Stay up for Stephen's guest, Carne Ross, though.
Here's a bit from his bio at CarneRoss.com:
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...
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.
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.
(Wikipedia, natually, has more details (about Independent Diplomat, too.)
And here's from theLeaderlessRevolution.com:
Bio
Carne Ross was a high-flying British diplomat who worked on many of the world’s toughest issues, including Afghanistan, terrorism, and climate change. After working on Iraqi WMD and sanctions at the UN Security Council, he was one of only two British diplomats to resign over the 2003 Iraq War. That experience forced him to confront the deeper problems of a volatile, globalized world. A frequent commentator on current affairs on CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera, and a contributor to Huffington Post and The Guardian, Ross also founded, and now runs, Independent Diplomat, a non-profit advisory group that assists democratic countries and political groups around the world. He lives in New York City.
OWS
Carne Ross has been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement since the early days, attending General Assembly and spokescouncil meetings. He also established and now helps facilitate an OWS working group on alternative banking, now called the “Occupy Bank Working Group”, which is discussing possible new and ideal banks, that embody the principles of OWS, and avoid the many deficits of contemporary for-profit banks...
Lots more there, including this summary of the book, The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century :
There are few books that attempt to interpret the world and how it is run. The Leaderless Revolution offers a refreshing and pungent contrast to the Panglossian optimism of Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat but, like that book, it offers a way of understanding the world of the 21st century that is both clear and easily comprehensible. Carne Ross takes different angles on contemporary issues - economics, politics, the state of democracy, the environment and terrorism - wrapping them into a unified explanation of how money and power function to control the lives of the earth’s inhabitants, such that they feel powerless to affect their collective future. It seems that mankind has settled upon liberal democracy as the ideal form of government. Its triumph with the collapse of communism signalled the end of ideological struggle and thus of history.
The Leaderless Revolution shows however that even in democracies, many if not most of the population feel that they are excluded from any agency over the issues that most trouble them, while governments appear less and less able to influence the global problems that threaten our peace and comforts. Mining the rich but little-examined history of anarchism, and updating the philosophy for today’s needs, The Leaderless Revolution offers a refreshing and original prescription for the problems of today. Not only an antidote to our global crises; Carne Ross offers, moreover, a route to fulfillment and self-realisation.
It was released last September in the UK (made a 2011 Book of the Year list), and in January over here. Reviews & such at Amazon.uk, Amazon, and B&N -- which has both of these, from Publisher's Weekly & Kirkus:
Publishers Weekly
Writing before the Occupy movement erupted, Ross (Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite) explores how the current interconnectedness of the world provides a fecund framework for leaderless revolutions, and why we should take advantage of it. Drawing on his experience as a former British diplomat, Ross believes we need to replace the current political system with what Stanford Professor James Fishkin calls "deliberative democracy," wherein a representative sample of individuals are brought together to decide on an issue. Ross wants people to take back the power from special interest groups and lobbyists and make their own decisions in a collaborative environment, trusting people to manage their own affairs. He cites successful examples in post-Katrina New Orleans (where 92% of involved citizens supported the "Unified Plan" for rebuilding the city) and in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Though Ross urges individuals to act, he provides no real specifics on how to proceed beyond encouraging people to locate their convictions, "act as if the means are the end," and use nonviolence. It may be that the leaderless nature of the revolution prevents Ross from being too prescriptive, but readers expecting a precise answer to the titular "How" will be disappointed.
Kirkus Reviews
A personal assessment of the transforming power of consultative democracy in the coming century. Political advisor Ross (Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, 2007, etc.) looks back at his disaffection with the British diplomatic service and resignation in the wake of the exposure, and subsequent suicide, of the government's top weapons-inspection scientist David Kelly. He had been intimately involved with Iraq sanctions and the buildup to war, as well as many other conflict situations, and he portrays the violence resulting from official "group think" with the Milgram experiment's proof of people's unquestioning potential for cruelty. The author provides many fascinating personal insights into the crises not only in Iraq, but also Afghanistan, Kosovo, Mauretania and Sudan. While many will be drawn to this aspect of his account, Ross' concern is not the past but the lessons to be applied now. In his view, the nation-state basis for the international diplomatic order has been undermined by the increasing power of particular interests acting through global institutions. Writing that society requires "authority in order to enjoy peace and stability," Ross questions authority itself by pointing to some of the worst outrages in human history--e.g., Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union. In democracies as well, he writes, "the very rules and institutions established to protect us in fact do the opposite," mainly because people tend to abdicate responsibility when they empower elected representatives to act on their behalf. Ross is an advocate for deliberative democracy--typified by Gandhi's nonviolent movement against the British in the 1920s and '30s--which he distinguishes from terrorism, anarchism and representative government. Intriguing but not entirely convincing. Stay tuned to see if the author's contentions play out in the next decade or so.
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