Although diplomats negotiate more and more aspects of world affairs
from trade and security issues to health, human rights, and the
environment we have little idea of, and even less control over,
what they are doing in our name. In Independent Diplomat, Carne
Ross provides a compelling account of what's wrong with
contemporary diplomacy and offers a bold new vision of how it might
be put right.For more than fifteen years, Ross was a British
diplomat on the frontlines of numerous international crises,
including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Afghanistan,
and the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, over which he eventually
resigned from the British civil service. In 2005, he founded
Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit advisory firm that offers
diplomatic advice and assistance to poor, politically marginalized
or inexperienced governments and political groups, including
Kosovo, Somaliland, and the Polisario movement in the Western
Sahara, as well as to NGOs and other international
institutions.Drawing on vivid episodes from his career in Oslo,
Bonn, Kabul, and at the UN Security Council, Ross reveals that many
of the assumptions that laypersons and even government officials
hold about the diplomatic corps are wrong. He argues passionately
and persuasively that the institutions of contemporary diplomacy
foreign ministries, the UN, the EU, and the like often exclude
those they most affect. He exposes the very limited range of
evidence upon which diplomats base their reports, and the
profoundly closed and undemocratic nature of the world's diplomatic
forums.As a diplomat, Ross was encouraged to see the world in a
narrow way in which the power of states and interests overwhelmed
or excluded more complex, sophisticated ways of understanding. As
Ross demonstrates, however, the reality of diplomatic negotiations,
whether at the UN or among the warlords of Afghanistan, shows
different forces at play, factors ignored in reductionist
descriptions and academic theories of "international relations." To
cope with the complexities of today's world, diplomats must open
their doors and minds to a far wider range of individuals and
groups, concerns and ideas, than the current and increasingly
dysfunctional system allows."
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