Hugh Pope

One day, a Turkish colonel bellowed at me across a hushed meeting table around which sat 43 representatives from 19 Turkish government departments: “Mr. Pope!” he roared. “Your report talks about peace. But they are burning my flag! If terrorists burned your flag, what would you do?”

It’s the beginning of one of the stories I told this week in a lecture about “Writing for Policymakers”, given to final-year students of Security Studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. It’s the third year they ask me to their campus in The Hague to talk about my experiences reporting on and trying to mitigate armed conflict. This time there was a special challenge, since among the audience was my youngest daughter Scarlett and her fellow last-year friends. As ever, I was struck by how much more aware and diverse students are today than at least I was back then (whenever that was).

I told them that writing for decision-makers is the art of getting a message across to people who have little time to read – and who sometimes don’t even want to listen. So planning is needed. I structured the talk along the four elements I argued are essential: how to focus on realistic goals; choose the right content; know your audience; and think through which tools to use.

The same bill of fare applies to many forms of commentary on the topic that I normally address, armed conflict. It doesn’t matter whether it’s advocating a specific policy or policies, which I used to do for the International Crisis Group, or the more subtle art of presenting data and analysis that could inform policy, which is the mission of my present job at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).

Among the things I try to stress:

• Timing – not just catching the news wave, but realizing that, in a crisis, most ministry advisers have wrapped up their position papers by early in the morning
• Keeping it short, clear and simple – often only possible after you’ve made yourself a master of the subject in a long-form report
• Having patience – sometimes for years
• Practicing your lines – and honing and repeating them until your audience has learned them too
• Personal outreach – few people change their minds through reading something by someone they haven’t met
• Talk to everyone in the room – and everyone they listen to as well, be it TV, radio, podcasts or just their friends

Along the way I wove in stories about situations where things worked well and not so well for me. Like the way I was completely non-plussed about the Turkish officer’s question about flag burnings. In my home country, after all, people wear the national flag on their underwear.

“Colonel!” I riposted, in a voice as close to his roar as I dared. “You’re right! It is a terrible thing to burn a country’s flag. But this is a trap to make you act as angry as you feel inside! I urge you to see this as a provocation, to rise above it and not be deflected from the wisest course of action.”

This may have had little if any long-term impact on making Turkey, now Türkiye, a country in which everyone – Turks, Kurds and many less numerous ethnicities – can live happily under one flag. Terrible fighting resumed three years later. But that day, as our high-powered meeting broke up for tea and cakes, for once I had the feeling that the message had landed.