I am a former British diplomat who resigned in 2004 after giving then-secret evidence to a British inquiry into the war.
After I quit, I founded the world's first non-profit diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat, which advises marginalized countries and groups around the world. In 2007, my critique of contemporary diplomacy was published: "Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite".
You can see more about Independent Diplomat at its homepage www.independentdiplomat.org.
This site offers news about my writing on world affairs and my deepening interest in alternate systems of organising our affairs, in particular anarchism. My new book, "The Leaderless Revolution: how ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century" goes into these ideas in more detail. It will be published in September 2011.
My experience from inside government dealing with some of the most difficult of contemporary challenges - terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan - has convinced me that government, as currently constituted, is a poor and failing mechanism to deal with the world's problems. We need to look for alternatives, not least action by us, ourselves.
Media Work
My work has been profiled in the New York Times and Time magazine. I regularly blog on the Huffington Post. I have appeared on “CNN’s The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer; Al Jazeera English has broadcast a documentary about Independent Diplomat's work. Channel 4 News in the UK asked me to broadcast a video memo to Gordon Brown when he became Prime Minister. I have also been interviewed by the celebrated Jeremy Paxman on British news show, “Newsnight”, and Stephen Sackur on BBC World’s “HARDtalk”.
My book, Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, offers a critique of contemporary diplomacy drawn from my own experience as a diplomat. In analysing the many deficits of the current system - and how that system produces bad decisions - it also offers a vision of what can be put right. You can see more here: