So here I am, whirring away to devise a new one-day module on Diplomatic Crisis Management. Imagine my surprise to see that Buckingham University got there first, with a full module on this very subject:

Module outline

  1. The nature of Conflicts and Crises
  2. Non-Diplomatic Tools of Conflict Resolution: Arbitration; Humanitarian Intervention; Peace keeping
  3. Diplomatic Tools of Conflict Resolution: Negotiations; Mediation; Good Offices
  4. Diplomatic Signalling in Conflict Resolution
  5. Crisis Management
  6. Contingency Planning
  7. Reputation Management
  8. State and Nation Building
  9. Review

Not having the time or inclination to suggest that my victims compose a 15,000-word dissertation that I might have to read, I am looking instead at something short and snappy.

The key thing to grasp is that each crisis is different, with its own dynamics and traps. But some broad categories of crisis can be identified.

Thus some crises directly affecting diplomats are caused by scandals. Others have an acute consular dimension: sizeable numbers of victims of a terrorist attack or natural disaster or a major accident such as a plane crash. Others have a primarily political focus. Conflicts and wars of course create prolonged dramatic opportunities for diplomatic confusion and bad judgement.

Some crises are focused on an embassy as such. See, for example, my painful experience with that leaked email in Poland in 2005. In a serious consular case an embassy may have a lead role but be expected to operate in difficult conditions far from the national capital (eg if a coach full of holiday-makers from your country has crashed in a mountainous area). Or an embassy might simply be doing its bit as part of a huge, wider drama affecting many countries simultaneously (eg the Asian tsunami disaster, or the UK embassy in Libya now trying to make sense of the accelerating disarray across that country and offer advice on the Mediterranean ‘migrant’ problem).

The capacity and willingness of the local state to help vary enormously. In some cases the local state’s activities may be directly causing the crisis that immediately involves the embassy (eg when the Russian government in 2004 raided the offices of the British Council), so the hapless diplomats on the spot can not turn to the local authorities for support. In other cases the host state’s blunders are creating a vast mess that leads to huge problems for embassies as collateral damage (not much fun working in the Commercial Section of any Western embassy in Venezuela these days).

Some crises almost defy categorisation. Such as the car-crash involving Diana, Princess of Wales in the early hours of 31 August 1997. The impact on the UK embassy in Paris was overwhelming on all sorts of levels simultaneously. Vast new unexpected areas of highly sensitive and potentially controversial work were created and continued for months if not years, changing the lives and careers of the diplomats involved.

Plus, of course, the impact of a diplomatic crisis at the key embassy concerned may be very different to how it all looks back in the Foreign Ministry. The embassy has depth – the Ministry has breadth. They see different things as important/vital, and usually find it hard to grasp each other’s operational priorities and limitations. Apart from anything else, an embassy tends to have one crisis at a time, whereas a Foreign Ministry may have several going on simultaneously – and have firm views about which crisis most deserves the Minister’s close attention and any spare cash.

And so on.

How best to teach anything useful on this sprawling inchoate subject in just a few hours?

The one thing defining how an embassy handles a crisis is communication. Communication with itself. With HQ. With the host authorities. With the public. With the media. Last but not least, with its own information: as news and rumours and contact details flood into an embassy during a consular emergency, are there systems in place to record everything accurately and access it later? Is the switchboard able to cope? Have you set up reserve phone-numbers for use only in an emergency? Does your up-country emergency kit include chargers for the spare mobile phones? What if they can’t get a signal? When in doubt invest some time and money in setting up some spare capacity so that your team can move into turbo mode very quickly

The other key organisational feature of crisis is getting everyone prepared to do quite different things, with much reduced regard to hierarchy. Embassy colleagues need to understand that it is part of their job to be ready and willing to drop what they are doing and tackle something unexpected and maybe disagreeable (eg manning the telephones to take calls from stressed-out relatives of people who may or may not have been involved in a signifiant local accident). If a coach full of UK holiday-makers crashes in Serbia, the embassy in Belgrade may well get hundreds of calls and emails from panicking people whose relatives are safe and not involved, sunning themselves in faraway Dubrovnik. Having a contingency plan in place to take down key details of potential victims and their contacts back in UK or elsewhere saves an awful lot of messing around once a crisis erupts. And you might well need a reasonable paper-trail to explain your actions to a later official enquiry if all has not gone well.

Then there’s money. Any significant crisis will cause unbudgeted-for extra spending. The UK system at least is flexible enough to cope with this quite well. But the people on the spot need (without going mad) to be ready to think outside existing categories and press on to get the job done, then send HQ the bill in slower time. Sometimes that bill may be quite large. I recall a German ambassador telling how he decided on his own initiative to charter a plane to get German tourists evacuated quickly when local law and order collapsed. He realised that going through ‘the usual channels’ would take too long and might put lives at risk. In effect he called the bluff of the System: “You won’t like this sudden $350,000 bill much, but I suspect that you won’t want to embarrass yourselves with the public by not paying it and somehow trying to blame me for wasting taxpayers’ money in saving actual taxpayers!“

Finally, media.

No-one knows what the media is/are any more. There are still newspapers and TV/radio channels. But increasingly they all draw on raw material found on the Internet to create their ‘stories’. So if one of your embassy team has a brief but vivid row with a distressed UK citizen whose demands are utterly unreasonable and someone films that row on a smartphone and posts that clip on the Internet, THAT footling incident can become the ‘story’ and ‘frame’ the embassy’s efforts, regardless of the merits of the case and regardless of all the other heroic things you and your team are doing to help hundreds of grateful people. Not much to do about that, other than to grit your teeth and plough on. But do what you can to make sure that your team grasp that this dimension of their work and its consequences has to be borne in mind as they tackle a crisis, when they too may be getting tired and upset by all the surrounding misery.

Conveying just the right tone in media statements while keeping control of the core message(s) is easier said than done. A while back the FCO issued this awful advice for ambassadors and others talking to the media after a major consular episode: the FCO’s 3 Ps:

What the public expects to hear…

PITY:             sympathy for the victims and their families

PRAISE:        praise for/thanks to the emergency services etc

PLEDGE:     a pledge to get to the bottom of what has happened – and learn any lessons

Isn’t there something at once and mendacious, mawkish and manipulative about this way of contriving a media reaction (The Crawford 3 Ms)? Yet no doubt something along these creepily banal lines will look good on TV.

One UK ambassador faced with a massive consular case involving just one missing child took a bold and (as it turned out) successful line with the media. He gave only statements when he had something to say, and answered no questions and gave no briefings. No-one else from the embassy was allowed to talk to the media about the embassy operation. This stringent policy allowed him and the embassy to keep control of their part of this complex and awful problem. Plus it maintained the embassy’s trust with the family and with the host authorities with whom the embassy was working closely to try to make progress.

As usual, even in a crisis?

Be clear to separate out what’s important from what matters. Less is more.