The question, "When did you last listen to a poor person properly and try to understand what's going on inside their own experience?" enables you to connect.

People think there's a single solution to complex problems, and the solution is often making an enemy of a group of people - pulling back and rejecting the other.

If you were disabled in Russia, you had to re-register every year, and it took up to six months to re-register, so people who lost limbs in Afghanistan had to prove that their leg hadn't grown back.

Activists can get very preachy about things. It's more about understanding people's own experiences and tapping into them.

Somewhere like Russia or China, decision-makers have far fewer constraints on acting than in more open systems.

There are always pressures on decision-makers other than just what is right or what is wrong.

There's a diversion between economic reality - integration, global village, everybody depending on everybody else - and cultural reality, which is people feeling invaded, undermined, threatened, wanting to have "stand-your-ground" legislation all over the place. It's alarming because at the moment, the fear is outweighing the benefits, and that's partially because the benefits have been so unequally distributed that lots of people don't feel better off. They feel threatened, angry and despairing.