Explore the Ideas That Shape Change
Dive into the insightful works of Carne Ross, where diplomacy, governance, and social justice intersect. From his acclaimed memoir “The Leaderless Revolution” to essays on anarchism and independent diplomacy, Carne’s writings challenge conventional thinking and offer fresh perspectives on global change.
Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite
Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, (UK: Hurst, 2007 and 2017; US: Cornell University Press, 2007). Though 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, I recount my experience, examine what’s wrong with contemporary diplomacy and offer a new vision of how it might be put right.
The Leaderless Revolution
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.