Gordon Karel Weiss
Bio brief
After a career in business and documentary-investigative journalism in former Eastern Bloc countries and Iran, I joined the UN for two decades of communications service focused on multi-faceted peacekeeping, political, and humanitarian crises in some of the world’s most fragile zones, resolving complex mission challenges.
UN work
I was boots-on-the-ground in theatres of seminal and open conflict and disaster, often in isolated conditions in Africa, India, former Soviet Central Asia, the Western Balkans, the Caribbean, the Caucasus, South-East Asia, and the Middle East.
I began my international service work with the OSCE in 1996, and led large teams for the UN in Bosnia and Kosovo, before I was relocated for a year to Pakistan and Afghanistan immediately following 9/11. As UNICEF's head of Emergency Comms based in New York, I managed a full range of interlocking political, aid, emergency, and security issues. I headed UN comms during the final three years of Sri Lanka's civil war, and then led the UN urban agency's global comms team, 2015-18 out of Nairobi.
Other stuff
Between UN engagements, and after authoring The Cage, I was a visiting scholar at Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (dept. of Political Science); a research professor at Griffith University’s Asia Institute (dept. of Government); a joint founder of the International Crimes Evidence Project investigating war crimes; and a director for ActionAid Australia.
As an investigative journalist, I reconstructed one of the worst 'honour' killings of a young Australian Lebanese Muslim woman; was in the the team who traced, located, and exposed members of the "52 Pack" of Bosnia's Nato force Most Wanted war crimes suspects; and reconstructed through digital forensics the murder of hors de combat prisoners of Sri Lanka's war.
Current
Most recently I ran Global Affairs and Emerging Markets for Pressland.com, a publicly-listed company challenging information distortion (mis/disinformation) through rigorous media supply-chain transparency; and am a Senior Fellow of the ARTIS International group, applying research and social science insights to a range of policy, stability, and human development issues around violent extremism of all political persuasions.
I have ongoing projects with a variety of partners and groups concerning the principle of reliable and truth-seeking news and information as fundament of liberal and open society. This includes a focus on fake news, propaganda, deep fakes, infowars and information flooding, gaming, and support to "gatekeeping" public broadcasting as a fundamental institution of 21st century social stability and cohesion which must now be renewed.
Personal
I am the son of an immigrant who became an early female judge in Australia, and a Czech refugee whose 57-member family was killed during the Holocaust (he died last year).
I lived for extended periods in New York, Ashgabat, London, Prishtina, Herat, Colombo, Sydney, Barcelona, Sarajevo, Tokyo, Nairobi, Luanda, and Islamabad. Covid-19 aside, I currently live between Prague and Sicily and Sydney, to which the Scottish part of my family immigrated in the 1820s. I raised two girls, with a Turkmen/Belarusian partner.
I keep bees, love dogs, ride horses, garden, photograph, and built and ran my own jazz/burlesque bar.
Recent media
September 2020
Watching mob violence in the streets of America, I recalled an encounter in Kosovo in 1999. Driving through the country one day in a UN vehicle, I stopped at the house of a man who, some months before, had been dragged from his house by Serbian paramilitaries and made to kneel on the dusty road and was poised for execution in front of his seven daughters.
October 2020
‘When small men begin to cast big shadows’, wrote the Chinese intellectual Lin Yutang, ‘it means the sun is about to set.’ It is a dictum that, like many, functions neatly in reverse. When small countries stand up to the great, it might well be a sign of a new day.
November 2020
A billboard firm cleverly lures clients with a simple slogan on an otherwise blank canvas—unsee this.
Its genius rests on a human trait: we can’t unsee, unhear or unsmell anything. Our senses are primordial devices programmed to extract millions of data points every second, most of it, at some level, novel. Yet the brain can sort and analyse only around 50 points per second in order to assess a possible response.
Photojournalism
The points of light project
