 The most significant finding of this research for me is that if you give scholars in places like Myanmar and Ethiopia a chance to do their own research, they can produce a standing result because talent is equally disputed around the world, so why wouldn't they? The outside world is closing in and Kalashnikovs cannot really help us, but I've found a new weapon and I want to give my people a voice. I've found the camera more powerful than Kalashnikov. I trained as a social anthropologist in the late 1980s and then I worked in development and then jumped to studying Parliament. I realised that people having a really close look behind the scenes is actually really good for Parliament. That kind of scrutiny is very good for democracy. For the last five years I've been running international research coalitions at SOAS in the Anthropology Department. I became really conscious of how important scrutiny of political institutions and political processes is. One of the really significant projects is run by an incredible team who we met at a conference. Oli Salari, Oli Bui and Tesfahun Hailu became friends and put in an application for a proposal based on their research about the mercy in Ethiopia. The mercy are an extremely marginalised group of people who are subjected to land grabs and harassment and this coalition between an anthropologist and theatre studies lecturer and a pastoralist filmmaker and now playwright is the most innovative example of research I've ever encountered. All too often you get artists and filmmakers kind of asked to disseminate findings right at the end of the project but the beauty of this one is that they're working in collaboration from the very start of the application throughout the process of the research. We began to realise that our grantees were beginning to have significant impact so we designed a new programme which was about reducing inequalities in public engagement and we collected together the artists and the scholars who had been working in our programme for a huge arts festival. It was the first of its kind in Myanmar and what was politically significant was that they raised the issue of the rights of ethnic minorities in Myanmar including the Rohingya which is an extremely sensitive topic in the country. One of the programmes that we funded is run by Mercy Mulugeta and it's called Bridge and it's incredibly timely. It's a very innovative programme about creating a web-based platform for politicians and citizens to discuss and they do it entirely online. So the significance of this platform is that it's moderated in a way to really encourage people to focus on content but to do so in a way that allows the conversation to move forward and doesn't get stuck just in insults. So us really supports us in our ambition to give opportunities to scholars in Africa, Asia and Latin America to do their own research. They're not used to doing this so it's well worth giving advice and support but also what's very interesting about giving national researchers an opportunity to study their own political systems is that they have a really deep understanding of the local issues. So they don't make assumptions that democracy means the same thing that it means to us for example in the UK. They come up with vernacular ideas about how democracy needs to develop in their specific place.