Bio brief
I served the UN, the OSCE, and compatible governments for almost three decades of work focused on multi-faceted peacekeeping, political, and humanitarian crises in some of the world’s most fragile and conflicted zones. I was boots-on-the-ground in Africa, India, Af/Pak and former Soviet Central Asia, the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, the Caucasus, South-East Asia, and the Middle East, including first response operations.
Since June 2022 I lead the the Planet Humana Fund, a new private philanthropic organisation based out of Providence, Rhode Island, and Sydney. Planet Humana provides grants to individuals and organisations doing high-impact and innovative frontline work across a range of human rights, development, humanitarian, and media projects throughout the globe. We currently work in Kenya, Argentina, Sri Lanka, and East Timor, with the bulk of our work in Ukraine.
I've been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Salon, and various institutes, and have been interviewed by numerous Australian, U.S., European, and Asian news outlets, including the BBC, CNN, Sky News, and NPR. Formerly, I was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney's Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of Political Science, and an Adjunct Professor at Griffith University's Department of Government.
Personal
I'm the father of a beautiful daughter, and the son of an immigrant who became an early female judge in Australia, and a Czech refugee whose 57-member family was killed during the Holocaust. My primary home is Australia, to which the highland Scots part of my family immigrated in the 1820s as early pioneers in Tasmania and the Mildurra district on the Murray River.
Recent media
November 2024
While security forces stayed their guns and truncheons in those weeks, protesters forced the resignation of then Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. His tough-guy brother Gotabaya, vanquisher of the Tamil Tiger rebel army in 2009, and later president, soon abandoned post and jetted out of the country like a Bond-baddie, leaving a froth of bad foreign debts in his wake for successors to clean up.
November 2024
I’m in a basement in Kyiv, having just returned from the frontline eastern city of Kharkiv. Psychologists, neuro-scientists, battlefront combat medics, diplomats, army commanders, and chief medical officers attached to combat formations have gathered to consider a phenomenon which not only menaces Ukraine’s survival as a functional democracy, but also her capacity to recover and rebuild when peace finally returns to this battered land. This is the phenomenon of what was once called “shell shock” which is produced by the sheer scale of Russian firepower.
October 2024
What has been surprising for many in the Western generation, which came of age at the end of the Cold war, is the resurgence of totalitarianism as a political force in great power politics, and as a political instinct now playing out in the echelons of elite Western universities, and in the streets of liberal democratic countries whose systems make open protest possible. It comes from the Left and the Right.
May 2024
A few days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I arrived on the border of Ukraine and Poland along with my former UN colleagues to pitch in with assistance. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were streaming across the border, guided into Poland with great sensitivity by the usually brusque Polish border guards. The long lines of Ukrainian civilians, wrapped up against the freeze and clutching their household pets, were largely hushed, too exhausted to do more than quietly talk among themselves as they waited patiently to pass the border gates.
May 2024
The European spring is breaking, and Kyiv is abundant with flowering chestnut trees. The perfumed thaw, however, is blighted by the recent squandered lives of Ukrainian troops 500 kilometres to the east. This resolute army has waited vainly for the armaments needed to match the Russian winter onslaught. These weapons, now en route after months of crippling delay through US Congressional bickering and European dithering rebuked by French President Emmanuel Macron, might have saved many Ukrainian lives.
September 2020
Watching mob violence in the streets of America, I recalled an encounter in Kosovo in 1999. Driving through the country one day in a UN vehicle, I stopped at the house of a man who, some months before, had been dragged from his house by Serbian paramilitaries and made to kneel on the dusty road and was poised for execution in front of his seven daughters.
October 2020
‘When small men begin to cast big shadows’, wrote the Chinese intellectual Lin Yutang, ‘it means the sun is about to set.’ It is a dictum that, like many, functions neatly in reverse. When small countries stand up to the great, it might well be a sign of a new day.
November 2020
A billboard firm cleverly lures clients with a simple slogan on an otherwise blank canvas—unsee this.
Its genius rests on a human trait: we can’t unsee, unhear or unsmell anything. Our senses are primordial devices programmed to extract millions of data points every second, most of it, at some level, novel. Yet the brain can sort and analyse only around 50 points per second in order to assess a possible response.
