Hugh Pope

It makes a welcome change to step aside and look back. Such a chance arose last week when I joined a few ex-colleagues for dinner with our old boss Gareth Evans, the long-serving former Australian foreign minister. Evans took over a small outfit called The International Crisis Group in 2000 and over the next decade turned it into a powerhouse of global conflict analysis. In various ways – in my case, a lucky two-year overlap at the end – we had been part of that adventure. 

What struck me most was our debate over Gareth’s formula for policy impact and why it worked so well. At its best, we agreed, it worked like this: bestow trust and responsibility on far-flung country directors; give them time to write long, ground-breaking reports on how to avoid or end conflict; put their reports through an editing regime to bring out the best in what they were trying to say; mobilise resources for weeks-long advocacy tours; and harness the work to board members who accessed the top level of governments around the world.

With such support, I loved the fifteen years I spent at Crisis Group after Gareth, Nicholas Whyte and others not at our dinner took me on as the director of the Turkey & Cyprus Project. There was also the joy of working for a non-partisan organisation. For sure, I had been given resources and rigour at my previous employer, The Wall Street Journal. But I had crashed out. I felt exhausted by reporting the folly of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq for a newspaper whose opinion pages so wantonly fanned the flames of war.

Gareth reminded us of the terrible fight he had had with Crisis Group’s US board members who blocked the organisation’s attempts to oppose the Iraq invasion. He remained proud that Crisis Group managed to publish at least some of the basic facts about what lay ahead. But it was too little, too late to blunt the George W. Bush administration’s war-mongering intent.

There were high points, too. Gareth now laughed about the day in 2006 when rumours swirled that Crisis Group was in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize. Television teams were even ready down in the lobby. But the award went to Muhammad Yunus for his micro-finance bank in Bangladesh. Suddenly the television crew wanted to interview not Gareth, but one of the humblest members of our IT staff who happened to hail from Yunus’s homeland.

Still, being a Nobel runner-up was quite an achievement. Gareth, now 81, says he has written all the books he wants to write (more than ten of them) and has long cut back his once legendary sixteen-hour-plus workdays. But he keeps his fiery style. His Australian expletives remain richly undeleted, as does his swashbuckling chorus line of “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” 

I remembered how those of a gentler disposition were physically scared to offer up work for his appraisal, which could indeed be terrifyingly scathing. He was unrepentant about the demands of his style, arguing that rigour was vital in his quest to win respect for his organisation in chanceries around the world as “professional, professional, professional.” Another key to any success, he believed, was the high performance he got from “high maintenance” staff that others found demanding or difficult to manage. 

Building up Crisis Group, he said, was one of his proudest achievements, a close second to his decade “inside the tent” as Australian foreign minister. He reminisced about creating the organisation’s stylebook with, under the letter G, the “Gareth Rule”: namely, that he could override any of the other rules. He still almost always rejects any editing of his own outputs, he said. “I spent half my life editing other people, why should I let anyone touch my own writing?”. 

We raked over the coals of why today’s non-profits are losing their fire. They now struggle to find stable funding, to choose good boards, to manage themselves openly, to maintain first-hand experience of countries in conflict and to make work on thematic topics genuinely unique. One of our former colleagues, Neil Campbell, noted that in the corridors of European power in Brussels, the word “advocacy” itself has become a taboo. Another ex-Crisis Grouper with us, Andebrhan Giorgis, lamented the apparently unstoppable rise of authoritarian governments round the world.

In short, many rules have changed. The all-male profile of our dinner speaks for itself (even if accidental). Few non-profits likely implement one of his old impact-seeking diktats, namely that even in their own offices, staff should act the part of suited-up diplomats. And the old ruler himself reckoned that, compared with his heyday of the post-Cold War, Western-led order, the era has passed when then youthful, plucky non-profits like Crisis Group could achieve such an extraordinary and outsize role.

Still, Gareth said, “it was a magical time.”