Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Author: Hugh Pope
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When the news searchlight lit upon Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney last month as the saviour of democracies from US President Donald Trump and right-wing authoritarianism around the world, did it really show us a new path forward? Or did the Canadian ex-central banker’s well-turned speech at Davos just offer a sleeker retread of the…
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First sparks can be hard to fan into bright lights. Especially when they’re needed to banish dark demons lurking in the violent history of Iraqi Kurdistan’s six million people. Five years ago, a few Iraqi Kurdish health professionals and friends of Iraqi Kurdistan, mostly in Britain, had an idea. They wanted to introduce the first…
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Reflections of a deliberative democrat on debating the Ottoman Empire in the Oxford Union, 20 November 2025
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People feel hopeless at the state of our elected governments. But here’s news from the frontline of deliberative democracy activists who are finding another way to run our countries better.
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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…
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How making the ascent of Mount Olympos on the southern Turkish coast redoubled my appreciation of the raw beauty of a region where my wife and I built a house twenty years ago.
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A farewell bow to my 43 years of reporting notebooks.
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The US bombing of Iranian targets today got me thinking about how US actions in the Middle East have often propelled it into places that it had no apparent inkling about beforehand. I studied Persian at university, lived for year as a journalist in Iran and made several trips to the country during three decades…
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An account of what happened after the 56 randomly selected members Norway’s Framtidspanelet, or Future Assembly, were asked to come up with ideas for spending the country’s oil fortune.
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A top UK podcast champions sortition as democracy’s way forward
Hugh Pope 