Powercube: understanding power for social change

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Notes

1. This perspective is, however, present in some of the supporting documents. Making change happen, for example, proclaims ‘knowledge + noise = policy and political change’. Well, maybe. Sometimes. Not in opposing the Iraq war in 2003 and not in Burma in 2007. Sometimes noise is not enough.

2. Given that ‘civil society’ returned to academic popularity in the 1980s in the context of Soviet bloc dissidence and independent activism under Latin American dictatorships, the absence of violence and repression is perhaps particularly strange here.

3. At this point, an attentive reader of Powercube might suspect the presence of what it describes as hidden power relations – in this case, perhaps, the relationship between western governments’ aid programmes, international NGOs and well-resourced academic institutions (IDS claims a staff of 180, and 150 students).