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Michael Keizer
Melbourne, Australia
I have been an aid logistician since 2001, when I swapped my comfortable life in the corporate sector for a less comfortable but more rewarding career in aid work. Since then, I have worked as a field logistician, logistics coordinator, logistics consultant, and country manager. I have been involved in planning, implementation, and management of logistics systems as small as a single health structure, and as big as the health system of an entire country (pop. 75 million). And surprisingly, I still love what I am doing.
Recent Activity
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Michael commented on the article |Woops, sorry for that! The dangers of speed reading... My apologies.
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Michael commented on the article |
You leave out a type of aid that lately gets a lot of attention but falls a bit outside this spectrum: cash on delivery assistance or CODA. In CODA, aid is given afterwards to the receiving government if certain benchmarks are reached. How these benchmarks are attained is up to the receiving partner.
Advantages and disadvantages will be clear.
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Michael commented on the article |Thanks for the kind words!
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Michael commented on the article |
The logistics of daily life is often overlooked as an important factor of global health. This is nowhere more apparent than when it comes to getting health care and patients together. I have written a more extended post about this issue on my blog in April 2009.
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Michael commented on the article |It strikes me as slightly cynical to post this under the heading 'peacebuilding' -- or even more generally on a blog dedicated to 'War and Peace'. And this from an unabashed and wholehearted supporter of anybody's right to life and death.
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Michael commented on the article |Which, of course, begs the question of who would decide when 'a state is no longer acting in the best interest of its people'; e.g., why intervening in Sudan and not in North Korea, or China, or Israel/Palestine, or Saudi? You will also get into all kinds of thorny questions like, 'what is a state?', 'who are its people?', 'who can represent those people and articulate their best interests?', etcetera.
Again, not saying that it shouldn't happen nor that it can't happen, just that the issue is the slightest bit more complicated than this.
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Michael commented on the article |
Of course, in the cases of Kyoto, the ICC, and the WTO, the states involved voluntarily gave up part of their sovereignty, but you propose that Sudan should loose (part of) its sovereignty involuntarily. That is not impossible and not even unheard of (think of the rules customary international law, which bind countries whether they agree or not), but the examples you give are fairly irrelevant.
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Michael commented on the article |"As a result, come this August, a new piece of international law will go into effect making the use of cluster bombs illegal in the eyes of the global community."
I fear that this is a somewhat overly rosy view. As with all treaties, its rules are only binding for the treaty parties (unless they are simultaneously part of customary international law -- which in this instance does not seem to be the case), which sadly does not include the main users of cluster munitions. With only thirty signatories, the eyes of the global community seem to be looking elsewhere.
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Michael commented on the article |Over 2 million children under five years of age die each year from pneumonia. Around 1.8 million people die each year from tuberculosis alone. An estimated 1 million people annually die from malaria.
What was the last war that caused more than 2 million deaths per year?
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Michael commented on the article |I am looking forward to the article. In the mean time, I think it is important to note that electoral vetting was not asked for in the letter, but that they only asked for strengthening of the vetting for civil servants.
The two processes are separate and distinct, for good reasons: when you start vetting prospective parliament candidates, you are directly influencing the democratic process, which asks for very strong safeguards to prevent it being used to e.g. exclude candidates the government just doesn't like -- all the more in a country where almost everybody has some sort of tie with armed groups (whether they want to or not) and the legality or illegality of those groups is not subject to strong due process.
Procedurally or even conceptually conflating the two processes into one does not seem such a good idea to me.
