International Crisis Group

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The International Crisis Group is an international, non-profit, non-governmental organization whose mission is to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy.

When a country is at risk of outbreak, escalation or recurrence of large scale violence, Crisis Group dispatches teams of political analysts into or close to the area of conflict. Based on the information these teams gather, the organization creates analytical reports with recommendations targeted at various world leaders and organizations. In addition to this work, Crisis Group publishes a monthly newsletter, CrisisWatch, which provides a brief overview of continuing or impending violence in the world.

As an analytical and report-generating organization, Crisis Group works with governments, international organizations, and media outlets to publish and disseminate their reports and briefing papers, which are also available on its website.

Crisis Group is co-chaired by former British politician and European Commissioner for External Affairs, Christopher Patten and Boeing's former Senior Vice President, International Relations, Thomas R. Pickering. Its President and Chief Executive since January 2000 has been former Foreign Minister of Australia, Gareth Evans.

Crisis Group's international headquarters are in Brussels, with advocacy offices in Washington DC (where it is based as a legal entity), New York, London and Moscow. The organisation currently operates fifteen field offices (in Amman, Belgrade, Bishkek, Bogotá, Cairo, Dakar, Dushanbe, Islamabad, Jakarta, Kabul, Nairobi, Pretoria, Pristina, Seoul and Tbilisi), with analysts working in over 50 crisis-affected countries and territories across four continents. In Africa, this includes Angola, Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia, Rwanda, the Sahel region, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe; in Asia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kashmir, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar/Burma, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan; in Europe, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro and Serbia; in the Middle East, the whole region from North Africa to Iran; and in Latin America, Colombia, the Andean region and Haiti. Crisis Group raises funds from governments, charitable foundations, companies and individual donors.

The Crisis Group was founded in 1994 by World Bank Vice-President Mark Malloch Brown, former US diplomat Morton Abramowitz and Fred Cuny, an international disaster relief specialist who disappeared in Chechnya in 1995.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said of Crisis Group: "[T]he International Crisis Group [is] a global voice of conscience, and a genuine force for peace. Your mediation work – and your leadership in early warning and conflict prevention – have been enormously important. So has your intellectual contribution to finding new approaches to long-standing conflicts. Your well researched and carefully argued reports have greatly helped us in understanding the origins and complexities of the conflict in which we become involved – often at short notice" (5 October 2002).