Patrick Sweeney – Intern at Institute for Strategic Dialogue and intern at International Alert.
Last years Placement Scheme participant Patrick Sweeney used our blog to reflect on the placements he undertook last summer. Here is one of his blog posts summarising his positive experience of the scheme.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/patrick-sweeney-isd-ia-intern-fass-placement-scheme?trk=mp-reader-card
I was anxious when I heard that I would be moving to London this summer. I had only heard about ‘Harry Potter cupboard’-style accommodation, rip-off rents, £5 pints and the frantic 24/7 pace that sucks life out of everyone. It turns out that by and large; I’d actually been hearing these things from people who had made the decision to move away from London, rather than the locals themselves. I managed to find a leafy Islington-based student apartment on Airbnb for £700 per month. My housemates are friendly (and clean) and FASS have been extremely helpful in bringing my wage forward to help cover living costs and provide travel expenses for my Zone 1-2 Oyster Card. I live near a Lidl, so thankfully I’m not paying any more on an average day than I would expect to in Lancaster. It’s alsoimpossible to get bored in London, even on a limited budget—there are plenty of free film screenings and live music venues across the city which I go to after to work.
I decided that I wanted to intern at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) after working closely with this organisation at the Richardson Institute on a programme that studied the efficacy of online counter narratives of violent extremism. ISD describes itself as a ‘think-and-do-tank’, both producing extremism research and connecting leaders in government, media and the private sector to challenge long-range threats to international and communal peace. As a recent History and Politics graduate, working at ISD seemed like an excellent opportunity to carry on applying concepts I learned about as an undergraduate.
I spent my first week at ISD learning about the office culture, internal terminology, the structure of the organisation and the type of projects that ISD do. All of this took some time to get used to but my supervisor Moli Dow (herself a Lancaster graduate) has helped me find my feet, negotiate the terms of my contract and has always been available to answer any questions. Where previous interns have been consigned to working on a single initiative because of the nature of their placement, I’ve been given a great amount of freedom to choose which projects to get involved with.
I decided to work on the Strong Cities Network (SCN) three days per week, where I have been researching anti-extremism policies in Morocco and seeing where ISD – in conjunction with the Danish government can help establish structures that help coordinate these efforts. Reading through leading publications, I found that many Middle-East and North Africa researchers have already suggested that the Moroccan government implement some variation on the Danish Model! I will be leading a group call with one such academic next week, after I brief a key SCN associate I am working with on my research into the political climate and governing structure of Morocco.
For the remaining three weeks, I will be working on the Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI) a campaign funded by Facebook and founded as a partnership between ISD, the International Centre of the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), and the Amadeu Antonio Foundation. So far I’ve also been taught how to use some industry-specific software such as the social-listening toolCrimson Hexagon which I have used to analyse the online response of the UK Far-Right groups to recent events. Yet over the coming month my work will involve researching possible ways that this project can expand and helping to develop online models to groups trying to counter extremist discourse online. Iam excited to get involved with this project as it naturally continues from the report I produced for the Richardson Institute.
I expect my time at ISD to be a challenging yet edifying experience. I have been extremely privileged to be put in this position, which is already providing insight into the ways in which the processes, structures and policies I have studied at university function in the real world. Pp