Type | Non-profit NGO |
---|---|
Founded | 1995 |
Location | Brussels, Belgium |
Key people | Louise Arbour, President/CEO |
Method | international conflict prevention |
Website | http://www.crisisgroup.org/ |
The International Crisis Group (ICG) is an international, anti-conflict non-profit, non-governmental organization.
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The International Crisis Group was founded in 1995 by World Bank Vice-President Mark Malloch Brown, former US diplomat Morton Abramowitz[1] and Fred Cuny, an international disaster relief specialist who disappeared in Chechnya in 1995. Their aim was to create an organisation, wholly independent from any government, to assist governments, intergovernmental bodies and the international community at large in preventing deadly conflict.
The ICG gives advice to governments, and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, European Union and World Bank, on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict. Its primary goals are a combination of field-based analysis, policy prescription, and aggressive advocacy, with key roles being played by a senior management team highly experienced in government and by a highly active Board of Trustees containing many senior diplomats. By its own accounts, the ICG plays a major role in six ways:
The ICG maintains teams of analysts in 17 field offices worldwide, who are dispatched to areas at risk of outbreak, escalation, or recurrence 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, the Crisis Group publishes a monthly newsletter, CrisisWatch, which provides a brief overview of continuing or impending violence in the world. All of the Crisis Group's reporting is available on its website.
The Crisis Group is co-chaired by former British politician and European Commissioner for External Affairs, Christopher Patten and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Thomas R. Pickering.
Its President and Chief Executive from January 2000 was former Foreign Minister of Australia, Gareth Evans. In July 2009 he was succeeded by Louise Arbour, formerly the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Crisis Group raises funds from mainly western governments, charitable foundations, companies and individual donors. In 2006, 40% of its funding came from 22 different governments, 32% from 15 philanthropic organisations, and 28% from individuals and private foundations. Philanthropist George Soros who is chairman of the Open Society Institute is on the Board of Trustees.[3] And its Advisory Council includes corporations like Chevron and Shell.[4]
The 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 seventeen field offices (in Abuja, Amman, Bishkek, Bogotá, Cairo, Colombo, Dakar, Dushanbe, Islamabad, Jakarta, Kabul, Kathmandu, Nairobi, Port-au-Prince, Pristina, Seoul and Tbilisi), with analysts working in over 50 crisis-affected countries and territories across four continents.
Crisis Group's ten areas of issues research is co-ordinated out of Brussels. Reports published in 2001 and 2005 under the "Issues" heading "draw on lessons from Crisis Group's in-country experience in crisis zones around the world as well as existing studies by research institutions and think tanks."[5] The ten research areas are Islamism, Violence and Reform, Energy Issues, The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), Peace and justice, Gender and Conflict, Climate Change and Conflict, International Terrorism, Democratisation, The European Union and its crisis response capability, and HIV/AIDS as a security issue.[5]
Crisis Group President Gareth Evans served as co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that first fully articulated the doctrine of the Responsibility to protect concept in 2001. The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) holds that sovereign states, and the international community as a whole, have a responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocity crimes.[5]