Quotes of the Day

Forecasting the future is rarely a rewarding exercise. Calamities averted earn you little credit, yet warnings that go unheeded—weakened levees in New Orleans or radicals preaching hate in London's mosques—only serve as unwelcome evidence exposing ill-prepared governments. Sidney Jones knows the feeling. She's the Jakarta-based Southeast Asia project director for International Crisis Group, an NGO headquartered in Brussels and headed there by the plain-speaking former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. Two months before the 2002 Bali bombings, Jones released a meticulously researched, prescient report on the danger posed by Jemaah Islamiah (J.I.), the Southeast Asian network of extremists now widely believed to have masterminded those attacks. Few paid heed at the time, but after the attacks, Jones' thorough descriptions of the background and training of key J.I. members proved invaluable to the multinational investigative team. "That's the advantage of having long-term contacts and a real depth of field experience," says Jones, whose 13 years working with Muslim prisoners in Indonesia as a human-rights advocate gave her wide access to the country's Islamic militants.

For 10 years Crisis Group has undertaken the task of predicting and resolving deadly conflicts worldwide—from North Korea, where the group's analysts are widely considered to be the foremost experts on the opaque nation's economic and political maneuvers, to the nuclear-tinged relations between Pakistan and India. Evans believes that tensions and grievances need to be recognized early, before they erupt into violence. The delicate business of defusing the planet's powder kegs is left to the group's local experts who transform exhaustive on-the-ground research into erudite reports and policy recommendations. Crisis Group's influential board of directors—whose names read like a Who's Who of global power brokers, from George Soros to Chris Patten—ensure that those reports reach the highest ranks of international decision-makers. "What we do is a long-haul process," says Evans, whose own credits include the U.N. peace plan for Cambodia, the establishment of APEC, and a commitment to arms control. "We're not getting into a sexy conflict, getting all the parties into a room, then emerging with our arms aloft and getting the Nobel Prize."

Crisis Group's grassroots approach to resolving long-running conflicts is what sets it apart from other think tanks. Since assuming leadership in 2000, Evans has put together a crack team of locally based researchers like Jones (he calls her "a living national treasure"), who can zero in on trouble spots that itinerant political analysts often miss. Last summer, for example, the U.N. Security Council was considering the Somali government's request for an armed peacekeeping mission to quell civil unrest. The African Union had already endorsed the plan, but Crisis Group saw nothing but quicksand. The interim government's call for foreign troops was deeply divisive in Somalia. In Crisis Group's judgment, an external military intervention at that point might have derailed the peace process and rekindled the fighting. Evans said as much in a strongly-worded letter to Kofi Annan and the Security Council, recommending instead a three-step approach: revive dialogue between the rival factions; arrange a cease-fire; and establish a consensus before the deployment of any foreign troops. The Security Council agreed. "We've always got to be thinking ahead," says Evans. "Nobody noticed, but I think we did stop a war in Somalia." No mean feat.

• Aryn Baker
• The Problem-Solvers