“The Missing Link” is out and I am somewhat relieved – it was such a long process.
I started working on this publication more than a year and a half ago. The field research took me to Timor-Leste and Liberia, while a colleague went to Burundi. My goal was to demonstrate the relevance of public sphere dynamics to governance and political stability, particularly in countries emerging out of violent conflict, and to offer practitioners a tool-kit that would help assess and address public sphere capacities and challenges. The unrest that broke out in Timor in spring 2006 had been the trigger to this thinking. I had lived in this country during the transitional period and sensed what had gone wrong: the international community, in its desire to quickly build governance institutions, had forgotten to ensure that these were connected with the people. To the Timorese leadership, used to the hierarchical “closed” communication environment of a military resistance movement, the lack of national dialogue and a culture of “closed” institutions seemed fine. The violence of 2006 proved that they were not; the government and people of Timor paid a high price for this oversight.
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The presidential election campaign in the United States is suffocating. You can't escape it anywhere, even when on vacation outside the US. Everyone is absorbed in it, I find. They want to talk about it; they want to watch 
During a working group session as part of the 
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I've been with 
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A few days ago, The New York Times published 
As a first-time blogger on this site, I will focus on bringing experiences and reflections on how communication plays a key role in initiatives related to governance, a role even more fundamental than that played in other kinds of development programs. Before digging more into this, I would like to illustrate and hopefully clarify one term that, due to its broad and multifaceted connotation, is used too frequently in an ambiguous manner: communication. Most dictionaries and basic textbooks define communication basically as the act of sending messages or, more specifically as a sender transmitting messages through channels to one or more receivers.
A few years ago in London, I was part of a circle that included quite a few Pakistani Brits, all top professionals. And I became aware of efforts by some of the great powers to broker a deal between the late 
"Unless mass views have some place in the shaping of policy, all the talk about democracy is nonsense" - 
Watch interviews with experts on issues pertaining to governance reform under real-world conditions, and a BBC World World Debate on good governance and poverty. 
