Carne Ross
# Carne Ross

Carne Ross (born 1966) is the founder and executive director of Independent Diplomat, a diplomatic advisory group.

## Career

After graduating from Exeter University, Ross joined the British Foreign Office and worked at the UK embassy in Bonn, Germany before moving to the UK mission to the UN.

He resigned from the Foreign Office after 15 years of service, citing his secret evidence to the Butler Review as the reason. In 2007, he is a supporter of a UN Parliamentary Assembly. In 2004, he founded the non-governmental organisation Independent Diplomat.

## Publications and documentary

Ross published a book called Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite in 2007 and a book called The Leaderless Revolution in 2011. He wrote a play called The Fox.

In the "Acknowledgements" section of his 2013 novel, A Delicate Truth, John le Carré thanks Ross for "his example demonstrat[ing] the perils of speaking a delicate truth to power."

In 2017, BBC4 broadcast a documentary about Ross's life and ideas called The Accidental Anarchist. The documentary charts Ross's change from a civil servant in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to an anarchist. The linguist, cognitive scientist and political activist Noam Chomsky appears in the documentary. Ross explores the philosophy of democratic confederalism developed by Abdullah Öcalan and its influence on Kurdish groups in the Syrian Civil War such as the YPG and YPJ. Ross sees these groups as anarchist.

## Personal life

Ross is the grandson of linguist and academic Alan S. C. Ross.

## Selected works

* Ross, Carne (2007). Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-4557-6.
* Ross, Carne (2012). The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the Twenty-First Century. Blue Rider Press. ISBN 978-0-399-15872-8.
* Ross, Carne (2019). "Chapter 29: The time is now". In Extinction Rebellion (ed.). This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. Penguin Books. pp. 176–180. ISBN 9780141991443.
