any official blogging from the likes of government ministers would make me shudder and I assumed it was with ignorance that organisations and authorities around the world stumbled into this new digital playground. I sniggered at local authority Tweets and hollow-laughed as government Facebook groups requested my membership.  Then a friend reminded me that my own words (these in fact) appear branded on the website of a rather large organisation – no less than the World Bank.  Ah. Right. And I have to confess I have never been censored and rarely edited by the bank (save for my typos).  I decided to have a conversation with a Digital Diplomacy expert in the hope it would resolve my issues for me.  It did.

Many (some say all) organisational, institutional or government communications efforts are about influence and/or behaviour change.  A point often missed is that communications cannot be a bolt-on activity that happens in isolation from other actions.  If you are generally “making friends” with your audience, it will be a lot easier to influence them – as J.S.Knox writes “You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time.”  Time and time again I come across well-educated policy formers, peace builders, and frontline campaigners who are attempting to build a strategy for their work without including an element of strategic communications from the outset.  There is a need to grasp that every activity you are engaged in will influence (there is no such thing as “not communicating” – everything sends a message).  So, the way the phone is answered, your level of cultural awareness, the tone of an email, the policies you promote, and physical campaigns (e.g. military/peacekeeping/law enforcement activity) will all have an impact on your effectiveness to communicate other messages.

For the record, I don’t believe the hype that people are only interested in bad news.  I think as humans we are intrigued by “dramatic” – but not that this has to be necessarily “negative”.  I proved it to myself recently.

These past few weeks I have been working on a project that has seen me focus pretty close up to the recent crisis in Gaza. As a former resident of the region (some twenty years ago), I was half dreading it.  Since last December my inbox has been filled with the plight of people in the area - photos of dead children, graphic descriptions of cruelty.  Despite being rich in information, I had to dig deep to find what I was looking for – yet it was undeniably there.

On a cold January evening, shortly after watching President Obama take office from a crowded bar in central London, I dashed across town to the Palace of Westminster to listen to the wise words of Johan Galtung who was talking at the All Party Parliamentary Group for Conflict Issues.

In the field I work in, Galtung is a legend.  The 78 year-old Norwegian socialist is the grandfather of peace studies and has mediated in over 40 conflicts around the world.  He has been a peace activist most of his life – in his teens he was sent to prison for insisting that he be engaged in peace-making activities rather than serving in the military.  

Communicating change is a specialist field.  PR and HR companies charge a small fortune for seminars on the subject.  Whilst corporate and government communicators wrestle to understand how they might persuade colleagues that important, imminent, organisational changes are good for them - so that they can achieve that all important "buy-in" which leads to the shiny path of success - organisations are using change as a selling point or a process improvement to their customers.
 

I was asked to join forces with other bloggers to blog on Blog Action Day (October 15) and write about Poverty.  What better platform than the World Bank’s People, Spaces, Deliberation blog?  I encourage others to do the same. 
 
I have been discussing with fellow bloggers what “being poor” means to them.  Interesting how varied the response – but one thing is clear, in this current economic crisis everyone around the globe is thinking about it.  I don’t know when I stopped thinking about it, but I know I am guilty of taking cash and credit for granted over the years.
 

International Day of Peace on Sunday 21st September is an annual event that has been organised by the UN for more than a quarter of a century.  International Day of Peace is also a day of Global Ceasefire which, if adhered to, provides a small ray of sunshine for those who endure war and conflict and often allows essential food, water, and medical supplies to reach those most in need. The UN have launched an admirable campaign this year, encouraging like-minded global citizens to network, participate and even send text messages of peace to world leaders.  Jeremy Gilley has even made a film about it, set in Afghanistan and starring Jude Law.  But as a Communications Strategist I have been contemplating the difficulties of selling “peace” both in my work with the UK ministry for peace and as research for a book on the subject.

I have just returned from an exhausting but exhilarating week in Kabul, where I had a lively exchange with the Afghan journalists. The freedom that exists for the press in Afghanistan is largely thanks to an enlightened Deputy Minister who some years ago freely issued licenses.  However, whilst the top end of the media market is slick and modern (if not occasionally dubiously funded), left unregulated the seedy underbelly of Afghan journalism can be insensitive and irresponsible.  Couple this with a reported lack of media capacity within the Afghan Government and a tendency to respond to inaccurate reporting with knee jerk overreaction – the relationship seems doomed to spiral downwards, unless

Every morning last week I stumbled through the public foyer in the United Nations Headquarters on my way to work (which was speaking to spokespeople – a tall order).  It wasn’t until Friday that I stopped to take a look at the exhibition that I had largely rushed by, running a slalom course through visiting tourists all week.