Writer of books on Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Formerly Director of Communications & Outreach and Turkey/Cyprus Project Director for International Crisis Group. Ex-Turkey & Middle East staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.
The Keys to Democracy may not have made it to any New York Times lists (yet). But for Imprint Academic, the UK publishing house that put it out two years ago today, the book has pride of place on its home page among the four listed as “best sellers.”
Better still, publisher Keith Sutherland told me this week, Imprint Academic will put out a paperback version in September 2025.
I still find it hard to believe the book’s good fortune. It was written more than three decades ago. We in the family long thought the manuscript was lost. Then, after my father’s death in 2019, my mother found the typescript in his library.
My brother Quentin and I edited the text, and we are thrilled at the continuing endorsements, reviews and interest in hearing more.
Just the other day, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, French author of insightful books like the The Death of Democracy – as well as being a University of Columbia professor, former head of UN Peacekeeping Forces and my old boss at International Crisis Group – wrote in spontaneously after ordering my late father’s book. He said that while he didn’t agree with everything, TheKeys to Democracy“truly convinced me that sortition is a way to restore the dignity of each and every human being, and is part of the answer to the ills of our societies.”
I hope such reactions mean that more and more people in the world – perhaps triggered by recent advances of authoritarian government in many countries – agree that we need to evolve a better new way forward than electing yet more politicians. This just perpetuates the system that got us into this mess.
In his book, my father proposes to replace elections with a new system of randomly selected “panels” of ordinary citizens. These panels are much the same as what has become the fast-expanding idea of citizens’ assemblies, in which a randomly selected group of ordinary people from a community or country are mandated to solve a tough policy problem. They hear from experts, deliberate among themselves and, after ranking all ideas by votes among themselves, propose whatever commands a supermajority. Choosing by lot is also known as sortition. Some call the vision of this eventually becoming the basis of all government “lottocracy.”
The Keys to Democracy is not a typical political science book, however. My father may have been an academic classicist by training, but he was a successful writer too and wanted the book to be a good read and to draw on all his learning. He mixes in lessons from ancient Greece and the subsequent history of government, the limitations of the renaissance, the efficacy of the Anglo-Saxon jury system, the mathematical breakthroughs of sampling and opinion polling, and a defence of the philosophical and scientific beauties of randomness.
Over the book’s second year, my favourite shoutouts include:
The best book I’ve read all year! – Mette Spencer, sociologist and peace activist
I am loving this posthumously published gem of a book . . . strongly recommended. – Erica Benner, political philosopher
Pope is both a utopian and a realist. This masterful balancing act between the idea and its practical incarnations is a very strong point of his concept and sets it apart from other similar books. – Joanna Podgórska-Rykała, political scientist
I want to emphasize again how much I enjoyed reading this book. Pope is an interesting mind, and even the reader that still scoffs at the idea that our political systems should be more random will find things to enjoy in the boldness and ingenuity of his arguments and the breadth of his interests. – James Kierstead, classicist and think-tanker
You can find links to all the news and reviews about The Keys to Democracyhere. Keep scrolling down to find the most recent ones! And a big thank you to everyone who has helped this book on its way up from a long-lost typescript on a bottom library shelf.
Set between Istanbul and London, dancing over more than a century, hovering between fact and fiction, Andrew Finkel’s debut novel is connoisseurs’ delight. Jewels glimmer, capes swirl and mother-of-pearl inlay glistens from every page of The Adventure of the Second Wife: the Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Sultan. A deep and easy familiarity with life in Ottoman Turkey is interleaved with Sherlock Holmes in shape-shifting exploits. The complexity of the overall story is a minor masterpiece in itself.
In the end. there is a solution to the mystery at the heart of the book. Or is there? Each time I try to fit the book’s narrative together, it seems to come out slightly differently. It’s like a truth about the sprawling metropolis of Istanbul that Finkel shares early on in the story:
I would say that to understand this story you also have to understand Istanbul, but I am not convinced such a thing is possible. I do not pretend the city is Eastern and inscrutable. In many ways it is friendly and familiar. But it is devious, like the pub raconteur who, while you work out if he is spinning a tale, has you buy him another round. On each visit I made, I felt I had come to a different place. It was like watching a time-lapse kaleidoscope of urban sprawl. Istanbul is a city where things change with a whir, and where standing still feels like falling through air.
When I finished The Adventure of the Second Wife, I went through some passages again so I could appreciate the text with new knowledge. I wasn’t sure that I’d understood the role of all the characters, even if all the loose ends seemed tied up. A tricky trompe-l’oeil is that the story feels so authentic: one could read it thinking that it was all historical fact. But I felt a certain bewilderment since – when I thought it through – some twists in the plot simply could not be real. It’s actually impossible to see the joints between fact and fiction, like the immaculate marquetry Finkel has us believe that the last great Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II conjured up for his private office.
Forced into the harem
Indeed, history books say that Abdulhamid was a skilled carpenter – but was he that good? I’m almost ready to believe it, because Finkel’s account of Abdulhamid’s inner brooding, off-the-cuff kindnesses and occasional cunning cruelties are so compellingly imagined. He describes a man happiest with his Belgian mistress as a young prince, but who finds himself as sultan “forced to to reject bourgeois monogamy for an oriental harem.” Abdulhamid is always a target of assassination and obsessed with his network of spies. But he is taken aback when his private voicing of approval to one woman for her particular “amatory skill” spreads to all the palace women, who assume he wants the same. This surprise came even though he “knew full well that his nocturnal wanderings had to be recorded for dynastic purposes.”
Sultan Abdulhamid II is only the most memorable of the many characters who lingered in my mind after I closed the book. I can’t remember when I last read an original story about Sherlock Holmes, the great 19th century fictional detective, and the original Dr Watson, his loyal sidekick and chronicler. So it was a surprise to get to know a key collective character that is a mainspring of the novel’s action: a global network of fans of the two sleuths, constantly hungry for new insights into their heros, and their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Finkel also gives us a modern Dr. Watson who leads us through much of the narrative, whose flaws, erudition and ancestry eventually make him fully part of it. And of course there is a train of Ottoman princesses who blend into one another at the heart of the story, damaged, melodramatic, yet each putting their own stamp on a role they had not sought.
Sifting the evidence
The format of the novel is refreshing, too. The story unfolds through the eyes of multiple characters giving testimony, writing short stories, translating articles and voicing parts of the narrative. They are interleaved with beguiling photographs of remnants of Ottoman Istanbul, illustrations from 1890s London magazines and picture postcards of the era, which all serve to confuse and confirm the factual and quasi-factual foundations of the novel. The hardback is lovingly designed and produced by publishers Cornucopia/Even Keel, adding to the pleasure of the read.
Indeed, the multifaceted timeline and people with more than one name make it hard at times to remember all the characters, as when you open a new puzzle and are overwhelmed by a sea of look-alike pieces. Concentration and a readiness to sift evidence – of course – can be needed to understand completely who’s who on first encounters. But as with looking into the movement of a grand watch, one can pause, work out where the action is going and pick up momentum again, while still admiring the clever complication.
Another pleasure that kept me moving forward is that Finkel’s writing is splendid, especially the take-no-prisoners wit of the dialogue. Innumerable insights into life and people range from an angry outburst by a Turkish professor “unused to being contradicted” to an English housewife happy that her husband studies the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, since it’s “the sort of pastime that men are meant to have to stop them getting underfoot.”
Three of the photographs from the text, two on the left by Jürgen Frank, on right by Fritz von der Schulenberg
The power of complexity
Finkel is a long-time follower of Turkish politics (and, full disclosure, an old friend from my days on the Istanbul journalistic beat) and he likes to juggle with what he calls the “power of complexity and the complexity of power.” In one memorable passage, a soldier is posted in an Ottoman palace to guard Abdulhamid after the sultan’s dethronement in 1909, but goes off limits, finds himself in a dark room and is offered a light for his cigarette – and discovers he is alone with the ex-ruler.
The soldier nearly choked on his own smoke. What was he to do? By rights he should have summoned the officers outside, but then he would have to explain his own presence in the room. He had become a partner in the Sultan’s crime. ‘To own the man, give him something to steal’ is the proverb and a roundabout way of saying that leading a man into temptation is a surer means of securing his loyalty than having him swear a flowery oath of allegiance.
I admired too the connections that Finkel weaves through the book: the links between Ottoman Turks, British Victorians and the Indian part of their empire; the strands of continuity in Turkey, from the universal Islamic caliphate to the secular national republic that formed on its core after 1923; Ottoman Constantinople morphing into modern Istanbul; and more universally, the conjecture that the world’s whole population can be divided into either more active Sherlocks or more passive Watsons.
By the end of the tale, a new world had opened up for me in which “the Game” of a Holmesian investigation is always afoot, ready to dart in a new direction. The dark-bearded Abdulhamid II of many a stiff black and white photograph had come to satisfyingly to life. I even felt at home with the likes of a “professional courtier” who is “like an executive happy to serve Coca-Cola today or Pepsi tomorrow … equally at home in Buckingham Palace as … in Yıldız Palace or on a mission to the Emir of Afghanistan.”
What a remarkably original book!
Receiving a copy of The Adventures of the Second Wife in London not that far from Baker Street – R-L: Caroline Finkel, wife of the author, Ottoman expert and author of Osman’s Dream; my wife Jessica Lutz, holding the book; the author Andrew Finkel; and myself Hugh Pope in appropriately Holmesian cape.
“An election that only one party wins, with a simple plurality, operates as a kind of factory setting for American democracy, one that we have neglected to update, despite radically changed circumstances.”
This week’s New York Times opinion piece on How to Fix America’s Two-Party System is a fine read, and not just because of clever metaphors (as above) and some gorgeous scrolly graphics. Authors Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman also clearly lay out how “two parties competing in winner-take-all elections cannot reflect the diversity of 335 million Americans.”
A graphic tellingly portrays six main groups of US political sentiment that might form the basis for future parties (one slide can be seen below). The advocacy for more members of the House of Representatives is spot-on (a congressperson now represents on average 760,000+ people). And the case against single-seat, gerrymandered constituencies is well put. After all, the authors point out that 90% of seats are “not competitive”, that is, they are won by a landslide. Voters therefore almost never chose the winning candidate, but one of the two current parties does.
The last slide from a superbly designed New York Times overview of political opinion in America – and the new political party groupings they might define.
No doubt, proportional representation is better than winner-take-all elections, just like an aristocracy is usually better than one-person rule, or a law-abiding king may be better than an oppressive tyrant. Wegman and Drutman are right to point out that in many other states, notably in Europe, this way of allowing many and more varied parties to win seats in parliaments produces more representative government.
“An exact portrait”
To define the ideal representation that democratic reformers are aiming for, the New York Times authors do well to cite John Adams. The US founding father wrote in 1776 that the US Congress “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should feel, reason and act like them.”
My late father Maurice Pope had the same ideal for representation when he considered the pros and cons of proportional representation in his posthumous 2023 book The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model of Citizen Power. He shows how proponents of this system go back to mid-19th century figures like English philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill and Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics don who enjoyed thinking up new systems of electoral representation (when not writing children’s stories like Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Caroll).
Maurice Pope’s conclusion is that proportional representation can never get far toward to this “exact portrait” of society, even if it is an improvement on winner-takes-all elections. The book’s central argument, after all, is that systems based only on voting favour the wealthy and well-connected, concentrating power in the hands of factions and the few. This line of thinking also goes back a long way, from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to writers in the 20th century like Italian-German political sociologist Roberto Michels. Here’s an excerpt from The Keys to Democracy:
Proportional representation is not a recipe for introducing democracy, but for improving oligarchy. Its tendency is to make government more responsive to the will of the broad majority and to dampen the mad swings of two-party politics. These are both desirable ends. It also encourages an increase in the number of effective political parties. From the liberal point of view, this is a good thing too. If the ideal is for as wide a range of serious opinions as possible to be represented in political debate, then four or five parties are as much an improvement on two parties as two parties are an improvement on one.
But from the democratic point of view, it is a red herring. Proportional representation still works through political parties. Indeed, it gives them and their organisations even greater importance. The main parties will play a steadier part in government than with a system of alternating periods of office and the small parties will also be able to exercise a genuine influence on events. If parties become more powerful, so do the party-organisers.
The consequence is inevitable. The individual voter’s effectiveness will be strengthened and so will the grip of Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy”. This would be a paradox if voting were a democratic device. As soon as one realises that it is not, the paradox vanishes and becomes a truism. What strengthens an electoral system must also strengthen an oligarchic one, for they are two sides of the same coin. (pp. 22-23).
A lottery winner
Since elections deliver such poor results, Maurice Pope and many in the new movement for deliberative democracy argue, a better way to achieve best-in-class representation is by using sortition, that is, the random selection of regular citizens to decision-making bodies. The world now has a version of this, citizens’ assemblies, of which more than 1,000 have been held in the past decade. Groups of 20-200 citizens are chosen by lot to meet on a tough policy question, inform themselves from experts, deliberate as a group and build up a new policy based on what most participants agree on.
Six philosophers discuss moral perspectives on assisted suicide with France’s randomly-selected Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life (Paris, 2022-23). Photo: Hugh Pope
Such representation is still far from perfect. This new method of taking decisions is still little known, so typically only 5% of randomly issued invitations get a positive answer. That means that there is a second lottery (known as stratification) to choose from among those who say “yes”. This makes sure the profile of participants in the assembly matches the make-up of their community. To get closer to the “exact picture” would need a legal requirement to attend, as happens with jury service.
So much for representation. Another issue beyond the scope of this article is Wegman’s and Drutman’s idealistic hope that several new parties would be able to easily make compromises on policies and form governments. Chronic difficulties right now around exactly this issue in the proportional systems of Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium point to grave potential obstacles here.
Back to utopias
It’s wonderful, though, that The New York Times is debating such constitutional questions on its opinion page. My late father always regretted the absence of constitutions and utopias from political debates over the past 200 years.
Such constitutional speculation was common in the Renaissance, becoming highly influential in government design during the American and French Revolutions. One sign of the un-fashionability of such talk today is that – amid the glowing reviews of The Keys to Democracy – there’s some disapproval of the chapter in which Pope develops his own political utopia. More encouragingly, however, I’ve heard that one Ivy League university has assigned students precisely this chapter from the book as part of a politics course on new ideas.
My eyes rolled too when I first read the manuscript in the 1980s. I am ashamed to remember my exasperated comments like: “Dad, what planet are you living on?” But I now love the story of his utopia, a community of scientists that organises itself when marooned on Antarctica after a nuclear war lays waste to the rest of the world. The scientists experiment and gradually build a completely new political system in which executive, legislature and judiciary take decisions entirely in randomly selected assemblies.
My late father admits that in normal circumstances, no society starts from scratch, so in reality such structures can only evolve. But ideals serve a motivational purpose, even if they take time to materialise and rarely in exactly the form we expected. It is at the very least refreshing to read about “a community that had discovered how to live at peace with itself and that had cured itself of the fatal human disease whose first symptom is group loyalty and which ends in blindness and mutual destruction” (p. 164).
“I didn’t vote for five or six party chiefs to run the country between them.”
I had not heard of Luc Bertrand before my weekly dip into the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. But he made me think this weekend when I looked at the Saturday edition’s in-depth interviews, a window onto what my neighbours in and around Brussels are thinking as well as life beyond the world of English-speaking media.
Bertrand, 73, seems to have it all. He stands atop a Belgian family conglomerate (Ackermans & van Haren) with roots in shipping, banking and the late 19th century, when Belgium was one of the most technologically advanced and richest countries in Europe. But he is full of gloom about bad governance and the bottomless fiscal swamp that Belgium and Europe now find themselves in.
De Morgen’s headline trumpets him saying that “European industry is being swept off the map.” Bertrand lists the elements of his argument with clarity: a fragmented and over-regulated continent unable to foster innovative companies, especially in technology; a Europe that gives advantages to fatal Chinese competition, but can’t get the same rights to grow in China; a Europe that equalled the US a generation ago, but now only produces 70% of what Americans manage; and in Belgium, out-of-control budgetary deficits, under-investment and over-consumption, leading to the plight of young couples who pay 60% tax and can’t afford to buy a house to live in.
“Europe has allowed itself to fall asleep,” Bertrand said. “We have the best engineers in the world, but none of the best seven high tech companies are European.”
A dead end
What struck me most were this captain of European industry’s concerns about the dead end of politics in both his country and also Europe more broadly. Right now, Belgium is off the end of the scale of political dysfunction, still unable to form a new federal government after elections in June that (once again) left several parties squabbling over how they might cooperate to form a cabinet. Neighbouring France, Germany and the Netherlands are doing little better, and the UK is barely out of the post-Brexit woods.
Bertrand points out that it’s not just the way so much time is lost first campaigning for votes and then forming governments (in Belgium this has already taken more than a year twice in the past 15 years). The quality of government dialogue with business has suffered too. Fifteen years ago, Bertrand said, a minister might gather a half-dozen relevant industrialists, invite them in and listen to the conversation. Now, he says, industrial bosses get invited to events by the score and then only get lectured at.
“Today … we live in a vacuum,” Bertrand said. “Politics itself is less powerful. We only hear about obstacles and compromises, from morning to night. We hold elections, and six weeks later we still don’t know who won. Then all the parties behave as if they are the ones who are victorious. I ask myself a lot of questions over democracy in this land. I didn’t vote for five or six party chiefs to run the country between them. This is not just a problem in Belgium. In one [European] country they are tending towards authoritarianism, another is just a democracy in name.”
The paradox
When describing the policymaking that he wants, Bertrand gives the example of his conglomerate. He says family interests mean that investments come first and they can take long-term decisions, avoid deficits and smooth the peaks and troughs between good and bad times. He would also like a “moderate Elon Musk” to cut out Belgium’s unfunded government spending.
But here’s the paradox: for him the way to get there is to go backward to cosy two-party electoral politics. The family seems invested in this old route. His daughter Alexia Bertrand is Budget Minister in the outgoing government and a high-ranking member of one of the centre-right parties in talks to form a new government.
It’s ironic that someone so observant and keen on innovation can find no better response to the current failure in governance than a repeat of the party-based electoral formula. That is what got us into this mess in the first place.
After all, Belgium has seen some of the exciting experiments in deliberative democracy. Brussels is home to the best-selling author of Against Elections, the pioneering David van Reybrouck. Concerned Belgians convened one of the earliest citizens’ assemblies, chosen by lot during a government breakdown already 15 years ago. Five years ago, eastern Belgium’s German-speaking community set up the world’s first permanent citizens’ assembly. There are several other examples of new ideas to use randomly selected groups of citizens to make policymaking work more efficiently – and take the long-term view that Bertrand and many others want to see.
In late December, Belgium passed its latest 200-days-without-a-government mark. To judge by Luc Bertrand’s comments about where his conglomerate’s investment is going – places far from Europe that are actually growing – we haven’t hit the bottom of the cycle yet.
Still, Belgium’s past success, the individualism of its people, the diversity of Brussels and a relative lack of inequality do still give me grounds for hope in the country. And perhaps Belgium is so original and good at evolving new tools of deliberative democracy precisely because the country is well ahead of others in Europe in the cycle of stagnation of a once-rich industrial state.
Anger, despair and a sense of impotence at new death and destruction in the Middle East were among the reasons I got out of the business of writing about the region. Indeed, up to now, I’ve had no idea what I could usefully add to all that’s being said about still-expanding consequences of the war in and around Gaza since 7 October 2023.
Which you might find odd, since I was a Middle East correspondent for three decades, including in all the places still consumed by conflict.
Iranian offensive into Iraq’s Faw peninsula, January 1986 (Photo: Hugh Pope)
The reasons for my reticence go deep. I believe in context as well as details. I worry about empathising one side’s story rather than the other/s. I’m fearful of consequences for friendships and, to be honest, perhaps comfort zones too.
My caution is also informed by professional experience. University studies of Persian and Arabic make me look naturally partisan. Life as a reporter makes me reluctant to comment on matters I haven’t researched myself. Many years as an analyst seeking ways to defuse and end conflict at International Crisis Group taught me there’s little point in saying anything if it doesn’t offer at least a potential, long-term route out of the crisis in question.
It is also dispiriting that nothing has changed or seems about to change in the blanket US, British and European official backing of Israel. And I still have that censorious voice in my head, drummed in by years of far-away editors and in-my-face spokespeople, warning me that just writing that last sentence means that, for balance, I now have to say something cautionary about one or more of Israel’s or the US’s enemies.
But I still listen to the news every day, to brave reporters and indispensable aid workers like those from the UN Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA). I observe my daughter’s TikTok feed overflowing with desperate Palestinians begging for attention. I hear out the Israelis, both the my-way-or-the-highway types and those who don’t think that everything their government does is right.
Apart from the scale of the violence, I’m still not sure how much has really changed. Everything I read or hear seem to be reruns of qualitatively similar stories we used to report on more than 40 years ago. And just as it did so many times in the past, the escalation is spreading out from the Middle East in all kinds of ways, including to my new home in Europe.
The juggernaut will find us everywhere, even if we try to escape it. The sheer quantity of deadly developments seems to have reached a new critical mass. Events now proceed faster, and are more flagrantly naked in their ambition or blood raw in their desperation.
My first botcast
So I decided to ask NotebookLM what about my many experiences I could usefully share with a neutral onlooker. For those who have not used this miraculous new Google machine, it’s like having a second brain. You upload content and NotebookLM analyses that content (and no other source) in the light of everything that Google knows. Which is a lot.
To see what real people say about my book, please go to hughpope.com/mideast
In this case, I simply uploaded one piece of work on the Middle East of which I am particularly proud, my book, Dining with al-Qaeda: Making Sense of the Middle East. It was first published in 2010, and I put out a paperback in 2022 with some minor updates and better photos. It lays out everything that I saw, heard and what I thought about the pattern of events. I didn’t give Google any of the reviews, old articles or supplementary material.
I then asked NotebookLM to explain what my three decades of experiences, findings and arguments said about the Middle East that could usefully be applied to analyse or resolve the current, post-7 October situation. I also asked it to phrase its response in such a way that would not offend any friends (that little voice never goes away).
Tilting the balance toward peace
To be specific, I asked: What seven policies can you extrapolate from the book that could strengthen any outside powers who actually wanted to tilt the balance toward peace in today’s Middle East?
Here, it replied, are the seven things your book suggests such powers should do:
Embrace a one-state, democratic solution in Israel/Palestine in which Israelis would “fully share the country they have conquered with its native Palestinian inhabitants,” including equal rights and representation
Adopt even-handed policies, especially in the case of the US
Engage with Iran diplomatically and acknowledge its legitimate interests and concerns
Reassess restrictive visa policies, promote people-to-people connections and foster a more positive image of the West in the Middle East
Counter authoritarianism in the region by promoting good governance, provide assistance to civil society organizations, advocate for greater political freedoms, and hold authoritarian leaders accountable for human rights abuses
Promote cultural understanding by moving beyond simplistic stereotypes, engaging with a diverse range of voices, fostering cultural exchanges and encouraging media coverage that goes beyond sensationalized headlines
Address economic disparities by supporting economic development initiatives, promoting fair trade practices, and investing in education and job creation programs in the region.
In 2004, it was heartening to see some US-Iraqi cooperation over the rebuilding of Mosul University after the US take-over of Iraq. But all the damage was done by the US invasion in 2003. (Photo: Hugh Pope)
Well, these mostly mild suggestions don’t have the blistering clarity of UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese cataloguing the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian presence in Gaza and the occupied territories. But it does sound like the kind of thing I would say, in that I believe policy recommendations should usually only include what a state has the power to do and would make some difference if sustained over time.
“Surprisingly relevant”
But, I asked NotebookLM, why should anyone listen to me? What contemporary usefulness could there be in an account of experiences from the 1980s-2000s?
The “valuable insights” in Dining with al-Qaeda “remain surprisingly relevant to the situation today,” the machine replied. This “valuable historical lens through which to view current events” highlighted “the persistence of certain patterns and the challenges of achieving lasting peace and stability in the region.”
Specifically, it said, the book:
Highlights a recurring pattern of pro-reform uprisings followed by state failures in the Middle East, noting the brutal survival tactics of regional regimes
Critiques the United States’ continuous entanglement in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and argues that the US failure to break free from a cycle of intervention often exacerbates conflicts and creates unintended consequences
Explores the enduring power of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, highlights their reliance on corruption, control of information, and suppression of dissent to maintain power … all this resonates with the challenges faced by pro-democracy movements across the region today
Reveals through personal experiences and journalistic observations a deep-seated criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians … challenges the prevailing narrative surrounding the conflict, highlights the suffering of Palestinians living under Israeli rule and notes the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States
Argues that oil wealth allows regimes to maintain their power structures and resist calls for change
Provides insights into various cultural and societal dynamics in the Middle East, such as the role of Islam, the challenges faced by women, and the influence of tribalism … these observations offer valuable context for understanding the complex social fabric of the region
So there you have it: a set of policy recommendations for me to say and the reasons why I can plausibly say them. I’ve smoothed some of the phrasing but the content is neither more nor less than what NotebookLM suggested. And of course it is what I suggested too, in the form of my book, the only input I gave it.
Mourner in Syria after the death in 2000 of its long-serving strongman, President Hafez al-Assad. (Photo: Hugh Pope)
NotebookLM also gave me a recording of its two robot podcasters discussing the book. That alone is a technological marvel. If you haven’t heard one of these “pure” botcasts before – NotebookLM calls them “audio overviews” – you must listen to at least a bit of it. Yes, there are a couple of slips, there is something synthetic about it and I had to cut out some repetitions. But it’s true to say that the underlying patterns of Middle East crisis haven’t changed much, and so it sounds like what I might say. It even inspired me to dig up a selection of photos from my reporting days. They fit, mostly.
Double checking
Just to check, I then uploaded the relevant reporting about the Middle East situation from Crisis Group, which does a good non-partisan job of rounding up all the latest information all sides agree to. I then asked NotebookLM if that added anything to change its mind. No, it said, the report “underscores the ongoing relevance of Dining with al-Qaeda in several ways”. (It did however note that the book did not specifically focus on Iranian influence in the region as the “axis of resistance”, a term that has become popular in the past decade).
I loaded up three Israeli perspectives – from a right-wing US group lobbying for Israel, a retired Israeli colonel opposed to his country’s strategy, a liberal explainer article in the US magazine Jewish Currents and a centrist commentator. NotebookLM retained its general endorsement for relevance, especially in giving the broader context and complexities. However, it noted that Dining with al-Qaeda was originally published before social media and so missed that dimension, made no detailed argument on a one-state policy for Israel and would benefit from re-evaluation of some time-sensitive recommendations.
Finally, I also uploaded Francesca Albanese’s UN report on Gaza, and asked the same question. “The UN report adds a layer of urgency and gravity to the issues explored in Dining with al-Qaeda. It reinforces the book’s relevance,” NotebookLM replied.
Perhaps it is just telling me what I want to hear, or rather playing a new version of my old words back to me. All the same, what an extraordinary machine!
For good measure, this is what WordPress’s AI-generated image made of this whole article …
“PEOPLE HATE politicians. What has the worst approval ratings in America, continuously? Congress … [That’s why] Donald Trump, in not sounding like a politician … actually manages … to win over a certain number of people.”
This kind of throwaway insight is typical of what has made me — and millions of others — an addict of The Rest is Politics podcast. I have learned so much from the presenters and guests. In the UK, they include communications guru Alastair Campbell and writer-politician Rory Stewart. The US branch is led by financier Anthony Scaramucci, a former pro-Trump political activist, and reporter Katty Kay (who said the above in episode #33).
But after two years, hundreds of episodes and more than two thousand kilometers — I listen while I run — I keep wondering about an inherent ambivalence in the shows.
In short, I feel that these cutting-edge experts and their world leader guests are not teaching me about what makes the political world go round. They are talking about what’s blocking it from getting anywhere at all.
Put another way, the heart of the shows is an insiders’ account of high politics. But at best, the elected governments of the world’s richer countries come across as lost in transition. The deeper the podcasts dive, the more these electoral systems seem to be in trouble. Fundamental reform seems urgently needed. Or maybe a transplant.
In the article below, I’ve put together examples of how The Rest is Politics describes this collapse of national and even global governance.
I do so in the hope these leading lights of our age will draw more conclusions when their analysis shows how broken the current system of electoral representation is, as well as to share with other listeners a new way of learning from these excellent podcasts too.
Crying out for change
To my ears, the drumbeat of the presenters’ critique sounds compelling. Political parties are selfish and dysfunctional. Most lawmakers have little or no knowledge of the laws they vote on. Some leaders may begin their careers with good intentions, but the system empowers charismatic me-first types and then puts impossible strain on people who make it to the top. Few if any politicians have enough time, authority or energy to fulfil their tasks effectively.
The presenters are aware of the irony that the kings in their parade of global events may be wearing no clothes.
“I do think there is something fundamentally wrong with our politics,” Campbell put it once (episode #163). “It’s partly what gave us Brexit. It’s partly what gave us this succession of pretty useless prime ministers. And it’s partly what’s making people frustrated that the Labour Party is not coming in with that sense of real … radical change that the country is crying out for.”
Yet the podcasters’ chorus line remains traditional: if only we try harder, if only we tweak things here or there, if only we find somebody better, we can make the existing system work.
And so I go on listening, hour after hour, to the apparently doomed political intrigues of people who are struggling — and failing — to do just that.
Since there is so much wisdom and so many good intentions in these podcasts — even among the politicians who appear on it — it is fair to ask: what is their conclusion, the essential core of their message about what can change?
Flirting with reform
Campbell and Stewart occasionally flirt with reforms or alternative ways of getting the right decision makers into power.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrive for the state opening of the UK parliament, July 2024 (Photo: House of Lords press office)
Both agree on doing something about the UK’s upper chamber of parliament, the House of Lords. Both talk much about using more proportional representation and transferring more power to the lower House of Commons. Both also like the sound of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, if only in a sort of opinion-polling capacity.
Campbell recognizes the problem. ”There is a paradox,” he says (episode #299). “We are having more and more elections, more and more people voting, but we are not necessarily a more democratic world.”
But they do not seriously discuss options for going ahead with any of these, let alone back any firm, specific plan.
There’s been a noticeable drop in discussion of alternatives, for instance, since July when Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour Party were elected in the UK. It’s not the first time. Campbell remembers (episode #180) a plan to introduce proportional representation being much discussed by his Labour Party before their 1997 election victory. “Once we got into power,” he said, “that sort of went on to the back burner.”
The podcasters’ unwillingness to take their rich experience of political dysfunction to a logical conclusion also applies to their books published this year.
Campbell’s But What Can I Do? recognizes a population discouraged by their elected leaders’ poor performance. He talks much about the frustrated potential energy he feels in his contacts with the public, especially the young. He wants to channel this willingness to engage into political activity.
But — judging by what he says on the podcast — this is simply asking them to throw themselves into the same system of pointless political trench warfare that he says demotivated them in the first place.
Stewart’s Politics on the Edge powerfully describes the toxicity of his decade in the UK parliament and government. To improve the situation, he suggests more checks and balances, more transparency, better lobbying regulations, civic education, more judicial independence and new ways for parties to select parliamentary candidates.
But these praiseworthy ideaswould treat the symptoms rather than the cause that is now hard baked into the system: the demands made on parties and politicians doomed to fight eternal elections. The damaging results include short-term policies that fail, rising unpopularity and their current crisis of lost authority.
In the US, with its more optimistic streak, Kay and Scaramucci go less far down this road. As they roll their eyes at politicians’ behaviour and detail public disappointment, they occasionally look back into history for insights and explanations, even re-reading texts by the US founding fathers. But I can’t remember them questioning the system itself or suggesting fundamental changes.
Really hollow
One of the gravest problems that emerges from my take on the podcasts is the role of political parties in the existing parliament.
“Something about the way that party politics works in the House of Commons has really meant that debates and scrutiny of legislation is almost meaningless today,” Stewart says (episode #206). “The Commons feels really hollow,”
A year before, Stewart had gone ever further (episode #140), citing a civil servant telling him that “the House of Commons was a complete waste of time, never bothered to look at the detail, never scrutinised anything.”
Stewart’s account of his own career in politics makes clear why those elected don’t bother to engage. A minister is simply not allowed to oppose a law backed by their party, and if they do, they are dismissed from office; any ordinary MP that does the same will never leave the backbenches.
A weird sect
One of their guests went further (episode #86 of Leading, a companion podcast to The Rest is Politics). Nick Clegg describes the three “bubbles” of his career: Brussels, where he was a member of the European Parliament, the UK parliament, where he was Liberal Party leader and deputy prime minister, and his current Silicon Valley job working for Meta (Facebook).
“Of those three bubbles, the worst by a long shot is [the UK Houses of Parliament in] Westminster,” he says. It’s “stuck in the 19th century … architecturally designed for conflict not conversation … like a weird sect … a pastiche of a Harry Potter boarding school.”
This prompts Stewart to slam “the incredible poor quality of so much of it … I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee and chaired the Defence Committee … we knew almost nothing about the world … we didn’t really hold ministers to account … speeches in parliament were of such pathetically low quality … nobody [was] paying the slightest attention … [the government was free to act] like an elected dictatorship.”
In other episodes Stewart points out how members of parliament have no job description (episode #224). He often notes how impossible it was to balance of his work as a constituency MP and that of representing the national interest as a foreign office minister by, say, travelling to the places affected by any policies. His book excoriates politicians as “grotesquely unqualified”.
For his part, Campbell points out there is no external audit of parliament, like, for instance, the never-ending inspections endured by Britain’s schools. Before the 2024 UK elections, Campbell (episode #180) goes as far as to say that “radical fundamental change” is needed, that he is “on a journey” on this topic and that the Labour Party manifesto should be offering what he called an “electoral review”.
Yet none of the podcasters ever stop to imagine a future that simply does away with the political parties that both rule and corrupt the system.
Sleepless in London, penniless in Paris
Two leaders who join the program describe an environment that gives little hope that an impeccable new leader will somehow get elected and miraculously sweep the problem away.
“It is widely underrated that politicians need to be made of very stern [stuff],” Clegg underlined (episode #87, Leading). “You’re taking most decisions, highly consequential decisions, often at very great speed, based on imperfect information, with very great consequences, in a sleepless state … We create a whole cast (and caste) of decision makers who are in a state which is the worst state in which to take decisions. They’re knackered.”
Former President François Hollande of France tells listeners (episode #69, Leading) that the new generation is simply not interested in coming to the rescue.
“Nobody in the elite wants to make politics. When I was a student, the main [idea of] success was to be a member of parliament, perhaps minister and if possible president. Now in the elite, politics is considered the wrong way. Now people want to be on boards, economic circles. Not in politics,” Hollande says. “It is hard in politics. You [face intrusions] on your private life, you do not have any revenues and wages in comparison with business. You can be defeated in elections. You have no holidays, no weekends, never. Why be committed? … Social media is harsh, cruel… in France, the political system is broken.”
Exposing the rottenness
So what is the alternative, and who will come together to find it? Probably not the politicians, or at least not yet.
Film star and ex-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger cites Albert Einstein to the podcasters (episode #43): ”The same mind that created the problem is not able to solve it.” Another problem is what historian Dominic Sandbrook observes on a sister podcast (episode #35, The Rest is History): “To be a politician is to be divisive.”
Stewart and Campbell spend more time discussing the problem than the causes, and even worry that they are being too critical.
Campbell (episode #168) says he agrees with a lot of the negativity in Stewart book, but adds that “I worry that your basic message is that “politics is all terrible”.”
Stewart retorts that “I do believe that in order to change you’ve got to begin by really delving into the problems, we’ve got to expose where the rottenness is … we have had a mafia code of silence around parliament for a long time.”
An unshakeable faith in elections is the clear motor driving the dysfunctional system of parties, politicians and polarisation that they describe. But none of the podcasters question the idea — which only evolved in the 19th century — that voting is where democracy begins and ends.
CItizens’ assemblies
Despite their faith in the legitimacy of elections, however, Campbell and Stewart have at times been ready to toy with fundamentally different approaches. This was especially evident at the peak of their frustration in the final months of the Conservative Party’s time in power in the UK from 2010–2024.
Stewart in particular finds much to like in one potentially radical alternative: citizens’ assemblies. These are groups of citizens from a community or country, randomly selected by lot, a process also called sortition. Participants meet over several days to learn from experts, deliberate and propose solutions to a common policy problem.
“I am very attracted by sortition, the basis of how juries are selected, and it’s how ancient Athens worked,” Stewart said (episode #173). “I am very interested in what happens if you do it from the whole public … a genuinely representative sample of people … This would take power away from parties, which I like.”
Campbell is the more reserved of the pair — saying only “we both think they are a good idea” (episode #224) — but Stewart is enthusiastic. At one point (episode #199) he said citizens’ assemblies are “the most exciting thing that’s facing democracies around the world.”
Stewart praises random selection as a way of getting a wide range of points of view working on an idea (episode #173). Later he points out (episode #269) that: “Real truth emerges quite slowly through giving people space and time to debate and explore ideas. Maybe change their opinion a little bit.”
Even so, for both Campbell and Stewart, such assemblies can only work in an advisory capacity, or, in Stewart’s case, possibly as a third British House of Citizens alongside the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Taking the people into account
One notable guest, economist Kate Raworth, firmly advocated the use of citizens’ assemblies as the way forward. She did so in answer to Campbell’s lament that China’s dictatorial capitalism is getting ahead of “democracies with very, very short timeframes” (Leading episode #22).
Group discussion at the Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life, Paris, December 2022 (Photo: Hugh Pope)
“Many politicians will say: “I know what I need to do, I just don’t know how to get reelected when I’ve done it”,” Raworth responded. “That’s why you’re seeing some of the most progressive places say: “Let’s hold a citizens assembly, use sortition. Let’s bring together a randomly selected group of around 100 citizens, residents of our place. Let’s introduce them to experts who can introduce them to the scale of the topic and see what they come up with. Time and again, what’s coming out of these citizens’ assemblies is that these people — who are not trying to get reelected, because they are citizens thinking of the long view — have come up with far more ambitious policies than politicians feel they are able to.”
When Campbell worries that these policies might not be implemented, Raworth rises to the challenge, pointing out that what’s needed is for governments to commit to “taking into account what the people of this nation are saying they want to happen.”
That would be a wonderful development indeed. But the podcasters changed the subject back to economic growth. As usual, they fail to take their analysis to the logical conclusion that a new democratic system is needed.
Reflecting later in the episode on their conversation with Raworth, Campbell recognized that “our current politics” made him feel impotent to make any of her “idealistic” suggestions come about. He added: “The only way to you’re actually going to do this is if you live in a dictatorship.”
Shaken to the core
The Raworth interview is not the only time that The Rest is Politics podcasters note that the conclusion that some people are drawing from the mess they describe is not a desire to see bottom-up democracy like citizens’ assemblies, but more top-down, authoritarian rule.
So which is it to be? How much time do the richer world’s governments have to find an alternative to their current dead end? Who will lead the way?
Former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg opined (episode #87, Leading) that: ”I find myself more of an anti-establishment politician after five years in government than before … There’s so much that needs to be shaken to the core.”
Yet, as so many top establishment politicians before him, Clegg has been rewarded at Meta with a lucrative job at the pinnacle of the existing system. Normally, this is one way that rich companies control parties and politicians, who need money and support to win elections.
Unusually, though, Meta is both part of the problem, as its algorithms tear down the old order — whether empowering individual access to information or feeding polarisation–and offering possible solutions, as it experiments in sortition-based online deliberation within its global community of billions. But again, we hear nothing about that.
Back in the UK, “it could not be clearer that people don’t just think that the country’s stuck. They think politics is part of the problem,” Campbell proclaims (episode #154). “If it’s a part of the problem, you have to change it.”
But what should that change be? Perhaps only a new podcast series called The Rest is Democracy could fully answer the question. My running shoes are ready.
Such words are rarely applied to a policy-making process. But praise for citizens’ assemblies was on many people’s lips during a recent week of trainings, workshops and events in British Columbia on the progress of deliberative & participatory democracy. Held in the Canadian province in September, they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the modern world’s first randomly selected citizens’ assembly, held in Vancouver in 2004.
Since that little-heralded event, perhaps 1,000 citizens’ assemblies have now been held all over the world. Most have been held in the past few years and the number is rising fast, particularly in local politics. The deliberative movement’s main network, Democracy R&D, which started out with a conference of 30 people in Madrid in 2018, attracted 200 practitioners and experts to Vancouver for its conference this year. Symbolising the enthusiasm, Leonora Camner (pictured below), chief executive of Democracy Beyond Elections, boasted a new tattoo in the form of a kleroterion, a machine used in ancient Athens to assign citizens to policy-making committees.
Today, citizens’ assemblies are an evolving technique for taking hard decisions in the public common interest. Also known as civic assemblies or citizens’ juries, they bring together between 30 and 200 participants chosen by lot from the relevant community or country. Usually meeting for several days over a number of weeks, the citizens first get to know each other, learn from experts about the challenge at hand, deliberate among themselves and then propose solutions. They are thus much more heterogenous than, say, elected parliaments, which are dominated by charismatic, relatively wealthy people like party politicians or lawyers. Yet citizens’ assemblies routinely adopt suggestions that achieve consensus, which usually means over 80% approval.
“People who profess to be helping are not. [This electoral system,] it’s a European construct and it’s falling apart,” said Shane Pointe (pictured above), a Canadian Indigenous leader who came to bless the opening of the Democracy R&D conference in the name of his ancestors. “We need to take action, my friends from round the world! We need to spread the word that we need to participate. We are the sacred medicine that is going to help us heal democracy.”
Changing the world
The recommendations of that first 2004 British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on voting reform won 57% support in a province-wide referendum – a notable success, even if it fell short of the 60% needed to change the law that day. “It was a global first,” Peter MacLeod, the doyen of Canadian deliberative democracy activists, told an anniversary reunion of participants. “It may not have succeeded [in B.C.], but it still changed the world.”
MacLeod remembered how Irish academic David Farrell attended the 2004 assembly to brief participants on Ireland’s voting system, but went home convinced that actually random selection might be the future. This led directly to the Irish citizens’ assemblies that in the 2010s broke the country’s political logjams on same-sex marriage and abortion.
The week of democracy meetings in British Columbia showcased more evidence of deliberative democracy’s potential to act as an antidote to public frustrations: alienation from partisan politicians, domineering parties, bad decision-making and anger about the poor performance of electoral systems in delivering efficient government.
“Polarisation was the first thing to fall,” remembered Shoni Field (pictured on the right of the second row above), addressing fellow alumni of that first Vancouver assembly in the same downtown building where they met in 2004. She remembered how at first she and other members didn’t believe they would be able to achieve consensus. But “finding things in common was much easier than expected. We got to feel confident and connected … like magic.”
Politicians have not yet handed decision-making powers to such assemblies, but they have become readier to commit to serious discussion of their recommendations. In Canada, some 50 citizens’ assemblies have taken place since 2004, many of them local, like one that began in September on B.C.’s Vancouver Island. The mayors of Vancouver Island’s two main municipalities, Victoria and Saanich, welcomed 48 randomly selected citizens who will deliberate on a long-stalled plan to merge or not to merge (pictured below).
“Few people get the chance to do what you’re doing. Design something new!” the mayor of Victoria, Marianne Alto, told participants at the opening meeting. Her counterpart from Saanich, Dean Murdock, was equally encouraging. “You are bringing your lived experience and representing the community. Our commitment is to put your recommendations in front of the voters,” he pledged.
How far can deliberative democracy go?
It is still early days for deliberative democracy. A week of discussions among these new democrats revealed several lines of debate and innovation, from techniques of random selection to formulating an overall theory of change.
For instance, few of the advocates for deliberative democracy gathered in British Columbia publicly advocate that random selection should completely replace elections in selecting most decision-making bodies, as was the case during the glory days of ancient Athens. But there is no clear end point, either.
“I want evolution, not revolution! Trying to change everything at once would lead to chaos. At a time when our democracies are already under extreme pressure, nobody wants that,” saidEmily Jenke, joint chief of Australian assembly organizers democracyco. Zakia Elvang, managing partner at Danish advisory group We Do Democracy, pointed out that the goal should be to find out where elected politicians are feeling pain and to do something about it. “Inviting citizens in should help politicians, not be a threat to them,” she said.
The few people who do envisage a world run by random selected bodies – a process also called sortition or lottocracy – generally acknowledge that it could take a century or more to achieve. As my late father Maurice Pope pointed out in his The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a Model for Citizen Power, elections themselves took centuries to emerge. Universal suffrage was a long-unexpected result of the gradual displacement the discredited rule of kings, popes and nobles.
Still, advocates of deliberative democracy have become more ambitious in recent years. For instance, discussion of citizens’ assemblies has now eclipsed the attention once given to the early innovation of participatory budgeting, which emerged in the 1990s to give citizens a role in advising government entities on spending a small part of their annual outlays.
How can sortition work better?
Even in today’s all-digital age, a surprising first hurdle to random selection is getting access to complete lists of citizens to choose from. Some countries allow access to at least rolls of voters; in others, organisers of civic assemblies have to contract the job out to public opinion researchers or pollsters, which can be expensive.
Typically, only about 2%-5% of the citizens who are randomly selected respond positively to their invitation to serve in assemblies. A second round of random selection from this pool (known as stratification) makes sure that the final choice of assembly members reflects the demographics of the community, for instance balancing gender, age, location, language, education, and economic status.
However, assemblies are therefore biased towards the kind of people willing to say “yes” to such invitations. Also, these selection criteria lower the individual chances of acceptance to personality types who say “yes” most often. In European-populated countries, for instance, this means a low personal chance of attending for older, educated, better-off white men.
The only real solution to full representativity – as proposed by some, including my late father in his book – is to make attendance mandatory, as with service in court juries. This is unlikely for now, at least until sortition becomes far better known and widely accepted.
In the meantime, participants in Democracy R&D suggested a number of steps:
Do more research on what makes people opt in to join assemblies, and then act to persuade people who are randomly selected to decide to accept. Facilitators from Germany’s Es Geht Los, for instance, go door to door to persuade those chosen by the computer to join assemblies and have raised acceptance rates to as high as 25%.
Avoid putting too many criteria into the stratification (for instance relating to education or wealth), since motivated citizens may try to manipulate the system with false answers to get into the assembly. A sensible maximum is about six criteria.
Create a large number of possible, stratified assemblies from the pool of acceptances by candidates, then choose one of them from a hat. This makes the final selection of any single individual fairer. The German parliament did something like this with the final selection of its new Citizens’ Assemblies. MIT professor Bailey Finnigan (speaking to audience above) also designed a scientific algorithm to even out an individual’s chances of selection – which she charmingly called the “Goldilocks” method.
Absent mandatory service on citizens’ assemblies, build up as comprehensive a list as possible of all people in a community who in principle agree to join a future assembly that can then be used by all citizens’ assembly or jury organisers.
Can AI help deliberative democracy?
According to some participants, AI could plausibly open to multitudes of people the deliberative democracy that today is only available to smaller groups. Enthusiasts imagined that highly trained bots could do facilitation, allow participants to interrogate in-house databases of expert briefings more easily, transcribe conversations or synthesize conclusions from hundreds of transcripts at once. Indeed, a first fully tech-enhanced experiment is already under way in Oregon in the Deschutes Civic Assembly on Youth Homelessness.
Sceptics about the role of AI worried that the essence of the magic of citizens’ assemblies is in the human contact, trust and civic love that is so much more easily built up face-to-face.
Can citizens’ assemblies be institutionalised?
For some deliberative democracy non-profits, institutionalisation is the way forward. A start has been made, with some success, in Belgium’s German-community parliament, the municipality of Paris, a climate assembly for the Brussels region and a new Europe-wide body on the future of the EU. Each experiment is different, but a basic principle so far is that one randomly selected group chooses topics for other ad hoc, time-limited citizens’ assemblies to address.
Sceptics worry that institutionalisation could bring hierarchies, import a mentality of doing a paid jobs and lose the deep feeling of public service currently felt in shorter citizens’ assemblies. “I worry that permanent citizens’ assemblies could lead to over-bureaucratisation,” said the leader of one pan-European non-profit.
How can the advantages of democratic deliberation become more widely known?
One of participants’ frustrations is how little-known sortition still is. Despite a constant drumbeat of dissatisfaction with the performance of elected governments, mainstream news stories about alternative methods of decision-making is sparse. “The lowest-read articles [I write] are the ones about citizens’ assemblies,” syndicated California democracy columnist Joe Mathews told the Democracy R&D conference.
Yet it is remarkable how very few, if any, citizens drop out of an assembly, despite the intense work, usually over weekends. In fact, it’s frequent to hear them say that the experience was a highlight of their lives. Such alumni often become ardent advocates of the process. More could be done to mobilise them to spread the word, even if such alumni are still a small group in the world.
Such interest in sortition as there is in mainstream media seems to occur at moments of peak anger with and unpopular governments and then to disappear in the wave of hope when a new party takes power. For instance, before the last elections in the United Kingdom, a Labour Party adviser suggested citizens’ assemblies might be part of a victorious Labour Party program, but the party later backtracked. “As soon as they won, citizens’ assemblies suddenly became the last priority,” noted the chief of an international democracy non-profit.
Another suggestion to broaden experience of citizens’ assembly would be to do more with the randomly selected first pool of those who do say yes, often numbering a few hundred people, who are not chosen in the final stratification. For instance, they could be invited to a special outreach session of the assembly in which they could discuss the issue at hand with those who were selected.
Improving terminology, or awareness of it, could also help. The word sortition is little known or understood. Some say citizens’ assemblies should be known as civic assemblies (to include, for instance, unregistered refugees). Some worry the word democracy itself may be off-putting and means different things to different people. One issue is that people now associate democracy entirely with voting, even though until the 18th century democracy (“rule by the people”) was mostly used to describe direct popular authority, channelled through the random selection of classical times. Another difficulty is that because people now think democracy means voting, and because elected governments are in such disrepute, the word democracy can now trigger hostile feelings.
Ways Democracy R&D conference participants suggested to popularise the process included ideas to: build up better data and stories on citizens’ assemblies and their impact, and use these to craft a compelling theory of change; mobilise assembly alumni as spokespeople; win over politicians – critically, before they take power – to understand that citizens’ assemblies can bring support and legitimacy and not threaten their elected roles; stress that citizens’ assemblies are more representative of diversity than elected bodies and are better at blocking special-interest groups; and better link deliberative democracy to what the wider public cares about.
How can work on deliberative democracy get funded?
Non-profit types often wring their hands about finding funding for their work. The world of deliberative democracy has a particularly difficult time raising money, with some organizations reporting close calls with fate.
Small donations on a large scale are unknown for democracy NGOs, perhaps since deliberative democracy is not (yet) a cause with an emotional punch that can attract the attention of the general public or a passing donor in the street. At the other end, big national funders to organisations doing democratic improvement are often linked to elected politicians, who can worry that supporting alternatives to elections might cut off the branch on which they sit.
Additionally, the field is new and untested, with very few organizations older than a decade. “The funders are sometimes out of touch,” the chief of one international democracy NGO told me. “Look at what happened with the Brexit referendum. Tens of millions of pounds were spent to swing the campaign against Europe. And with sortition, donors give us $100,000-$150,000 and then ask us, why haven’t you changed democracy?”
One encouraging difference is that deliberative democracy does attract rich individuals frustrated with the electoral system, a number of whom have set up their own non-profits and take an active interest in deliberative projects. Time will tell if they can coordinate to build up a broader movement.
How fast will change happen?
Although the Democracy R&D network has grown rapidly to more than 100 organisations and 100 individual members since its founding in 2018, involving perhaps 400 people in total, few members expect a rapid global conversion to sortition. “The revolution will be a slow one, and it will happen in local administrations first,” predicted a founding member from Brussels, where next year’s conference takes place.
Still, the number of citizens’ assemblies being held round the world is rising in a logarithmic curve. I came away from my week in British Columbia sure that all the energy, new ideas, focused organizations, and idealism mean that the deliberative wave will not subside soon. The challenge for these new democrats is how to connect the solutions they offer – like citizens’ assemblies – with the now widespread recognition that public trust has been lost in electoral processes and the governments they produce. Or at least, how to make that connection before the argument is won by the forces who are currently far ahead in this race: the one-third of the population in richer countries with electoral systems who suggesting that authoritarian rule is the answer.
Canada’s Peter MacLeod (above right) urged the new democrats in Vancouver not to flag in their efforts, noting the ultimate success of the last big democratic wave in 1790-1830. In that period, the American and French revolutions spurred the replacement of monarchs, archbishops and aristocrats by then more effective elected governments. “Don’t underestimate the the ability of a small group of people to change the world [even if] it took another 120 years to full enfranchisement,” he said. “We have to keep delivering assemblies. Democracy’s second act has started.”
Books aren’t that common about the skills needed to manage one of the world’s 1.5 million nonprofits, also known as charities or nongovernmental organizations. Those on general release can often be uplifting but one-off personal stories, for instance about how the gift of a pencil or a sweater inspired a world-changing mission.
While Grono’s handbook is aimed squarely at non-profit CEOs, his insights are useful to anyone interested in a more idealistic style of management. Short, practical chapters distil the principles that he believes should guide nonprofits’ mission, impact, strategy, staff, corporate culture, boards, partners, diversity, funders and fundraising. Grono sets the bar high. He shares only the occasional cautionary vignette of what goes wrong, even though this is a business in which expertise and reputation are often prized far higher than the ability to manage.
The lodestar of purpose
Purpose, Grono says, must be the lodestar of the nonprofit and its CEO: “All highly successful nonprofits put purpose and impact at the very heart of everything they do, and they maintain a disciplined and relentless focus on them.”
Nick Grono and his book
Grono further advocates that CEOs should concentrate on the communities their nonprofits serve, build “resonant relationships” with funders, and include local partners at all levels of the international nonprofit. He explains in detail how to measure evidence of impact, arguing that activities, outputs and meetings count for little if they don’t directly serve the nonprofit’s theory of change, that is, the means by which its purpose will be achieved.
An Australian lawyer by training, Grono compellingly illustrates his arguments from his three decades’ experience of running a rich variety of organizations: one took youngsters sailing on a square-rigged ship, others aimed to prevent war, support human rights or stamp out people-trafficking.
Personal anecdotes include the amazing day that he took what seemed to be a random phone meeting and learned that his organization had won a (hard-earned) gift of $35 million. Nuggets from his research include a study showing that the twelve highest-performing nonprofits have had CEOs in place for a decade or more – echoing similar findings from the for-profit world about the value of nurturing long experience.
Most of the real-world examples Grono gives are uplifting stories about how things go right in the end. There are plenty of gold stars (and more than 100 mentions) for the Freedom Fund, the anti-slavery nonprofit that Grono has led from its creation a decade ago. That said, he also makes space for other top nonprofit CEOs to give their insights and pithy case studies.
Each chapter – in the best tradition of the how-to book – ends with clear action points on how the non-profit CEO can overcome each of the challenges outlined.
Coercive leadership
Grono assumes good intentions and that all nonprofit leaders aspire to be best-in-class. Still, he does note the perils of mission creep beyond an organization’s core purpose, a nonprofit tendency to avoid tough decisions and that “at worst … badly led nonprofits can operate for many years without being held accountable”.
There is also a warning for CEOs who are too dominant. “A version of coercive leadership too often found at nonprofits is the “hero” or “charismatic” style … These leaders bring huge passion and charisma to their roles. They are often founders who have created organizations in their image. But the problem with this style of leadership is that its important strengths – the ability to inspire others and sell a powerful vision – [is that] often the hero leader thinks that their interests and the organization’s are one and the same, or even that their interests take priority. Such leaders often verge on being narcissistic, and frequently bully subordinates.”
If staff don’t feel safe and trusted, Grono says, they won’t be productive. Persuasion and teamwork works better than diktat, especially when power is actually diffuse in an organization. CEOs need to be aware, he says, of how they define the culture of the organization: if they do not admit mistakes, nobody under them is likely to do so either. He points out the irony that a lack of self-confidence can lie behind an unhealthy desire to control everyone and everything.
Nonprofit leaders at the 2024 Stockholm Forum for Peace and Development debate “rebuilding a trust-based international system”.
What should staffs and boards do when an authoritarian CEO has such a grip on an organization? Grono could have made more space for advice. Furthermore, what should a CEO or other board members do when a single, usually rich individual begins to dominate a nonprofit board and all major decisions? How should CEOs react when individual directors turn their positions or programs into highly-reputed and untouchable silos? Decrying physical harassment is a given, but what should leaders do when high-performing colleagues indulge in another bane of nonprofit life, intellectual bullying?
On another level, Grono assumes that the nonprofits, donors and the communities they serve have the purest of motives – that is, not financial gain, paying high salaries, serving a general strategic or ideological interest or simply wanting to defeat an enemy. However, there are nonprofits that do make money from their activities or serve national causes. The grey zone between the two poles – with international, change-the-world impact at one end and making money or seizing advantage at the other – is quite wide and might have been worth more exploration.
Also, serving and including exploited or vulnerable communities seems logical for organizations interacting directly with them, like Grono’s own Freedom Fund. But what about nonprofits whose “communities served” are something as large as the oppressed of the world, the global poor or any nation at risk of war? Are some nonprofits just one part of the global elite engaged in serving another part of the global elite? Can this be good too, and if so, what service criteria should be applied to these organizations? And are there different principles involved in running a nonprofit of a few hundred people compared to some that have thousands of employees?
Perhaps these more detailed management conundrums would have overloaded the book, which keeps its focus tightly on helping CEOs themselves define their vision, prioritize, collaborate with peers, delegate to avoid burnout, think through strategies and remember that “the planning process is often more valuable than any written strategic plan”.
Turning rebellion into consultation
When writing about building teams, Grono describes a time when he was deputy president of the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization. The 2008 financial crisis had hit the outlook for revenue and his management team prepared a cull of employees. At a retreat soon afterward, he relates how senior Crisis Group staff rallied after dinner to find another way to save the necessary amount of money; those involved in the intervention even demanded that one of them chair retreat discussions on the topic. Grono says he felt “deeply distressed at the way events were unfolding and the realization that my mishandling of the process had let to a staff revolt.”
I was a Crisis Group project director back then and do remember how Grono and other bosses looked uncomfortable at this uprising. But despite hearing one or two fiery speeches, it didn’t occur to me at the time that many people felt he or our president had done anything wrong.
Instead, it was a tribute to Grono’s ability to keep the organization running smoothly that the meeting took place undisturbed, the senior staff’s suggestions were largely adopted, the retreat ended with a standing ovation for the then departing CEO and Crisis Group came out of the storm stronger.
Small wonder too that Grono went on to become a successful CEO himself. This operating manual on how to run nonprofits is sure to help others follow in his footsteps.
I’d like to make a bet that Türkiye – the official name for Turkey since 2021 – is about to make a comeback after years of disastrous economic policies, fear-mongering leadership and regional turmoil.
Being invited this week by the Bruegel think-tank in Brussels for a discussion with Turkish Treasury & Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek felt like reliving the start of a memorable upswing back in the late 1990s. Back then, against the odds, Ankara quelled years of political chaos, conquered runaway inflation and successfully wooed the EU for an invitation to join the club.
If we believe Minister Şimşek, President Erdoğan has abandoned an economic ideology that kept interest rates artificially low and drained foreign currency reserves. Şimşek says he is getting a grip on inflation, promising it will decline after peaking at 70% this month. His past year running the budget has already brought an improved balance of payments, inflows of cash and a lower cost of borrowing. Similarly to the self-imposed stabilization package of the late 1990s, he seemed to have a good economic outlook to talk about.
When I asked him whether any political reforms would follow his recent budgetary measures, he talked up the long-moribund Turkish candidacy to join the EU. He invoked a longing for a “European anchor”, the EU’s “rules-based system” and an “engine” to bring the country back into a “virtuous circle.” His numbers showed how close the two sides remain in economic terms: for instance, the EU accounts for two-thirds of inbound Turkish investment, 41% of Turkish export sales, and 41% of tourists to the country.
The Turks have had a rough decade, going through the crushing of the country’s Kurdish movement, alarming wars close by, the inflow of 3.6 million Syrian refugees, a terrible earthquake in February last year and (as ever) financial crisis. But already during my most recent visit in April, I had the impression an upswing is in the offing. It isn’t just that the opposition swept to power in key municipal elections in March and – despite much Islamification of public spaces over the past two decades – Islamic sloganeering is not such a central fixture. From digital government, to a lack of power cuts, to better roads, to how people talk, things just seemed to be working a bit better.
In Brussels, Şimşek answered questions openly and showed a gentler side of the country long missing from the public stage. “We’d like to mend fences,” he offered.
I asked Şimşek if anyone he met officially in Brussels or other European capitals had responded favourably to his message that “Türkiye is ready”. The minister demurred. Such European encouragement as he received, he said, was more personal than institutional. But “they seem constructive”, he added, and “markets are coming round.”
Just as in the 1990s, a good portion of Şimşek’s Q&A discussed the question of whether Turkish leaders really wanted to join the EU at all – and vice versa. The minister himself preferred, like many Turkish leaders in the past, to plea to focus on “the process”, not the end goal, to see what happened if and when convergence worked.
European participants in the audience seemed to doubt that EU leaders would go that far. When it came to re-embracing the goal of Turkish membership of the EU, “Europe is not ready,” said economist André Sapir, my fellow panelist and a Bruegel Senior Fellow. Former top EU official and ambassador to Ankara, Stefano Manservisi, noted from the audience that even the unique 1995 customs union with the EU was invented to keep the country out.
Indeed, Türkiye’s EU progress report for 2023 points out that accession talks are “at a standstill” since at least 2018. The report is stiff with phrases like “no progress”, “backsliding,” and “serious deficiencies.” As in the 1990s, issues of human rights and rule of law stand out as big obstacles to any normalization.
At the same time, much has changed. One of Şimşek’s slides showed how the old unspoken European prejudice that the country was “too big, too poor and too Muslim” is now at least partly wrong. While purchasing power per capita was just 40% of the European average in 2001, it’s now reached 74%.
Indeed, when I started living in Istanbul in the 1980s, there were just 30 often ageing planes in the Turkish Airlines fleet. That’s about the number of planes I saw last month from one window of Istanbul’s vast new airport, possibly the biggest in Europe. Turkish Airlines says that today’s fleet of over 440 planes serves 272 destinations in more countries than any other carrier in the world.
That’s not all. An economy whose leading exports were hazlenuts and figs in the 1980s now sells drones that change the course of foreign wars. Compared to the 1990s, little armed conflict now happens inside the country. And the 3m-4m people of Turkish origin in EU states are now far better integrated and rising in European societies, changing perceptions of their mother country.
It may be that if technocrats like Minister Şimşek can get Türkiye’s act together, European leaders may accept his revival of Ankara’s old argument that collaboration with a country with its size and growth could be an advantage for the EU, whose combined GDP has now fallen to 17.5% of the global total from 28.6% in 1980. It’s possible too that Europeans can learn to look with new eyes at a richer, potentially better-run, and, dare I say, still relatively secular country.
I remember the December 1999 moment that the EU issued its invitation to join, an amazingly proud and happy day for many Turks. It kick-started years of real progress. Perhaps a more constructive approach from both sides could be an opportunity to bring back those happier days again.
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Postscripton 15 October 2024. I think I won my bet. Four months after writing this, The Economist published this article (10 October 2024):
Setting interest rates in Turkey is like skiing in pre-lift days. Going down is the easy part. Climbing back up is gruelling, and takes ages. The country’s central bankers have been doing so since the summer of 2023, and they still need more time.
They do have something to show for their pains….The economic team he appointed has won back the trust of foreign investors…”
It’s nice to see the country’s economy stabilize. Unfortunately, it’s no quick cure for the pain of constant transitions and uncertainties that continue to bedevil the lives of many ordinary Turks.
“All those who would trust a Citizens’ Assembly to take decisions for them, stand up!”
Half of the 50-strong audience rose to their feet in response to the question posed by Bridie Nathanson, co-founder and joint animator of the Brussels debating club Full Circle.
A sign of changing times? The unexpected endorsement of deliberative democracy came before my fellow pro-Citizens’ Assembly presenter and I had even begun to speak: Eva Rovers, co-founder of the Dutch deliberative democracy organizers Bureau Burgerberaad, and myself, co-editor of my father Maurice Pope’s posthumous book, The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power, published exactly a year ago.
Ideas do sometimes travel faster than you realize. One of them is certainly that of the Citizens’ Assembly: the idea that good policy proposals to solve polarizing problems can come from a group of people randomly selected from a community. This method is also known as sortition. The randomly selected members meet, inform themselves, deliberate with the help of facilitators, hear everyone’s views and find new ways forward.
When my classicist father first typed a manuscript proposing similar kinds of assemblies in the 1980s, as a modernized version of ancient Greek democracy, none of his usual publishers would touch the work. Now there have been at least 800 sortition-based Citizens’ Assemblies around the world since the first one in British Columbia in 2004, most of them in the past decade.
Belgium, where I live, has a permanent Citizens’ Assembly for the German-language community, and the city of Paris has one too. The German Bundestag is running a series of three. In Britain, columnists and podcasters are increasingly referencing, even approving of the concept. It even (briefly) surfaced as a 2024 UK election campaign issue when a Labour Party adviser said these assemblies were a good idea.
Photo by Julius Proost
When Bridie gave me the floor, I spoke a little about how my mother Johanna found the lost manuscript of The Keys to Democracy in the family library after my father’s death in 2019, the publishers Imprint Academic took it on and it is now endorsed by many in the fast-growing field of sortition studies. But mostly I spoke about the experience of being an official observer at France’s recent Citizens’ Assembly on the End of Life.
I wanted the audience to hear and feel how inspiring it was to see ordinary people from a cross-section of society – from an immigrant baggage handler at Charles de Gaulle Airport to a high official of the French Central Bank – all contribute to discussions and reach a clear decision. Over 75 per cent of the 184 citizens endorsed the idea of possible assisted death, but 95 per cent – that is, including those who were against it – endorsed the report, because it had taken their views on palliative care and other mitigating alternatives into account.
The Assembly was inspiring too because of the sense of collaborative joy shared by the citizen participants. I spoke of my amazement that my father, a proud but shy person who spent most waking hours in his library, had understood how random selection would empower people to simply represent themselves. “Democracy liberates,” he foresaw (p. 171). “The less that people feel belittled and the more that they feel they belong to society, the greater will be their zest for life and the more fruitful the energy that they will display.”
Eva Rovers, photo by Julius Proost
Eva Rovers told the story of how she pivoted from art history to deliberative democracy in response to what she saw as the failure of the current government system to come up with policies to deal with the climate emergency. The organization she leads is at the forefront of Citizens’ Assemblies taking off in municipalities all over the Netherlands.
Organized well, she said, Citizens’ Assemblies are proving good at finding innovative solutions to tricky problems. She gave the example of how one Assembly discussing the expansion of a nuclear power plant came up with an unexpected formula to quell disquiet in the coastal province of Zeeland. One of the ideas it suggested was that housing for workers should, after the completion of the project, be offered for occupation first to families of local people. “No architects would ever have thought of that on their own,” she said.
Our Full Circle discussion afterward seemed intrigued by deliberative democracy, even if not all participants were convinced that Citizens’ Assemblies could ever replace elections. My view, refined over my past year of book talks, is that any change will of course take time. Limiting the power of kings started (in England, anyway) 800 years ago; originally aristocratic parliaments took centuries to become the locus of power; and when parliamentary electorates began to expand beyond the elites, it took nearly two centuries to get to universal suffrage in most countries.
But it’s been more than a decade now that groups like Freedom House have recorded backsliding in the long global expansion of elected representative government. Polls show how many people are frustrated at the failure of elected bodies to make decisions in the public interest. I also argued that if we don’t find a path to more efficient government by expanding democracy beyond the confines of party politics and elections, even more people will be attracted to another seemingly more efficient alternative: authoritarian rule.
For sure, it may take many more decades before a majority of the population accepts the idea of giving Citizens’ Assemblies (or whatever develops from them) the full right to make recommendations, let alone have decision-making power. But engaging with so many people open to new ideas for better public decision-making, and seeing several more copies of my late Dad’s once-spurned book on sortition being sold, I feel it is not crazy to hope that change is on its way.
Hugh Pope 