[6] In his first years in the Senate, Evans focused strongly on legal and constitutional reform issues, attracting early attention with his series of attacks on Sir Garfield Barwick, for potential conflict of interest between his role as the Chief Justice of the High Court and his involvement in his family company Mundroola.

He immediately ran into controversy, arranging for the Royal Australian Air Force to take surveillance photos of the Franklin Dam project in Tasmania.

[7] More serious controversy surrounded the Government's handling of national security issues including the Combe-Ivanov affair and the attempted suppression of publication of leaked documents by journalist Brian Toohey, and the allegations of impropriety made against High Court Justice Lionel Murphy, all of which created stress for Evans as an avowed civil libertarian.

As Minister for Resources and Energy from 1984 to 1987[5] he won industry support for his role in rescuing from possible collapse of the huge North West Shelf gas project, managing the Australian fallout from the crash in world oil prices in 1986, and seeking to strike a workable balance, between resource sector and competing interests, on uranium mining, the environment and Aboriginal land rights.

Major contributions to international agenda setting, though not bearing much immediate fruit, were his book on UN reform[15] launched in New York City in 1993, and his initiation with Paul Keating of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

Evans famously became the first person to drop the f-bomb in the Australian Parliament, interjecting "for fuck's sake" during a speech by Senator Robert Hill.

Evans continues to be strongly criticised by many commentators – most prominently Noam Chomsky and John Pilger[21] – for supporting Australia's recognition of Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor following its military invasion in 1975, negotiating (and celebrating "replete with champagne") with then Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas the Timor Gap Treaty, and describing the 1991 Dili massacre as "an aberration, not an act of state policy".

When in June 1995 the resumption of French underground nuclear tests at Moruroa Atoll was announced, Evans generated a storm of press and public criticism for remarking that while Australia deplored the decision "it could have been worse".

In what was described at the time as "perhaps the finest moment in his political career",[24] he played the leading role in getting the government's Native Title Act 1993 through the Senate in one of the Parliament's longest-ever debates[25] following the High Court of Australia's decision in Mabo v Queensland.

He also did not enjoy the move to opposition after thirteen years in government, coining the expression "relevance deprivation syndrome", which – while he was criticised more than applauded for his honesty at the time – is now entrenched in the national vocabulary.

[27] His biographer, Keith Scott, commented that "Overwhelmingly, Evans's period as deputy leader and shadow treasurer – from March 1996 to October 1998 – was his least successful in federal parliament".

[5] In 1994, while Foreign Minister of Australia, Evans committed his government to donate $500,000 as initial funding[29] for Brussels-based conflict prevention and resolution organisation, the International Crisis Group (ICG).

[30] The ICG made important contributions during this period in early-warning bellringing in cases like Darfur and Ethiopia-Eritrea, supporting conflict mediation in situations like Southern Sudan, Kosovo and Aceh, making path-breaking recommendations on Israel-Palestine, Iran and Burma/Myanmar, analysing the different strands of Islamism, and generally providing timely and detailed field-based analysis and recommendations to policymakers on hundreds of separate conflict-related issues.

Although subject to occasional attack for the positions it has taken,[31] the ICG was firmly established by the time of Evans's departure, and has remained, the preeminent international NGO working on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict, praised by leaders across the spectrum from Condoleezza Rice to Hillary Clinton, and regularly being identified as one of the world's most influential think tanks.

[32] In 2000–2001 Evans co-chaired, with Mohamed Sahnoun, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), appointed by the government of Canada to address the issue of genocide and other mass atrocity crimes, which published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001.

The concept was expressly designed to supersede the idea of "humanitarian intervention", which had failed to generate any international consensus about how to respond to the 1990s catastrophes of Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Evans has been widely acknowledged[34] as playing a crucial role in initiating, and advocating the international acceptance of, the concept, first as co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty which introduced the expression in its 2001 report of that name, and subsequently as a member of the UN Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, Co-chair of the advisory board of the Global Centre on the Responsibility to Protect, and as the author of the Brookings Institution-published The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All and many other published works.

He was a member of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, whose report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, addressing mass atrocity crimes and many other UN reform issues, was published in December 2004.

Evans had previously served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1994–97), co-chaired by Cyrus Vance and David Hamburg.

He was also a member of the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, sponsored by Sweden and France and chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, which reported in September 2006.

He is also an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford; a Distinguished Fellow of the Australia India Institute; Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament; and Member of the Advisory Boards of the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy and Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

[38] His other major works include The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Brookings Institution Press, September 2008, paperback edition 2009),[39] which was awarded an Honorable Mention in the US Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award 2009 as one of the best three books on international relations published in the previous year, as well as Australia's Foreign Relations (with Bruce Grant, Melbourne University Press 1991, 2nd ed 1995), Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s (Allen & Unwin, 1993), Australia's Constitution (with John McMillan and Haddon Storey, Allen & Unwin, 1983) and the edited collection, Labor and the Constitution, 1972–1975 (Heinemann, 1977).

[40] Evans introduced the idea of "good international citizenship" in his first major speeches as Australian foreign minister, and repeated and refined it in subsequent writing.

Its defining – and attractive – characteristics were that "the term tends to connote consultation rather than confrontation, reassurance rather than deterrence, transparency rather than secrecy, prevention rather than correction, and interdependence rather than unilateralism".

[47] On 11 June 2012, Evans was named a Companion of the Order of Australia for "eminent service to international relations, particularly in the Asia Pacific Region as an adviser to governments on a range of global policy matters, to conflict prevention and resolution, and to arms control and disarmament.

[50] Earlier in his career he was designated Australian Humanist of the Year in 1990 by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, won the ANZAC Peace Prize in 1994 for his "leadership role in the Cambodian Peace Process", was awarded in 1995 the prestigious University of Louisville $150 000 Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Improving World Order for his 1994 Foreign Policy article "Cooperative Security and Intrastate Conflict", and in 1999 received the Chilean Order of Merit (Grand Officer) for his work in initiating APEC.