Hello, I’m Robin.

I am a British writer, teacher and peace maker.

My travels across the globe (to Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, America, Spain and Guatemala) have made me the storyteller and author I am today.

I was a child of the United Nations. My dad was a doctor in Africa, so part of my childhood was spent there. I then raised my own kids in West Africa.

After 40 years of development and peace work, as well as teaching about Africa and Asia, I’ve settled into a life of writing in the French cottage my wife and I have owned since 1977, where we enjoy a well-filled feeder to attract wild birds and a garden of flowers to nourish the bees.

For years, I wrote a weekly column in several African newspapers and in the international Guardian Weekly (using the pen name Robert Lacville to protect my professional UN and government work). In 1997 while living in Geneva, I was elected to the Swiss Romande section of International PEN, the international writer and human rights organization. I am now a member of the Malian section of PEN.

I have now written more than twenty books, as well as hundreds of articles in English and French. As a matter of principle, I try to co-author my books and articles with African collaborators or with women partners in order to get their Southern Hemisphere voices heard in a world dominated by the North and by white men. You can see their names in my bibliography.

I enthusiastically support those who are struggling with their Master’s theses and am happy to help them get published.

Explore my books

Background & Education

Dr Robin-Edward Poulton (known in the family as ‘RE’) was born in 1946, immediately after the Second World War. His father’s family was from Oxford where RE was born and baptised, the product of two Scottish grandparents and two English grandparents.

Great grandfather Sir Edward Bagnall Poulton was Hope Professor of Zoology and Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford for 40 years. His son Edward Palmer Poulton became Chief Physician of Guy’s Hospital; grandson Edward Maclean Poulton (RE’s father) trained at Guy’s and graduated D.M. from Oxford. RE followed his father, grandfather and great-uncle Ronald to Balliol College for an MSc in agricultural and development economics after undergraduate studies (MA Hons 1969) at St Andrews University, Scotland in economics and history.

Robin’s father, Dr E.M. Poulton, joined the World Health Organisation as an expert in public health and Maternal & Child Health (MCH), his career taking him to positions in Egypt, Denmark, Nigeria, Congo, Uganda and Sierra Leone. Robin and his four siblings were therefore raised partly in UK and partly in Africa. RE always intended to follow in his father’s African footsteps.

He spent some months at Fourah Bay college in 1968, pre-preparing Finals, as well as participating in the Sierra Leone UN Student Association (which included – being in West Africa - a lot of dancing).

Before going St Andrews, RE spent 9 months in Tübingen, Germany where he worked at the Tropenheim (sorting and packing pharmaceuticals for mission hospitals in India) and attended the Karl-Eberhardts Universität, becoming fluent in German.

Doctoral Research

Robin and his wife Michelle married in Afghanistan, and completed doctoral degrees in Paris at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales 1979, producing a unique study of Afghan village life in two parallel theses. Michelle’s thesis on Afghan women’s lives was called La Vie Derrière les Murs. Robin’s was called La Vie Economique et Sociale.

They gained the highest grade of Mention Très Bien Avec Félicitations du Jury. Their Directeur de Thèse was Henri Desroche, president of the Collège Coopératif de Paris and founder of the Université Coopérative Internationale.

Their studies in what would later be called ‘development anthropology’ were directed by anthropologist Paul-Henri Stahl of the Collège de France, and economic sociologist Maxime Haubert of l'Institut d'Etude du Développement Economique et Social (IEDES), l’Université de Paris I - Sorbonne.

Click on the photos to read the story behind them.

Ségou: VFoM visiting the Soroblé mud cloth studio

I always wear African dress when working in Mali

Richmond VA sister city is Ségou. Here is the town hall

A Peace of Timbuktu with UNSG Kofi Annan

Some of my African family in Bamako

Nianankoulou is where Sunjata won back his kingdom

The first annual Richmond Lecture in Ségou, Febr 2019

Ségou’s koré dancers greet us at City Hall

Clean water is one secret to better health and nutrition

Student Activities

In Scotland and in Oxford, Poulton was active in Oxfam, Anti-Apartheid Movement, Anti-Vietnam War, Amnesty International, International Planned Parenthood Federation, support for World Refugees and refugee students, Unicef, and particularly the United Nations Student Association (UNSA) of which he was president in St Andrews, in Scotland and later Chairman of the Annual conference and Senior Vice-President in UK under the presidency of Michael Tyler (Cambridge). He was a member of the United Nations Association (UNA) Policy Committee when the organisation was led by David Ennis, Leslie Kirkley and Humphrey Berkeley. RE was a member of the ANC (African National Congress) and SWAPO (South West African People’s Organisation), a disciple of Nelson Mandela. Mentors included Peter Katjavivi of SWAPO, Ruth First, Basil Davidson and the founder of the Iona Community in Scotland, Lord George Macleod.

SANROC, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee led by Dennis Brutus in London, launched an international sports boycott of racist South Africa, starting with the 1970 cricket series. The 1969-70 Springbok Rugby Football tour began with a match against Oxford University. Poulton who was headed to Oxford, was charged with the launch of a campaign spearheaded by Peter Hain (later Baron Hain) recently exiled from Southern Africa. On Day 1 in Balliol College Robin met Rhodes Scholar David V. Williams, a life-long friend who would one day lead a New Zealand campaign against apartheid sport. On Day 2 he met the Secretary of Oxford UNSA, Michelle Elcoat, whom he later married. Michelle contacted the Oxford associations, and at the end of that week Poulton chaired a meeting in the Balliol common room, addressed by Hugh Geach from Reading University, Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and the Stop the Seventy Tour Committee (STST). The campaign was launched. Every Springbok rugby match drew ten thousand protesters, and the 1970 South African cricket tour never took place.

At an Anti-Apartheid Movement Trafalgar Square meeting addressed by Rev Trevor Huddleston and John Garnett (among others), a giant MANDALA decorated the balcony of the National Gallery. Each letter was a banner held by one student. ‘M’ was held by Robin Poulton, and ‘A’ was held by Michelle Elcoat: the beginning of a 50-year relationship that may yet celebrate a golden wedding.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the British Establishment and the Conservative Party treated Nelson Mandela as a “terrorist” for demanding One man One Vote. In the 1990s the very same people were falling over one another to shake the hand of Nelson Mandela, the world’s greatest Statesman and Nobel Peace Laureate.

When he died, the British Establishment discovered that the one-time terrorist deserved to be remembered with a statue in Parliament Square.

And people ask me why I often disbelieve what Western governments tell me! I have lived my life hearing their official lies and excuses.

When I was leading the UN Student Association, a distinguished British diplomat asked me why I did not apply to work in the Foreign Office. I replied: “I do not wish to spend my life promoting ideas with which I profoundly disagree and defending actions that are profoundly immoral.” Instead of the Foreign Office, I applied to work as a United Nations volunteer in Afghanistan.

Career

1970
After his post-graduate studies in Oxford, Poulton was recruited by UNA as a volunteer to work with the United Nations Development Programme in Afghanistan.

1972
Two years later, now married, R & M Poulton were hired as a couple to work in a Unicef research-action program designing rural programs for Unicef to reach children most at need. They spent a year in a snow-bound village in the Hindu Kush Koh-i-Baba mountains of Balkh Province, in Northern Afghanistan. Their project was frozen in July 1973 by a Soviet-inspired coup d’état removing the King. Their field work would inspire two doctoral theses and – 20 years later – Unicef programs in Afghanistan.

1973
Back in Europe, Poulton and his agricultural economics degree were hired by Beecham Pharmaceuticals. He moved to Brittany in agri-business and veterinary medicine, as Beecham marketing manager. This allowed him and his wife to prepare their doctoral theses at the EHESS in Paris (completed in 1979).

1980
Recruited by the non-governmental consortium ACORD to direct drought-relief in the Sahel, Poulton ran programs in Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu, in northern Mali. While learning management, African project management had been the career strategy.

1984
Recruited by ActionAidThe Gambia, Robin was equipped by work in Mali + Sierra Leone to function in Banjul. He inherited an unauthorized $2 million overdraft and a team without structure or budgets. He set out a training program and financial strategy that turned the programme around. AATG became the country’s biggest private sector employer and a continent-wide reference. Poulton put an end to several scams inside AATG (fuel-theft, protection rackets and a revolutionary political movement), forcing him to fire a few people. Marabouts were hired to kill him. Their magic failed.

1988
Michelle was appointed Director of Save the Children in Mali. For the next 8 years, Robin Poulton developed civil society and NGOs in Mali and West Africa: as an unpaid trainer for the CCA-ONG (NGO coordinating committee), and later as project manager of a $50 million United States program for private voluntary organizations (PVO) partnering with Malian civil society organizations (CSO). The PVO Co-Financing Project received the best USAID evaluation in West African history.

The 1990-92 popular revolution, with Mali’s transition to democracy, led Poulton into peace-building as he oversaw projects in Timbuktu, Kidal, Menaka and Gao. Through shared objectives, he joined UNDP peacemakers in Bamako: Tore Rose, Ivor Fung, Marie Kagaju and Ibrahim ag Youssouf were preparing the Peace of Timbuktu (the name of our future book) and Africa’s first-ever Flame of Peace (on March 27th 1996).

1995
Geneva was a wonderful place to live. Michelle was now European Director of Child Fund International (CFI then called Christian Children’s Fund) and leading the Unicef NGO Committee. Sven Loodegaard, Director of UNIDIR - UN Institute for Disarmament Research – offered Robin a desk and a computer at the Palais des Nations, without salary but with a view of Mont Blanc. With income from paid consultancies (Swiss, UN, EU), UNIDIR provided the perfect platform for research, books and for transforming UNIDIR into the world’s leading micro-disarmament research institute. UNIDIR led West African civil society to support the UN, UNDP and Mali’s President Alpha Oumar Konaré : the West African Moratorium on Small Arms was signed by all ECOWAS presidents (including Charles Taylor), contributing to peace in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and later becoming a legally-binding ECOWAS Convention limiting the circulation of illegal weapons.

1999
Michelle became CFI Vice-President for International Programs in Richmond, Viginia. A non-resident Senior Fellow of UNDIR, Robin joined UNDIR Board Member General Henny van der Graaf in an EU security sector reform project in Cambodia. Robin’s job was to persuade Khmer Rouge villagers to believe in peace and to give up their firearms – people who for 30 years had known nothing but war and genocide. The EU project’s success led Poulton to create EPES Mandala Consulting, a mechanism for promoting peace and influencing international policy by applying Lessons Learned from the field. Alas! EEAS officials have little interest in learning lessons.

2002
After the 9/11 attacks, Dr Poulton was invited by University of Richmond, Shepherd Center, Virginia Commonwealth University and the European Peace University (2002-2008 for graduates at M.A. level) to teach peace and terrorism studies. VCU also persuaded him to teach an undergraduate course on the Middle East called The Modern Arab World - thereby keeping clear of Israel and of American politics.

2005
The Virginia Department of Education in 2003 created a Standard of Learning course on the medieval Empire of Mali. With 25 years of working in the area and several books on Mali, Dr Poulton created an education program called Teaching Timbuktu: a peace-based response to American aggression towards Muslims and Afghanistan after 9/11. He decided that teaching 3rd Grade students and teachers would bring added value, after organizing several Virginian museum exhibitions on Malian culture.

In November 2005 Mali’s Ambassador Abdoulaye Diop and Prime Minister Ousmane Issoufi Maiga came to Richmond to meet children learning about Mali. At the end of a speech in VCU, the PM invited Richmond to become the Sister City of Ségou, second city of Mali. Dr Poulton founded Virginia Friends of Mali as a 501.c.3 non-profit, to support the Sister City program and teaching about Mali.

The book Sister Cities, written by Ana Edwards and Robin Poulton, traces fifteen years of citizen diplomacy with Ségou and Mali – the fruits of Teaching Timbuktu.

Click on the photos to read the story behind them.

Mali’s president Dr Alpha Oumar Konaré (center) with General Michel Sallé

All-female UN security guard of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (Liberia)

Meeting with village chiefs in south-eastern Nigeria

REP and U.N. disarmament colleague Chimène Mandakovic in Kunduz, N. Afghanistan

Personal Life

Robin Poulton is a Life Member of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, a life-long dancer and singer, and a member of various African and Asian friendship associations. In 1972 he married Michelle Jeanne Elcoat in the British Embassy in Afghanistan. Michelle has both French and British nationalities, as do their two biological children : Edward Elcoat Poulton (a lawyer specialized in international arbitration) and Catherine Leïla Poulton (a specialist in women and child protection, who works for UNICEF in New York). Robin and Michelle have three grandchildren.