Hugh Pope

Author, Reporter, Editor

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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.
  • What’s next for deliberative democracy?

    What’s next for deliberative democracy?

    “Inspiring”. “Magical”.  “Achieving consensus”. 

    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,” said Emily 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.”

  • Putting a shine on nonprofits – and their leaders

    Putting a shine on nonprofits – and their leaders

    Nonprofits aim to make the world a better place. But could they and their leaders do better themselves? 

    In How to Lead Nonprofits: Turning Purpose into Impact to Change the World – to be published on Tuesday 16 July – long-time nonprofit executive Nick Grono points out the pitfalls and the best-case scenarios of his (and for many years my own) line of work. 

    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.

  • Sensing a Turkish Upswing

    Sensing a Turkish Upswing

    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.

    +++

    Postscript on 15 October 2024. I think I won my bet. Four months after writing this, The Economist published this article (10 October 2024):

    Europe | Struggling back

    Turkey ’s long hard struggle with inflation: High interest rates are starting to do the trick

    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.

  • Full circle for ‘The Keys to Democracy’

    Full circle for ‘The Keys to Democracy’

    “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.

    Photo by Jessica Lutz
  • Writing for Policymakers

    Writing for Policymakers

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

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

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

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

    Among the things I try to stress:

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

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

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

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

  • A ‘thank you’ to Iraqi Kurds in the name of foreign reporters

    A ‘thank you’ to Iraqi Kurds in the name of foreign reporters

    I’m writing with news of something I’ve helped work on for over the past 18 months with one of my heroes, American writer and ex-international correspondent Jonathan Randal. It’s called the Kurdistan Mental Health Project. It’s a ray of hope at a time when people are enduring several conflicts around the world that once again are killing, maiming and uprooting lives.

    Thanks to this project, a gift in the name of the foreign correspondents and researchers who have covered Iraqi Kurdistan’s ordeals, 30 young psychology graduates and practitioners will begin on 16 January 2024 being trained across Iraqi Kurdistan at the start of a two-year course on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

    This ‘talking’ treatment is a first step to help Kurds move sustainably beyond their traumatic history: brutal campaigns by Saddam Hussein, the genocidal Islamic State assault on the Yezidis and other violence that has scarred the region. Despite Kurdish society’s pressing need for access to contemporary psychological treatment, there is not much beyond medication and/or denial being done to overcome the personal and collective damage done by these ordeals.

    You can find out more about the Kurdistan Mental Health Project here on the website of the Anglo-Kurdish charity that thought up the project. The therapy is being taught online by a group of teachers linked to Oxford University and being coordinated on the ground by an Iraqi Kurdish training center.

    The first two years of the project are being paid for by an anonymous gift in the name of friends of Kurdistan, many of them journalists, who researched in or reported on the region. In part, this is a ‘thank you’ to all the Kurds who so generously helped those who travelled there. Despite the risks, they ensured our access to people and safety getting in – and out – of Kurdistan to inform the outside world about their long-suppressed cause.

    Ideally, the project will find new backers to run four years more, at which point we hope the Kurdistan Regional Government will keep it going. You can scroll down to the bottom of the page from here to sign up to a newsletter that will post occasional updates about the project. Or if you like, click here to find out how to make a private donation, if you like.

    We’d love it if you would please help spread the word, which we hope would attract support from outside governments (some are already interested) and the bigger foundations already present in Iraqi Kurdistan. Such institutional funding is likely the best way to get the Kurdistan Mental Health Project on its legs.

    Please do forward a link to this post to anyone you think might like to hear about this, or post a few of your own words on social media with a link to project’s page on the charity website, perhaps accompanied by a picture of yourself in action in Iraqi Kurdistan and the hashtag #kurdistanmentalhealth. These would both be wonderful ways to show solidarity with this initiative.

    Hugh Pope (then a freelancer mainly with The Independent), Jonathan Randal (the Washington Post) and John Pomfret (then with the Associated Press) rediscovering Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 after it had shaken off the rule of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. At that time, there was surprising hope amid the newly liberated ruins of villages razed to the ground by Saddam’s forces. But the shocking legacy of decades of oppression endures.
  • A New Start in the New Year

    A New Start in the New Year

    A new year, a new organization, a new job! I feel very lucky and wish everyone a wonderful new start in 2024 as well.

    From today, I’m joining ACLED, the pre-eminent global researchers, analysts and publishers of data on political violence. I’ll be Chief of External Affairs, coordinating public-facing workstreams like publishing, communications and direct organizational outreach.

    The new role is part of the rapid expansion of ACLED – short for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project – as its unique database of conflict events gains traction with strategists, policy-makers and assessors of risk. The dataset was started just 18 years ago by the chief executive Clionadh Raleigh, also professor of political violence and geography at Sussex University, as part of her PhD work on six West African countries. She and executive director Olivia Russell have now presided over ACLED’s growth to cover all of the world’s 243 states and territories.

    That now includes the United States. In fact, ACLED’s most recent publication Riding the Tide: the Shifting Identity of the Proud Boys since the Capitol riot profiles that country’s far-right groups ahead of elections in November. ACLED data shows exactly how groups like the Proud Boys are on the up and the Oath Keepers are down, and how the Proud Boys jump opportunistically onto far-right political bandwagons: for instance, first demonstrating in support of Trump in 2020-2021, then against abortion in early 2022, and then mainly anti-LGBTQ+ in late 2022-2023.

    On top of widening and deepening its rich treasure chest of data, ACLED now wants to build up its presentation of what it finds, its own analysis of what it means, its support for data literacy and its reputation beyond its home audience in the data elite. I’ve already had fun meeting my new colleagues while working part-time over the past several months, even if I do now feel somewhat daunted by the challenges of my first fully remote workplace: some 250 collaborators in 50 countries all over the world and not a single office.

    As we build up our young communications department, we are hiring, too, so do check out the careers section of ACLED’s website. If you or anyone you know would like to help us to spread the word about how policy and other decisions can be made better if based on what’s actually happening on the ground, please do apply or encourage others to do so!

    My new job brings to a close a delightful two-year sabbatical after my 15 years with the International Crisis Group. I spent much of the time editing and getting published my late Dad’s long-lost book on The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power. I was also fortunate to be inducted into the world of sortition-based democratic reform, which actually has great potential for defusing conflicts too. (Above is a picture after a presentation of the book in Belfast in October with Art O’Leary, the Irish government’s electoral commission chief, Polish academic Joanna Podgorska-Rykoka and Trinity College Dublin sortition expert Peter Stone). I will be unable to stop myself blogging from time to time about breakthroughs in the use of groups of randomly selected citizens to deliberate and take decisions in the public interest.

    But for now, at least, it’s back to trying to understand armed conflict and, I hope, helping people find new ways to make the world a more peaceful place.

    Happy New Year!

  • How the random selection of students could improve universities

    How the random selection of students could improve universities

    Random selection popped up again in a favourite weekend read, the London Review of Books, where a reader in the 7 September 2023 edition raised a non-political application of lotteries that is dear to my heart: the allocation of elite university places.

    Link to letter page here.

    Reacting to an article on affirmative policies in top U.S. academies like Harvard University, Donald Gillies from London suggested that lotteries would be the best way to solve the question of who gets chosen by such institutions, including the University of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. He noted correctly that the system works well for medical training in the Netherlands.

    It reminded me of a page from my late Dad Maurice Pope’s posthumous book The Keys to Democracy: sortition as a new model for citizen power. Beyond advocating a return to the random selection of political decision-makers, as in ancient Athens, he proposes a radical version of sortition for universities too. A former professor himself, he points out how choosing candidates randomly from among those who meet the minimum qualifications for each department could have a revitalising impact on academic life as a whole.

    “Sortition could provide a cure for the snobbery associated with universities. According to the current doctrine of meritocracy, though it is not usually spelled out so plainly, the thirty best physics students of the year go to Cambridge or Leiden or MIT or wherever the most prestigious centre in the country is. The other students are more or less officially labelled as second-best, third-best or fourth-best, as the case may be. The farther down the line the students are, the more inferior the university will be and the lower their sense of self-esteem may fall. They will be classified by society not only as academically but also as socially inferior for having attended an inferior university. Luckily it does not work out quite like this. The doctrine is frustrated in practice both by ignorance among potential students as to which the best university is supposed to be and by inefficient selection and examination procedures on the part of the professors, which means that the best students often miss the best university. Nobody therefore has cause for despair. But if the meritocratic theory of centres of excellence were actually to work, it would be insupportable. In order to encourage the students and the faculties in the reputedly inferior universities, some other way of allocating places would have to be invented. The only fair procedure would be by lottery, the students who qualified for a university place being apportioned at random. An immediate effect might be a lowering of top standards, but only might be, since genius does not always work as examiners and bureaucrats think it ought to. Another effect, equally immediate, would be a raising of morale in all university faculties bar one and a raising of the general standard among graduates.” [p. 171]

    My own experience as one of those lucky enough to get into Oxford makes me agree. My getting in was already pretty random: I was no more or less clever than hundreds of other applicants who were turned away. (I don’t mean the brilliant scholars, just the ordinary students!) My subject was pretty eccentric ­– by my fourth year I was the only one in the whole university studying Persian with Arabic – but in the teaching of mainstream courses I couldn’t see much difference in outcome between Oxford and other good universities. The erratic essay/tutorial system may be one reason that Oxford graduates are notorious for what might be politely described as bluffing. Otherwise, I fail to see why I deserved what turned out to be a lifelong golden key in the perceptions of possible employers and other counterparts.

    As my father says, choosing places by lottery would remove both any undeserved sense of entitlement for getting in and also any stigma for not having been accepted. He doesn’t mention this, but as a Cambridge scholar and Greek poetry prize-winner, I guess he would agree with me to let universities continue to give scholarships to people they really wanted.

    My father and I in the early 1990s when I picked up my MA – to qualify for which, in the entitled Oxford of the time, I only had to survive for ten years after my BA graduation. It was about the same time as my father finished, but could find no publisher for, The Keys to Democracy.

    You can get a flavour my Dad’s radical view of the potential of random selection in his additional suggestion for a sortition-based system that would show which sports club is truly the best.

    “Randomisation … is an antidote to specialisation and to discrimination and has a part to play wherever these exceed their proper boundaries. Suppose, for example, that there was public concern over sport in schools and uni- versities becoming more and more professionalised. Sermons against the hiring of coaches, the granting of athletic scholarships and the increasing gap between pupils and players are not likely to be effective. But if it was genuinely desired to have a system in which all pupils could participate equally, then randomisation could provide it. If it were the rule that teams should be chosen by lot from among all players of the sport, then the school or college would have to give them all equal encouragement and equal training. Matches, instead of showing which institution had the best coach or the best wing-forward or the best coxswain, would show the one in which the general level of the sport was highest.” [p. 170]

  • RIP Thomas Goltz, the journalist who knew no limits

    RIP Thomas Goltz, the journalist who knew no limits

    Few reporters could match the outsize life of Thomas Goltz. He was fearless, unfailingly generous and utterly committed to getting out the news: his version of events, from right up close. He gave an undivided loyalty to any unjustly treated people whose cause he stumbled upon, whether they be Turks, Iraqi Kurds, Chechens, native Americans or the people of Azerbaijan.

    The American reporter and writer died on 29 July in Montana after a long illness, aged 68. To some, he may have seemed over-bearing, a maverick or even a recklessly unguided missile; for many more, like me, Thomas will be deeply missed as a unique, funny and loyal friend and story-teller who made a virtue of never accepting any limits.

    Thomas Goltz taught me how to enter this Soviet-era helicopter through the side porthole after the main door was blocked by Georgians fleeing a defeat in the Abkhaz war. Mountains above Sukhumi, 1993. Photo: Hugh Pope

    Sporting the bushy moustache of a 19th century German general and topping his smoothly shaved head with a variety of Turkish and Caucasian caps, Thomas was an inimitable, all-in reporter.

    Here’s one vignette: during a 1992 moment in the war over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani pilot offered us a flight into a besieged town called Khodjaly. I refused, noting that the helicopter was peppered with fresh bullet holes from the town’s attackers. But Thomas did not hesitate to join a chaotic group of traumatised townspeople for the risky ride back into the maelstrom and impending massacre. I watched him clamber aboard among shopping bags, boxes of ammunition and a canary in a cage, never looking back or having a thought about how he would arrange his return to safety.

    Thomas’s life matched his work. He didn’t just do press-ups, he did them while he was in a handstand, pushing himself up perpendicularly and doing a dozen at a time. He didn’t just write books, they poured out of him, and woe betide the computer keyboard that tried to resist his finger-punching. No good conversation was complete until the volume of his voice had reached that of an amused or outraged outcry.

    Thomas the toast-master regaling another feast. Baku, c. 1992. Photo: Hugh Pope

    “I discarded stage acting to embrace real life theatre,” Thomas told Conversations with History, an hour-long interview with Harry Kreisler of the University of California at Berkeley. Luck, fate and simply being the right person with the right skills at the right time in the right place was what propelled him, Thomas said, to give his heart and soul to the chance stories that crossed his path. He was inspired by people resisting unjust, overwhelming force.

    “I also sallied forth with the pretence of changing the world,” he told Kreisler. “This is common to many journalists, young and old, that that article that you write, that that television program that you do, will be so effective that the viewer, the reader, will stand up and shout: ‘Stop, stop this war! Stop this madness!’ …. Otherwise, it would be almost impossible to do your job in these extremely difficult situations.”

    Hicran and Thomas Goltz, Istanbul 2014. Photo: Hugh Pope

    I first met Thomas when he was one of the only American reporters working out of Ankara, Turkey, in its isolated, post-military coup era of the late 1980s. I remember raucous evenings with him and his thoughtful and equally determined Turkish wife Hicran, a doctor. She was to share several of his adventures in far-flung places and stuck by him to the end, despite his solitary exploits and the self-destructive drinking that interspersed them. I regret – having enjoyed his unaccompanied, no-holds-barred riffs on rock singing – that I never saw him perform as part of a foreign correspondents’ band. But I think it’s for the best that he and Hicran abandoned keeping their one-time pets, a plodding crew of un-house-trained tortoises.

    Thomas Goltz never shared with me his magical method for preparing glaze, but venison bone marrow was a critical ingredient. Istanbul, c. 2004. Photo: Hugh Pope

    Thomas preferred being a host to being a guest – probably so that he could claim the dominant position of what Georgians call the tamada, or toast-master, leading unending rounds of glasses raised to all and sundry – and was an astonishingly good cook, especially of his trademark dish of glazed and barbecued venison. He rarely missed a hunting season in his adopted home of Livingstone, Montana, and would regularly pass through Istanbul with frozen hunks of deer that he had personally shot and carefully butchered in the Montana woods and hills.

    Thomas Goltz was a great friend, making up for his dependable unreliability with tremendous loyalty. Photo: Hugh Pope (R)

    After he moved to the former Soviet Union around 1990, we did much together in the heady early years of independence for Azerbaijan and Georgia. I was the visitor and he was always generous with hospitality, information and contacts. Any rivalry was restricted to my claim to the first outsider to meet the future President Haidar Aliyev, in his native Nakhichevan, back in October 1990; Thomas’s that a year later, he was the first outsider to take a news photograph of the founder of what became Azerbaijan’s ruling dynasty. During our frightening visits to the chaotic front lines of the war over Nagorno-Karabagh, Thomas was always out in front.

    Thomas treasured his finalist’s place in the 1996 Rory Peck awards for his one-person video diary about Russian attacks on a Chechen village, Samashki, and the consequences for its people. He was also thrilled to be given an honorary doctorate recognizing his advocacy on behalf of Azerbaijan, which started long before it became an oil-rich state. He would also have been proud of a glowing obituary in The Caspian Post and an encomium from Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who said “the articles, books he wrote and films he made about the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict … made an invaluable contribution to conveying the true voice of Azerbaijan to the world.”

    Thomas Goltz posing on his Ural sidecar motorbike during the quixotic Oil Odyssey that he organised along the putative route of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Photo courtesy of Robert Mason.

    Thomas brushed aside any cricitism about his no-holds-barred embrace of those he reported about. “A journalist is not a perfectly neutral vessel. We pretend this,” he told Harry Kreisler. “When someone is feeding and protecting you and housing you by definition this will engender loyalties and a certain spin or twist. [There should be] a profound sense of responsibility to one’s subject. There’s no ‘wham, bam, thank you, ma’am’ …. The overriding lesson must be that you, O journalist, must take responsibility for having been there.”

    Books followed his reporting, accompanied by his often excellent photographs. The Caucasus inspired Thomas’s trilogy of ‘Diary’ books on Azerbaijan, Chechnya and Georgia, to which he later added a collection of essays on Türkiye (Turkey). An unfortunately lightly-edited collection of his essays on his years in the Middle East, Zakhrafa, includes tales of his hair-raising encounter with a dissident fellow patient in a Damascus hospital who knew he was about to be killed and his offbeat months as a self-appointed relief worker in Iraqi Kurdistan. My favourite is his Assassinating Shakespeare, an account of his overland journey aged 21 from Berlin to Cape Town earning money part of the way doing (as ever) one-man shows with wooden puppets representing Romeo and Juliet, Othello or King Lear.

    Unusually among reporters, Thomas was also a passionate American patriot. He loved his country, his family from North Dakota, his home and friends in Montana, and would have liked nothing better than to serve the national interest. One of the deep disappointments of his life, he once told me, was how the onset of troubles in his nervous system ultimately ruled out his offer to work alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

    Thomas Goltz enjoyed his role as honorary godfather to Scarlett, my daughter with Jessica Lutz. She remembers being particularly impressed by his impersonation of the dragon lying under the immortal fires of the Chimaera in Olympos, Turkey. Photos: Hugh Pope

    Whether Thomas’s outspoken, outsider style would have lasted long in any official institution is questionable. His bust-ups with newspaper employers were legendary, often after long phone calls in which he excoriated his editors for not sharing his sense of critical urgency.

    Paradoxes abounded elsewhere. Thomas thought telling the story was far more important than any financial reward, yet would anger at how hard it was to get paid. He was a gorgeous writer, but skimped when it came to the critical work of editing. He longed for public applause, but sometimes had difficulty adapting to what his audience was ready to hear. He was an individualist unwilling to travel with translators or what he called the hack-pack, yet he wanted to convert the mainstream to his views.

    Above all, he threw himself into danger as a war correspondent, while hating the likely pointlessness of risking his life.

    “A whole string of people have run up against the brick wall of impossibility, the futility of … changing the world with that one article, or that television program,” he told Harry Kreisler. “At that point you wonder if you are only being an entertainer and that violence is your tool to entertain.”

    Wherever you’ve gone now, Thomas, I’m sure you’re entertaining them still. Nobody will be calling me “Hugolinavitch!” down here any more , but I hope one day I’ll meet you somewhere again to hear that happy cry.

    Thomas Goltz in Olympos, Turkey, c. 2008. Photo: Hugh Pope
  • Three Surprises at the Launch of ‘We-mind vs. Me-mind’

    Three Surprises at the Launch of ‘We-mind vs. Me-mind’

    Perhaps because I accompanied my wife and author Jessica Lutz as she found, tested and ordered her ideas over the past seven years, I need little to convince me that her latest book contributes a powerful new way both to understand and also to run our human world.

    Still, I was in for more than one surprise at the 6 July publication launch of We-mind vs Me-mind: A New Vision for Success in Leadership and Life here in Brussels. Most of all, I was bowled over by how the strong women guest speakers had already made Jessica’s breakthrough language their own.

    Jessica Lutz, Georgia Brook and Helene Banner

    First up was Helene Banner, from Germany and the youngest person ever appointed a EU spokesperson. After a successful decade in European institutions, she has now, like Jessica, dedicated herself to solving the dilemmas faced by many women leaders as they fulfil their ambitions for promotion but lose faith in the often blinkered, hierarchical organisations they serve. Because of the mismatch she felt in the workplace – always being pressured to speak, act and even laugh differently from what came naturally to her as a woman – she gave her new platform a tongue-in-cheek name: Let’s Just Be Imperfect, Ladies!

    Beyond the gender lens

    Helene Banner

    “I felt, when reading your book, as if you were speaking from my heart,” said Helene. “You are finding words here for what many us women feel. So many of us feel represented and recognised by this term that you have coined, the We-mind rather than the Me-mind. This is what I call the more feminine approach to leadership: leading by building alliances rather than thinking in hierarchical terms; building teams; working for win-win situations with women’s empathy and their sensitivity to others, acknowledgment and anticipation of what others may think. When you coined it as the We-mind vs the Me-mind, I was like: Thank you so much! You found a term to go beyond the gender lens. That is such a breakthrough!”

    Next to speak was Georgia Brooks, whom the newspaper Politico had just two days before named one of the most influential 40 people in Brussels. Of British and Egyptian heritage, Brooks founded and leads The Nine, a club for women members only, and she had invited Jessica to launch We-mind vs Me-Mind in the garden of The Nine’s beautifully re-appointed belle époque townhouse barely one hundred metres from the European Commission. Georgia fully agreed with what Helene and Jessica were trying to get across.

    Georgia Brook

    “The tide is changing. People are waking up to realise that we have to do something,” Georgia told the capacity audience. “The great resignation is happening. Middle to high managers, female, are leaving …. If companies really want to attract and keep their strong female talent it is a question of training and work culture. You come in as a young woman, you are ambitious, you are keen to progress. Then there’s a little bit of, like: No, no, stay down stay in your box. We are taught to stay in our lanes, be good girls, colour within the lines. Then [others] are rewarded for being a little bit cheeky, a little bit naughty, breaking the rules. [Former British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson is a great example of someone [who is] so Me-minded.”

    Reframing leadership

    My second surprise was how much Helene and Georgia agreed with something that I had tried and failed to argue against while Jessica was writing the book. For me, the idea of We-mindedness seemed most useful as a new way of looking at human interactions, which might then nudge us all to a more collective approach. Jessica disagreed. She firmly believes that We-minded leadership can become a credo of an active, whole new style of management for both women and men. So did her two co-speakers, I discovered.

    “What Jessica does very well is to reframe ‘What is leadership?’, ‘What is success?’ and to move beyond the more gendered stereotypes and roles,” Georgia said. “It is very important for women to own the room and to step into their power and presence. Which is not to say we have to be like men …. It’s more about the team spirit, it’s about all of us who can … move the conversation together as opposed to individuals on plinths, the very siloed approaches and individualistic goals.”

    Including men was another argument that resonated strongly. As Jessica points out in the book’s preface, her inspiration to write the book after returning to Europe from a reporting career in Turkey followed her surprise “that the battle for equality was still not settled in the West. At the same time, it bothered me that usually the only explanation given was to blame the men, the ‘patriarchy’, for blocking us with a glass ceiling. I had worked among men all my life, and always enjoyed it. I love men. So that argument didn’t sit well with me, even though I’m the first to acknowledge that sexism can seriously hamper a woman’s career.”

    Jessica wanted her years reading up on the science of it all to find language that would go further than the usual debates. “Many men switch off the moment we start talking about gender. I do too,” she said. “This is more about two different value systems, that we all have. We all have a We-mind and a Me-mind. We lean to one of the two sides. Men tend to lean more to the ‘me’ side. But that’s not a dogma. There are 40 percent of men who are more We-minded, and 15 percent of women who are more Me-minded … Our definition of leadership is very Me-minded. I believe, and I think I have also found scientific grounds to say that the We-mind can be just as good as a leader as the Me-mind.”

    Helene also spoke of her frustration at the way men usually felt as if the question of differences between men and women’s approach to life and work were nothing to do with them, either because it was unfamiliar territory that made them nervous or because they believed that quotas for women managers were blocking their careers. Jessica’s approach, she believed, offers a new way forward.

    “Thank you for introducing us to language we can use to share how we feel as leaders in our workplaces … Thank you for finding the words and for speaking on behalf of so many women who often go to work stumbling [against] the glass ceiling, thinking: I’m not tough enough yet, I have to become more assertive, I have to hide my emotions, I need to cry in the bathroom not the boardroom,” she said. “In your book, you are giving us permission to be in our We-mind, to feel confident as We-minders to change the world and workplaces.”

    My third surprise

    My own many discussions with Jessica over We-minded values have left me in no doubt that giving them more weight would improve the state of the world. Indeed, her research and writing has buttressed my own enthusiasm for the ultimate tapping into our common We-mind: democratic reforms that would give everyone a chance to contribute to policy making through random selection, or sortition.

    For a video clip, click here.

    But none of this prepared me for my third big surprise of the launch event. It is traditional in the Netherlands, from where Jessica comes, to give a first copy of the book to somebody whose contribution the author truly values. In the months before the event, Jessica had discussed a few names – for instance, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo, whom Jessica met at the launch of his book The Age of Women: Why Feminism also Liberates Men – but I didn’t know what she had done about it.

    So, after she told the audience how the Prime Minister had declined her invitation, it was a shock to hear Jessica calling me up to be that honoured person. Suddenly there I was: a somewhat Me-minded man standing in front of an audience largely of women to receive a book mainly about women from a woman. My eyes were not dry as I stammered through my admission that indeed Jessica had long converted me to her way of thinking. But neither, our daughter Scarlett informed me later, were the eyes of several others in the audience.

    Long live that moment that Jessica formally delivered her We-minded idea to the world in such a We-minded way.

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