Michael Fischer

Michael M.J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, as well as Lecturer in Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School.  He trained at Johns Hopkins, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago (PhD).  He has taught at Chicago, Harvard, Rice, and MIT, serving as Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Rice, and Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT.  He has done fieldwork in the Caribbean, Iran, India, and currently in Southeast Asia on new initiatives in the biosciences and biotechnologies

He works in four primary areas:

(1) The anthropology of the biomedical sciences and technologies  He has worked with the Genome Institute of Singapore and the Human Geonome Organization (HUGO) on social and ethical issues associated with genomics and with capacity building in the Asia-Pacific region; and with the MIT- Indian Department of Biotechnology project to establish a Translational Medicine Institute in New Delhi on the MIT Health Science and Technology (HST) model.  He has also helped the National University of Singapore to establish an STS cluster, and is engaged at the new Singapore University of Technology and Design to do the same.  He co-edited A Reader in Medical Anthropology:  Theoretical Trajectories and Emergent Realities (with Byron Good, Mary Jo Good, and Sarah Willen). 

(2)  The anthropology of media circuits, with foci of regional attention to the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia.  He has authored three books on Iran (Iran from Religious Dispute to Revolution, on the training of religious leaders in the seminary town of Qum; Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues between Postmodernity and Tradition (with Mehdi Abedi) on oral, literate and visual media in Iran; and Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges in the Transnational Circuitry (2004) on interpretations of the national epic, the Shahnameh, and the films of social repair after the Iran-Iraq war. More recently he has been tracking the explosion of arts and media in Singapore and Asia.

(3) Anthropological methods for the contemporary world with specially attention to the interface between science and technology and anthropology.   He has publishedAnthropology in the Meantime (2018), Anthropological Futures (2009), Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (2003), and (with George Marcus)Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986, 2nd ed. 1999). He edits a book series (with Joe Dumit) on Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, and Anthropological Voices, which has 42 volumes out as of fall 2020    

(4) Anthropology of comparative religions: stratification and Protestants in Jamaica (“Value Assertion and Stratification: Religion and Marriage in Rural Jamaica”); Zoroastrians, Shi’ites, Jews and Baha’is in Iran (Zoroastrian Iran: Between Myth and Praxis); class-linked religiosities in Iran (Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution) and the Muslim world (“Islam and the Revolt of the Petite Bourgeoisie”); interpretive debate and cultural critique in Shi’ism and Iran (Debating Muslims); autobiographical genres of religious leaders in Islam, Judaism, Jainism (“Portrait of a Mullah”; “Imam Khomeini: Four Ways of Understanding”; "Autobiographical Voices (1,2,3) and Mosaic Memory: Experimental Sondage in the (Post)Modern World” [al-Hallaj and Massignon; R. Nachman of Breslau and Arthur Green; Shabbatai Zvi and Gershom Scholem; Jain social worker Santabalji and Minister of State Navalbahi Shah).  

Michael has been a wonderful friend since our undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins University in the mid-60’s. He advised me on many matters while I directed the Institute, from the applicability of the IRB process to the social sciences when we prepared our students for research abroad to helping to prepare and lead two distinctive, unique student delegation trips, one to Iran, another to Israel and the West Bank.

Mort Rosenblum

Mort Rosenblum, former chief international correspondent for the Associated Press and editor of the International Herald Tribune, now defines himself as “Reporter. Desert Rat/River Rat. Errant Quixote.” He runs the Mort Report: Non-Prophet Journalism, dividing his time among Paris, Provence, Tucson and reporting trips.

Rosenblum printed his first newspaper at six – “a pathetic biweekly,” he recalls -- on a toy press in his bedroom in Tucson. He edited his high school paper and, at 19, left the University of Arizona to work on the Mexico City Times and the Caracas Daily Journal. He returned to finish his degree and work on the Arizona Daily Star. He joined AP in Newark in 1965 and two years later, at 23, went to cover a mercenary war in the Congo. Since then, he ran AP bureaus in Kinshasa, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Paris.

He has written from seven continents on subjects ranging from war to tango dancing by the Seine. He covered the Biafra secession from Nigeria, Vietnam, the violent birth of Bangladesh, Central American mayhem, Israeli wars, the Iron Curtain collapse, Bosnia and Kosovo, and two Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and Somalia, among other conflicts. In Argentina in the 1970s, he broke the first stories on the Dirty War. He wrote the first African famine stories in 1984. In 1989, he won an Overseas Press Club award and was short-listed for a Pulitzer for the fall of Romania. He danced on Red Square the night Communism died.

He edited the International Herald Tribune from 1979 to 1981 but returned to AP as a special correspondent, based in Paris, winning AP’s top reporting award three times. He left AP in 2005 and launched the quarterly, dispatches, with co-editor Gary Knight and publisher Simba Gill, then led an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists team on ocean plunder.

In summers, he worked with the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, taking exceptional students to such places as Cambodia and Kashmir. For part of each winter he taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is now professor emeritus.

Rosenblum has written 14 books and contributed to Foreign Affairs, Harpers, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, Le Nouvel Observateur, Monocle, Travel & Leisure, and Bon Appetit, among others. His honors include a 2001 Harry Chapin Award for a series on water, a Mencken Award for African Famine, a James Beard Award for OLIVES, and an IACP Cookbook Award for CHOCOLATE. He was the 1980 Council on Foreign Relations Edward R. Murrow fellow.

His French and Spanish are fluent; his Italian is passable, and his Portuguese is hysterical. He can say, “Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist,” in a lot of other languages. (Not that it helps.) He is married to Jeannette Hermann, world-class ambiance director and astrology writer. Their cat, Streak, is a neurotic but noble.

One of my first“ dates” with my wife Iris, was in the early 80’s when she accepted a ride on my motorcycle to sit in one my lectures at Emerson College where I was teaching a journalism course on covering international affairs. The book I had assigned and discussing was - Coups and Earthquakes (Harper Colophon Books)  

At the Institute Mort was a powerful contributor to the development of our Exposure human rights photojournalism program. He was a superb teacher and mentored our students in our Exposure  seminars including on site in Kosovo, Argentina, and Kashmir.

Since I had a great respect for Mort’s powers of observation I was chagrined when he described me in our Exposure publication Rebuild: Kosovo Six Years Later as appearing to have a “grizzly bear exterior,” but, he assures me, that was meant to contrast interior warmth … It has been a fun element of our enduing conversations.  

 Mort is the ideal person for a Convisero mentor. In his acknowledgments to one of  his books, is  Escaping Plato’s Cave: How America’s Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival  (2007) He had the audacity to dedicate it to me in this manner:

My focus these days is on young people who care about a world they will have to manage and a noble old profession (journalism) they want to pursue.

He kindly added -  In this regard, I am particularly grateful to a pair of committed world – savers, Jacqueline Sharkey of the University of Arizona and  Sherman Teichman of Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership.

Our survival these days may loom as acutely from domestic threats, but Mort’s passion remains the same. 

David Cuttino

David D. Cuttino served as Dean of Admissions, Enrollment and External Affairs at Tufts University.  He was responsible of undergraduate admissions, financial aid policy, and the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership.  He initiated the Tufts Institute for Leadership and International Perspective and a number of scholar programs including the Balfour Scholars Program for minority students and the Neubauer Scholars Program for students who reflect the capacity for “transforming intellectual leadership”.  He also was Interim Dean of the College of Special Studies. He continues to serve on the External Advisory Board of the Institute for Global Leadership.

Prior to coming to Tufts, he was Associate Dean of Admissions at Georgetown University where he chaired the committees directing admission to the School of Foreign Service and the School of Business Administration. He developed and coordinated a Board of Advisors for an alumni admissions network and developed a successful scholarship program.  Working with an educational foundation he instituted programs on foreign policy and the judiciary at Georgetown for approximately 10,000 high school students each spring involving national and international leaders.

He has developed a variety of unique programs including an Appalachian Semester program and a science seminar for high school teachers and students. He served as a trustee for the Henry David Thoreau Foundation encouraging undergraduates for leadership in confronting complex environmental issues and also served on the board of Opportunity Homes building and restoring homes for low-income families. 

" Shortly after arriving at Tufts to lead the admissions effort, I began working with Sherman Teichman recognizing that the programs he was directing were uncommon among leading universities and offered a distinguishing university signature and the opportunity to make an important difference in the quality of education.   We worked together to build ties to international universities, organizations and foundations and to expand and support unique university efforts in scholarly and pragmatic engagement to involve and prepare students to manage and direct insightful change.  As the number of programs grew The Institute for Global Leadership was created and provides unique and intensive intellectual and experiential educational experiences across disciplines that are effective in preparing students to meaningfully and ethically confront complex global issues. He has continued to build bridges and bring people together across perspectives, disciplines and endeavors"

Together with fellow Board member Fred Berger, who we miss tremendously, we created Engineers Without Borders. Its first trip went to Tibet.

David’s qualities are hard to encapsulate - they are deep, meaningful and broad. A man of tremendous integrity, intellect, curiosity, vision, open-mindedness, an adventurous spirit combined with a courtly demeanor and impeccable appearance :). I was honored to work with him and report to him for years in admissions when he also held the portfolio as supervisor or director of special projects and admissions, of which the Institute was deemed one. 

We traveled together to secure the “yield” of students the university really wanted to admit, across a broad spectrum of socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. David was to me the precursor of DEI with a sense of justice and fair-mindedness that one could only hope for in a dean of admissions. His staff loved him and most importantly admired him. 

I was honored when he agreed to join the Institute board. He certainly knew about us almost from day one of his coming to Tufts, and I believe appreciated our maverick spirit and our distinctive sense of breaking boundaries and willingness to innovate along with him. I had the privilege of directing the Newbauer Scholars initiative, whose first class included Ben Harburg and others, including a student who accompanied the NSA’s Thomas Blanton to Cuba to record the first uncensored Russian documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Balfour program which enabled me to meet and mentor remarkable young scholars from relatively underprivileged, rural and urban highschools across the country. We had many interesting experiences together, but perhaps none more unique than meeting with Allan Goodman, the head of the International Institute of Education in New York City in Manhattan, opposite the United Nations the very moment the planes hit the World Trade Center, and we watched them crash on the IIE’s TV monitors. We were hustled out of the building by UN security and fled the city in one of the last rental cars as the convoys of the National Guard were passing us on the highway.  David was a confidant, a sage advisor, always able to find silver linings and renew my optimism. We were in New York to discuss a novel program, Passport to Leadership, that would provide Tufts rising sophomores who had never had a passport, and therefore never been outside the confines of the US, to link with IIE schools around the world on a specific, unified theme (we chose the world’s rivers) to bond and research together and present at symposia around the world. We could never raise the funding in a post-911 world where funding went elsewhere and isolationism took hold. David, who was also a minister, encouraged me to invite theological students to the EPIIC Nuclear Era year as many clergy had outspoken views on proliferation and mankind’s survival.

Ina Breuer

Ina Breuer is Executive Director of New England International Donors, which is a unique peer-to-peer learning community of global donors, grant-makers, social investors and family foundations. NEID’s mission is to convene and empower donors to help address the world’s big problems and does so through approximately 35 events per year, two simultaneously run Giving Circles, and a bi-annual skill building Symposium. NEID offers its members an on-going learning journey that helps them learn, connect, inspire, and act as a community. This journey entails providing members access to leading experts in international development and philanthropy, to other donor peers and to safe spaces to learn from each other. 

Previously Ina was the Executive Director of Beyond Conflict, where she worked for 17 years to help leaders in Middle East, Central America, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, South Africa and Sri Lanka address difficult challenges relating to reconciliation, conflict resolution and change. 

Beyond Conflict was originally The Program on Justice in Times of Transition (PJTT) and was formally affiliated with the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University from 2006 to 2011. During that period Ina integrated over 60 students into the work of BC.

The PJTT’s association with the IGL actually goes back to the early 1990s, during which both organizations worked closely with the original practitioners and leaders that shaped the truth commissions and retributive justice institutions in Latin America and Eastern Europe.  

One of the core efforts of PJTT while at the Institute was to create ACCESS, a joint mentorship program to mentor and foster a new generation of leaders in international diplomacy.

Another important collaboration was in the Institute’s unique Iraq Moving Forward Track II diplomatic effort. 

The impact of this highly productive relationship continues. At Beyond Conflict Ina launched the Neuroscience and Social Conflict Initiative in 2008, which now forms the core of Beyond Conflict’s work and has led to a new area of inquiry at the intersection of brain science and conflict.  This inquiry was inspired and led by an Institute for Global Leadership alumnus, and core member Trebuchet, Mike Niconchuk.

Prior to her work on conflict resolution, Ina was the Assistant Director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at the New School for Social Research in New York.  In the early 1990s TCDS was a hub for dissident activity from countries in the former Eastern Block and was focused on helping universities rebuild social science departments throughout East and Central Europe, the former Soviet Union and Central Asia.  Ina began her career at the Foundation for Civil Society in New York, where she was involved in educational, economic and environmental programming supporting civil society development in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the collapse of the Cold War. Ina is a German/US national that was born and raised in India and South Korea. 

Ina is one of the most ethical, accomplished administrators and innovators. She enhanced our students' lives while at the Institute. 

She was responsible for the suggestion and enactment of the expansion of the TILIP program, helping me redirect its energy from participation solely of Chinese universities in Beijing and Hong Kong to a wide array of university students coming from places as distinctive as Brazil, Canada, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iraqi-Kurdistan, Israel, Rwanda, Singapore, South Africa, and South Korea. We did this with the intervention of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition (PJTT), linking us as a program to the Clinton Global Initiative. We did this with the intervention of one of the first INSPIRE fellows, Tim Phillips.

Likewise, she helped us develop ACCESS, a program that integrated very distinguished global diplomats, including Nobel Prize winner, Jose Ramos Horta of East Timor, and an academic-credit course led by former US Ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia William Luers. 

She was extraordinarily important in revealing the bias and corruption of unfortunate administrative decisions. The first was to require the PJTT to leave our building and disassociate as allegedly a non-Tufts entity, whereas previous Tufts administrations had welcomed and embraced the program for 7 years. 

Ina was responsible for this acknowledgement in the volume Beyond Conflict: “From 1999 to 2004, the Project on Justice in Times of Transition was based at Harvard University as a university-wide initiative affiliated with the Harvard Law School, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the John F. Kennedy School for Government and thanks, Phil Heymann for that incredible opportunity and wonderful partnership. The project was also lucky, thanks to the remarkable Sherman Teichman, to have a close, intellectually vibrant, and enormously supportive strategic partnership with the IGL at Tufts University from 2006 to 2013.”

Amir Soltani

Amir Soltani is an Iranian-American writer, journalist and activist.  

Amir has worked in media, nonprofits, business and philanthropy, most recently as Executive Director of the Semnani Family Foundation, a foundation focused on poverty, health and human rights. His Iran work includes "Zahra's Paradise," a real-time online graphic novel about Iran's 2009 protests. It was recognized as a first in publishing, dissent and human rights activism, featured as part of "The Graphic Novel Renaissance" by Newsweek, nominated for two Eisner awards.  Zahra's Paradise has been translated into 16 languages, and covered by news outlets around the world. In 2013, Zahra ran as a virtual presidential candidate in Iran's 2013 elections.  She was the only female candidate  to run on a human rights platform calling for an end to executions, equality for women and freedoms of speech, assembly and religion.  

Amir's other publications include directing the research for the Ayatollah's Nuclear Gamble, a study on the human costs of military strikes on Iran's nuclear sites, as part of a campaign against an Iran war, and directing a study titled "Where is My Oil?" On Corruption in Iran's Oil and Gas Industry, part of a campaign against corruption in the Islamic Republic.  His latest publication "The Keys to Paradise: Children, Martyrdom and War" appeared in the LA Review of Books.  More recently, as a former board member of PEN Center, Amir has been working with PEN on international collaborations to secure the freedom of Nasrin Sotoudeh and other political prisoners in Iran.   

Amir's film work includes DOGTOWN REDEMPTION, an Emmy-nominated ITVS documentary film about poverty in West Oakland honored with a Congressional Commendation.  Amir is a producer on "Hold Your Fire," Stefan Forbes' acclaimed documentary film on racism and police violence in the United States, winner of the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns prize.  He is a co-producer on Skin of Glass, Denise Zmekhol's documentary on Sao Paolo's tallest high rise favella; a co-producer on Delnaz Abadi's the Secret Fatwa, a documentary on the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran; and consulting producer on Jeff Kaufman and Marcia Ross's Nasrin, a feature documentary about Nasrin Sotoudeh  

Amir studied history and international relations at Tufts University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Harvard University. He has a mutt named Louie.    

Amir’s personal statement:

I trace my roots in human rights activism back to an encounter with Sherman Teichman, an educational visionary and entrepreneur who has since become a lifelong friend and mentor.  I was amongst the first batch of students at Tufts to participate in an EPIIC course and symposium on International Terrorism in 1985. Sherman created the space in which I found my voice as an activist, a space where the intellectual, emotional and artistic could fuse as one," he says.  "In a way, I joined Convisero--a radically new model for education 35 years ago.  Education was not packaged by semester, discipline or even college.  It was a lifelong quest that linked the generations. I did not know it then but I had become part of a community that dared to breathe life into the idea of a global citizenship."   

Amir was selected by his peers, my students, to introduce the first symposium I conducted at Tufts in 1986, on International Terrorism. It was notable for many reasons. He was a freshman, and the majority of the students were seniors. Far more significantly he knew, and poignantly articulated the important distinction between terrorism and political violence, and thus the critical different ways to confront such violence, this from the personal experience of his family who had suffered under Khomeini and his conversion of Islam into a revolutionary ideology for purging his political opponents and purifying Iranian culture.

Our friendship endured over decades. He worked with me as an aide, mentored my students as a graduate TA, critiqued and influenced the evolution and growth of the Institute. Our contacts were many. We consulted over the years on human rights initiatives. He worked closely with our mutual friend Geralyn White Dreyfous on his documentary on race, class and poverty and I had the honor of being invited by Amir to accompany him to the Emmy ceremony at Lincoln Center, when I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting his wonderful family again.  Most recently we collaborated closely over the Convisero webinar for Nasrin Soutedeh.

Jamshed Bharucha

Jamshed Bharucha is a prominent cognitive neuroscientist and innovative educator who has served in prominent leadership roles in higher education in the United States and abroad.

Currently he is Vice Chancellor of Sai University (SaiU), in Chennai, India’s youngest University, He previously was the inaugural Vice Chancellor of SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, India.

 He is President Emeritus of Cooper Union, having served as its 12th President of Cooper Union from July 2011 through June 2015. After spending 2015-2016 at Harvard, Bharucha was appointed Distinguished Fellow at Dartmouth, where he taught in two departments: Education and Psychological & Brain Science

Previously Bharucha was Provost and Senior Vice President of Tufts University and Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Music and in the Medical School's Department of Neuroscience. Prior to Tufts he was the John Wentworth Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College. His research is in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, focusing on the cognitive and neural basis of the perception of music. He was editor of the interdisciplinary journal Music Perception and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

SaiU’s stated mission, is to “equip students with advanced skills to prepare them for the present and the future. Combining the academic rigour of traditional learning models with the pace and disruptive potential of technology, SaiU aims to accelerate pedagogic innovation and usher in a new era of learning in India.”

I will be joining Vice Chancellor Bharucha as SaiU’s Professor of Practice in International Relations, serving on SaiU’s International Advisory Board and advising in the creation of its Synaptic Institute of Interdisciplinarity. This initiative will resonate Synaptic Scholars, a program I created with Jamshed’s support and engagement at the Institute for Global Leadership when Jamshed was the Tufts University Provost.

The Institute created many innovative programs with his encouragement and involvement, Professor Turhan Canli’s workshop, Neuroethics and Homeland Security; our Track II diplomatic effort, “Iraq Moving Forward;” and of course, Tufts’ first intramural Cricket team.

Tovia Smith

Tovia Smith is an award-winning NPR National Correspondent based in Boston, who's spent more than three decades covering news around New England and beyond.

Most recently, she's reported on the pandemic and its fallout, and she has also reported extensively on the #MeToo movement and on the world of higher education. 

Smith has extensive experience covering breaking news, including the Newtown school shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent trial, as well as the capture and trial of Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger. She's provided coverage of the gay marriage fight in MA, and the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, including breaking the news of the Pope's secret meeting with survivors.

Throughout the years, Smith has brought to air the distinct voices of Boston area residents, whether those demanding the ouster of Cardinal Bernard Law, or those mourning the death of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. In her reporting on contentious issues like race relations, abortion, and juvenile crime, her reporting pushes past the polemics, and advances the national conversation with thoughtful, nuanced arguments from all sides.

Smith has reported on seven consecutive New Hampshire Primary elections, the BP oil spill, and the Sept. 11 attacks. She has gone behind prison bars to interview female prisoners who keep their babies with them, and behind closed doors to watch a college admissions committee decide whom to admit. She embedded in a local orphanage to tell the stories of the children living there. 

Smith has also chronicled such personal tales as a woman's battle against obesity and family businesses struggling to survive the recession of 2008, and the pandemic of 2020.

Throughout her career, Smith has won dozens of national journalism awards including a Gracie, the Casey Medal, the Unity Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Honorable Mention, and numerous honors from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Radio News Directors Association, and the Associated Press.

Smith took a leave of absence from NPR in 1998 to help create and launch Here and Now, a daily news magazine co-produced by NPR and WBUR in Boston. As co-host of the program, she conducted live interviews on issues ranging from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton to allegations of sexual abuse in Massachusetts prisons.

In 1996, Smith worked as a radio consultant and journalism instructor in Africa. She spent several months teaching and reporting in Ethiopia, Guinea, and Tunisia. She filed her first stories as an intern and then reporter for local affiliate WBUR in Boston beginning in 1987.

She is a graduate of Tufts University, with a degree in international relations, and a proud alum of the second cohort of the EPIIC program in 1986-7.

Quite simply, EPIIC taught me more than any other book, class or professor I’d ever encountered. I didn’t quite know it when I signed up for the program, but EPIIC was a lesson not only in politics and history, but also in morality, the search for “truth,” and personal leadership.  And it prepared me for a life-long career in journalism.

One of my assignments was to help edit what we called “The Briefing Book:” a compilation of writings, news articles and essays on the Palestinian - Israeli conflict that would serve as background to those who would attend our Symposium.  Knowing how difficult it would be to compose an historical narrative of the disputed region, we endeavored to create an “objective” timeline.  But even there, our little committee of Israelis, Jews, Palestinians and Protestants haggled for hours about which events belonged in our “true” record of the past, and how far back in history our timeline should begin. In the end, we opted to omit the timeline, and instead printed an excerpt from E.H. Carr’s “What is History?”  

“In the first place, the facts of history never come to us as “pure,” since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form:   they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder...  The facts...are like fish swimming about in a vast...ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in.”

This lesson still guides me every day.  As a journalist, I find myself constantly straining to see a situation from another perspective.  And I’m constantly challenging opposing parties to answer each other’s grievance. 

Don Thieme

A seasoned military diplomat, scholar, foreign policy practitioner, and teacher, Don Thieme brings more than 30 years of global experience to strategic problem solving in contested domains and operational environments. Before retiring from the U.S. Marine Corps, Don served in a wide variety of infantry and Reconnaissance units that deployed throughout Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Horn of Africa. When not deployed, Don was an Olmsted Scholar (Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków), a Council on Foreign Relations Term Member, and an MIT Seminar XXI Fellow. He was a personal advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for NATO expansion, theater campaign plans chief for U.S. Marine Forces in U.S. Central Command, and served seven years as a senior attaché in Warsaw and London, where he regularly analyzed foreign policy and recommended pragmatic actions to very senior U.S. and foreign leaders in pursuit of U.S. strategic objectives.  

At the U.S. Naval War College, he has served as a Professor of National Security Affairs and as Director & Professor of Writing in The Writing Center. He now works as a contractor in the War Gaming Division of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He has written over 600 posts for the Naval Wargaming Virtual Community of Practice, focusing on critical thinking that addresses emergent opportunities and threats at the convergence of technological, tactical, operational, and strategic levels of conflict and war.   

Don has taught in various fora from West Point classrooms to the desolate train tracks at Auschwitz, focused on the art – and action – of learning more than just strings of facts, but the inherent complex inter-relationships of human-ness in chaotic environments. He has published more than three dozen articles, helped write the Harvard University Carr Center Mass Atrocity Response Operations Handbook, and is a sought-after speaker on Holocaust and genocide issues. He is also a former Tufts University INSPIRE Fellow and Outward Bound Lecturer. There he worked closely with Sherman Teichman’s team to conceive and execute the 2015-2016 program of study focused on enduring strategic interests and emerging challenges in Europe and the Trans-Atlantic partnership that included non-traditional education as well as a four-day workshop and symposium New Security for a New Europe. Simultaneously, he wrote his Dissertation on the technological temptations and power of biotechnē as a threat to both individual liberties and liberal democratic governance.   

Don spends his ‘spare’ time raising four amazingly dynamic children, hunting, fishing, leading Boy Scouts, and running marathons to raise money for the charitable Semper Fi Fund. He occasionally actually catches a striped sea bass, and despite only intermittent success, still strives to teach his children some manners. He has given up on the two dozen ducks and chickens in his backyard.

In Memoriam - Yaron Ezrahi

A distinguished Israeli political theorist, philosopher, and professor at the Hebrew University, he was a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute which he co-founded in Jerusalem. At the IDI he co-foundedThe Seventh Eye, Israel's magazine for press criticism. As a Senior Fellow at the IDI, Ezrahi joined a committee of scholars headed by the former chief justice Meir Shamgar which wrote the most recent draft of a constitution for Israel.

Yaron was a wonderfully brilliant friend. I first met Yaron in 1965 when we were studying together at the Hebrew University on the Givat Ram campus. He was my first encounter with a “public intellectual,” even if I never even imagined the concept at the time. We spent many hours talking over the next years I spent in Israel, in Cambridge, and then many times over the ensuing decades long-distance. He introduced me to ideas in Encounter magazine, to the founders and contributors of the socialist journal, Emda, to friends, Menachem Brinker, Avishai and Edna Margolit. He involved me in the origins of the creation of the Open University of Israel, and in a Van Leer strategic think tank, introduced me to many iconoclastic security analysts on political, military, and long range-strategic thinking, including Abrasha Tamir and Meir Pa’il. He was active in Peace Now, and one of his students I knew through him, Emil Grunsweig was the first casualty of the peace movement. LINK 

Ezrahi was known for his work on the relations between modern science and the rise of the modern liberal democratic state and his later work that focused on the deterioration of the Enlightenment version of the partnership between science, technology and democracy.

Among his books are The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy, Can Democracy Recover? The Roots of the Crisis in Democratic Faith, and Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions.

He was prescient. This review he wrote expressed an irony that sadly deeply resonates today: “Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, War, Peace, and the Bomb.”

Einstein's impact on the relations between science, politics and freedom, however, transcends his record as a public intellectual. Ironically, the unintended wider cultural legacy of his physics worked against his commitment to democratic values and his faith in the mission of scientists to publicly combat violence and irrational politics.

In a letter to Rolland in August 1917, Einstein insisted that “only facts can dissuade the majority of the misled from their delusion”. But Einstein's concept of facts, as expressed in his exchange with the French philosopher Henri Bergson, was rather esoteric. Failing to appreciate the importance of common-sense realism as the basis of democratic public discourse, he did not seem to anticipate that the shift from newtonian to einsteinian physics would widen the gap between authoritative scientific knowledge and lay opinion. His liberal-democratic commitment was contradicted by his view that “naive realism”, the belief that “things 'are' as they are perceived by us through our senses”, was a “plebian illusion”. Deeply concerned about the turning of the public into a herd in the country of Kant and Goethe, he also failed to see that the public in democratic societies is not exactly moved by rational arguments free from rhetoric and theatricality.

Yaron’s last book, that he completed shortly before he passed away, Can Democracy Recover? The Roots of the Crisis in Democratic Faithanalyzed the current crisis of democratic institutions and of faith in democracy. It explores the current breakdown of common-sense conception of political reality and the erosion of democratic political epistemology that trigger the disruptive proliferation of popular political conspiracy theories. 

This, from his 2012 essay “The Reality of  Political Fictions: Democracy Between Modernity and  Postmodernity,” published by the IDI in an edited collection By the People, For the People, Without the People? The Emergence of (Anti) Political Sentiment in Western Democracies and in Israel.”

“Unlike philosophical knowledge and political science as fields of systemic propositional knowledge, the business of political constitutional and legal wisdom is not so much to explain or rationally justify, but to guide what Vico so insightfully called the acting out, or the enactment of the fictions which are necessary to the foundation and regulation of the civic order.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the fragility of the American democracy relates to the fact that the government of the Union rests almost wholly on legal fictions. The Union is an ideal nation that exists so to speak only in the mind, and whose extent and bounds intelligence alone discovers. But at the same time de Tocqueville argued that he never admired the good sense and practical intelligence of the Americans more, than in the manner by which they escape the innumerable difficulties to which their federal Constitution gives rise. Much practical wisdom was displayed also by the French revolutionaries when they chose to ichnographically embody the secular Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen within the image of the Mosaic tablets, thus tapping deeply engrained religious sensibilities in support of man-made or “natural laws.” 

A leading insightful authority on Israeli politics and democracy, Ezrahi was one of the leading interpreters of Israel's politics and civic culture in the Israeli and international media. His book Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel examined mounting tensions between nationalism and liberalism for Israeli attitudes towards military violence, political rhetoric, education and culture.

Yaron was a frequent analyst for Israeli and the international media, particularly cited in many of Pulitzer Prize columnist Thomas Friedman’s New York Times columns. Recently the IDI and the Hebrew University held a conference on the ‘Future of Democracy’ in memory of Yaron featuring former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Friedman.

Over the years Yaron was very generous with his time and with his judicious advice to the students I would selectively recommend to him. His last name is derivative of the Hebrew word for citizen – Ezrach.  He embodied that fully. He died in 2019, and I, and so many of my close community, including Irwin Cotler, miss him, his voice, his influence, tremendously.

Eli Levite

Ariel (Eli) Levite was the principal deputy director general for policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission from 2002 to 2007. He is a nonresident senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program and Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment. 

Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment in 2008, Eli was the principal deputy director general for policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission from 2002 to 2007. He also served as the deputy national security adviser for defense policy and was head of the Bureau of International Security and Arms Control (an assistant secretary position) in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. He was the co-leader of the Discriminate Force Project at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. 

Before his government service, Eli worked for five years as a senior research associate and head of the project on Israeli security at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (subsequently renamed INSS) at Tel Aviv University. He has taught courses on security studies and political science at Tel Aviv University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Davis. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies. 

He is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur.

Eli has published extensively, most recently “Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies” and “Three Ways to Break the Nuclear Stalemate with North Korea,” both with George Perkovich for the CEIP Nuclear Policy Program. Some of his more recent publications include: "Israeli Strategy in Transition, in Shaper Nations: Strategies for a Changing World; “From Dream to Reality: Israel and Missile Defense,” in Regional Missile Defense from a Global Perspective; “Will Nuclear War Break Out in the Middle East?;” Do Nuclear Weapons Have a Future? and “Reflections on Nuclear Opacity.”

A wonderful friend and adviser, his contributions at the Institute included the Nuclear Middle East, Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions, and the convening of a professional workshop on the State of the State in the Middle East and North Africa He was an Institute INSPIRE Fellow in 2011. I had the honor of awarding him the Dr. Jean Mayer Award for Global Citizenship

Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul (Shafik) Islam is professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a professor of water diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the director of the Water Diplomacy Program. He works on availability, access, and allocation of water within the context of climate challenges, health, and diplomacy.  Shafiqul’s research interests include water diplomacy, hydroclimatology, hydroepidemiology, remote sensing, and climate challenges.

He is noted for interdisciplinary approaches to create actionable knowledge by blending science, engineering, policy, and politics using methods and tools from complexity science, systems thinking, principled pragmatism, and negotiation theory. Islam maintains a diverse network of national and international partnerships and is engaged in several national and international consulting and training practices in the United States, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Shafiqul is a 2020 Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the 2016 recipient of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Water Prize for Creativity. He has over one hundred journal publications and four books on water diplomacy. His research and practice have been featured in numerous media outlets, including the BBC World Service, Voice of America, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, Nature, and Yale E360. 

Shafiqul participated in the 2005 EPIIC professional workshop on “Water as a Source of Conflict and Cooperation: Exploring the Potential,” which helped lead to the development of the Tufts Water Diplomacy Initiative. He most recently guest lectured for me through the Krea University Distinguished Lecture Series I helped started with a wonderful colleague, Professor Nirmala Rao, Vice Chancellor of Krea.

We are close personal friends and refer to one another as “bunkie,” having shared a bunk bed room at the Appalachian Mountain Club EPIIC Outward Bound weekend during the EPIIC Oil and Water year when he was one of our guest lecturers.

His daughter Maia Majumder was my TA and student in EPIIC’s Global Health and Security colloquium and symposium. I had the honor of being the lead toast and escort for Maia at her wedding.

Maia, an extraordinary young computational epidemiologist, .was a panelist in our Convisero webinar on the Human Impact of Covid-19. She is playing a significant role in the Moderna vaccine trials.

Sara Roy

Sara Roy (Ed.D. Harvard University) is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies specializing in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dr. Roy is also co-chair of the Middle East Seminar, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and co-chair of the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

We have been friends for decades, first collaborating in one of the very earliest symposia I created, in 1987’s “The Future of the West Bank and Gaza,” and subsequent lectures, NIMEP projects and including the 2014-15 EPIIC year on the “Future of the Middle East and North Africa.”

Sara spent time doing dissertation fieldwork in Israel and in the Gaza Strip as a research assistant to the West Bank Data Base Project,  led by another EPIIC Symposia participant, Meron Benvenisti.

She has written extensively on the Palestinian economy, particularly in Gaza, and on Gaza’s de-development, a concept she originated.

Sara is the author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development; Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, and editor, The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment, Research in Middle East Economics; Gaza: Reflections on Resistance; and Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector. Her forthcoming book,  Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance, will be published in 2021. 

She also has authored over 100 publications dealing with Palestinian issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia among other international venues.

We share the same conviction that “Israel’s occupation is about the domination and dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and the destruction of their soul. At its core, occupation aims to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. And just as there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied, no matter how much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims.” 

I had the pleasure of assisting her daughter,  Annie Schnitzer, in becoming a LEAP Fellow.

Iris Adler

Iris Adler is a 2021 Fellow at the Shorenstein Barone Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard University Kennedy School.

She is a former reporter, News Director and Executive Director for Programming and Podcasts at WBUR Radio in Boston. In these roles she has reported widely on Boston and New England, overseen the station’s news coverage, special projects and national and local programs. Most recently she created WBUR’s Innovation Lab where she oversaw new programming initiatives, including all of the station’s original podcasts and wbur.org’s opinion site Cognoscenti.

She also worked as the Executive Editor at NECN, a regional television news channel covering the six New England states, where she developed a nationally recognized documentary unit. She was the producer and reporter on a range of documentaries, from the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine where Arab and Israeli children live together, to a series of documentaries on the men and women who returned from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with PTSD and brain injuries.

Over the course of her career, she has won every major regional and national award for her work in both television and radio, including the Edward R. Murrow award, the Alfred I. Dupont award, and several Emmys. Iris has been married to Sherman for thirty-six years.

Wendell Wallach

Wendell Wallach is a consultant, ethicist, and scholar at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and  a senior advisor to The Hastings Center. He is also a fellow at the Center for Law, Science & Innovation at the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law (Arizona State University) and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technology. 

At Yale, Wallach has chaired the Center's working research group on Technology and Ethics and is a member of other research groups on Animal Ethics and End of Life Issues.

He is the author of A Dangerous Master: How to keep technology from slipping beyond our control was published by BASIC Books in June 2015. He also co-authored (with Colin Allen, Indiana University) Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford University Press), which mapped the then new field of enquiry variously called machine ethics, machine morality, computational morality, or friendly AI.

He is a series editor for eight Volume Library of Essays on the Ethics of Emerging Technology

The collection consists of eight volumes which focus on issues in: sports technologies and human enhancement; medical technologies; information technologies; biotechnology; nanotechnology, geoengineering and clean energy; military and security technologies; and ethics, law and governance.

The volumes encompass the ongoing debates and the cutting-edge issues of futuristic challenges and additional technologies under development..

He has also authored innumerable articles germane to our interests: http://wendellwallach.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Wallach-CV.pdf

Wallach has an international reputation as an expert on the ethical and governance concerns posed by emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and neuroscience. 

He received the World Technology Network award for Ethics in 2014 and for Journalism and Media in 2015, as well as a Fulbright Research Chair at the University of Ottawa for 2015-2016.  The World Economic Forum appointed Mr. Wallach co-chair of its Global Future Council on Technology, Values, and Policy for the 2016-2018 term.

I first met Wendell Wallach when he presented several wonderful talks, “Eye to Eye, Drone to Drone: The (De)Personalization of Warfare,” and “Neurotechnologies and the Future Soldier,” at the EPIIC symposium on Conflict in the 21st Century.

As Wendell has described it he also created a widely circulated proposal for an executive order from the US President, “Establishing Limits on Autonomous Weapons Capable of Initiating Lethal Force.” 

He did so on the advice, and with the collaboration of another participant, Lt. General Arlen “Dirk” Jameson, who had served as Deputy Commander in Chief and Chief of Staff of U.S. Strategic Command before retiring from the U.S. Air Force after more than three decades of active service.

Irwin Cotler

The Hounorable Irwin Cotler is the Founder and Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal, where I am honored to be a Senior Fellow. His life is dedicated to the search for justice and peace for all. He is one of the most honored, acknowledged and effective of global human rights thinkers and activists.

Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University, Professor Cotler is a greatly respected scholar of constitutional and comparative law. He has been noted for seminal legal arguments and opinions in the critical areas of free speech, freedom of religion, minority rights, peace law and war crimes justice.

As Canada’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Cotler reformed Canada’s Supreme Court appointment process, helping to make it the most gender-representative Supreme Court in the world. He chaired the Canadian Cabinet Committees on Aboriginal Rights and appointed the first-ever aboriginal and visible minority justices to the Ontario Court of Appeal.

He initiated the first-ever law on human trafficking; crafted the first-ever legislation to grant marriage equality to gays and lesbians; issued Canada’s first National Justice Initiative Against Racism and Hate. He overturned more wrongful convictions in a single year than any prior Minister.

Cotler became the first recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award for his leadership in the “creation of a beloved community.”  He was also the recipient of the Honorary Frederick Johnson Award from the Centre for Research-Action and Race Relations for his exceptional contribution to the rights of the Canadian Black Community 

An indefatigable international human rights lawyer, Professor Cotler was Counsel to Nelson Mandela and represented Canada’s Liberal Party at Mandela’s funeral. 

Among other renowned prisoners of conscience he defended included Argentina’s Jacobo Timmerman, and Russia’s Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov and Nathan Sharansky. He was the Chair of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg.

A leading global Parliamentarian, Cotler Chaired the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran; Chaired the Inter-Parliamentary Group of Justice for Russia’s slain Sergei Magnitsky; Chaired of the All-Party Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition, and Co-Chaired Global Parliamentarians for Tibet.

Cotler was the first Canadian Parliamentarian to call the mass atrocity in Darfur a genocide. He established a Canadian “Day of Reflection on the Lessons of Genocide” referring to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, and was counsel for representatives before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

He has transformed the lives of so many. He was a Member of the International Legal Team of Chinese Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo, international legal counsel to imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, the Saudi Human Rights Lawyer, Waleed Abdulhair, Venezuelan political prisoner Leopoldo López, and Shi’ite Cleric Ayatollah Boroujerdi in Iran, and Leader of Anti-Slavery Movement in Mauritania, Biram Dah Abeid.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian democracy activist imprisoned by the Egyptian government, was represented by Cotler, and acquitted in 2003. With Cotler, my Institute awarded Ibrahim the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award.

He has been lauded as “Counsel for the Oppressed,” while those of us with the Human Rights Foundation consider him “Freedom’s Counsel.”

Professor Cotler is a member the panel of independent international experts designated by the Secretary General of the OAS to determine whether there was reasonable ground to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed in Venezuela. For his advancement of human rights for Venezuelan people, he received the Special Award by the Standing Committee on Foreign Policy, Sovereignty and Integration of the Venezuelan National Assembly. 

He is the first Canadian recipient of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation’s Centennial Medal; the first recipient of the General Romeo Dallaire Award for Human Rights Leadership; the recipient of the Sir Zafrullah Khan Award for Distinguished Public Service, in honor Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister, a renowned international jurist and scholar of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

Recognized as a “a scholar and advocate of international stature” in sixteen honorary doctorate degree citations, Professor Cotler is an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the National Order of Quebec, and was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

A legal consultant in the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, Cotler has also defended both Palestinians and Israelis against their own governments; and counsel for the Association of Ethiopian Jews before the Supreme Court of Israel. He is the co-Founder and Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and is a prominent leader in Shoah remembrance.

For decades, Cotler has been a colleague, ally, and a close friend We met in our very early twenties, both young chairs of the US and Canadian delegations to the World Jewish Congress in Israel. Cotler was later chief counsel to the Canadian Jewish Congress at the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on Nazi War Criminals in Canada.

We collaborated on investigations on the Patriot Act, War Powers Act, extraordinary rendition, torture, civil liberties and national mock Supreme Court and Senate hearings with my Institute’s ALLIES program. As Canada’s Justice Minister, he sought to strike a balance between rights and national security concerns, guarding against arbitrary and unnecessary limits on rights in the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act.

Cotler is the Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran, and with my alumnus Amir Soltani, the Boroumand Foundation, and PEN America, we are working closely together to free Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh. See the webinar that we convened together.

As part of my responsibility as a Senior Fellow at Wallenberg, we worked together to support the opposition to Maduro’s regime in Venezuela; on his submission on “Consular Responsibility to Protect Journalists,” to the High Level Panel of Independent Legal Experts on Media Freedom, as part of Wallenberg’s Media Freedom project.

We are working on anti-corruption efforts to extend the adoption of Global Justice for Sergei Magnitsky legislation; and on Uyghur rights together with a Fellow Wallenberg Fellow, Rayhan Asat.

I proudly wrote the inscription on the Dr. Jean Mayer Award given to Cotler:

“In recognition of a lifelong passion and concern for human rights; for the determination to defend the most illustrious and the most anonymous; for a distinguished career of integrity in international law and in the administration of justice, one dedicated to the dignity of the individual, with compassion for the oppressed and unrepresented”

Yom Hashoah - National Holocaust Remembrance Day - is a poignant and painful historical moment of remembrance and reminder - of bearing witness - of learning and acting upon the enduring and universal lessons of Holocaust remembrance, including; 

• Lesson One: The danger of forgetting - the imperative of remembrance - le devoir de memoir: of remembrance of horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened: of the Holocaust, as Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor Professor Elie Wiesel would remind us again and again: “The Holocaust was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were targeted victims”; of the demonization and dehumanization of the Jew as prologue and justification for their mass murder; of the mass murder of six million Jews, 1.5 million of whom were children, not just as a matter of abstract statistics, but as we say at such moments, of remembrance: “Unto each person there is a name, each person is an identity, each person is a universe,” reminding us of the teaching -- “hametzil adam ahat, ke’ilu hitzil olam kulo – that if you save a single person, it is as if you have saved an entire universe.” And so, the overriding first lesson: That we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other's destiny.

• Lesson Two: The Dangers of Antisemitism of which the death camp Auschwitz - the most brutal extermination camp of the twentieth century - is both message and metaphor: 1.3 million people were deported to the death camp Auschwitz; 1.1 million of them were Jews. Let there be no mistake about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism itself did not die at Auschwitz. It remains the bloodied canary in the mineshaft of global evil today, toxic to democracies, a threat to our common humanity; and as we've learned only too painfully and too well, while it begins with Jews, it doesn't end with Jews. Indeed, antisemitism is a paradigm for radical hate as the Holocaust is a paradigm for radical evil.

• Lesson Three: The Danger of State Sanctioned Incitement to Genocide. As the Supreme Court put it, “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.” These, as the court put it, are the catastrophic effects of racism. These, as the court put it, are the chilling facts of history. It is this teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other, this is where it all begins. In particular, incitement to genocide is not merely a warning sign of preventable tragedy; it is itself an international crime prohibited in the Genocide Convention. We have a responsibility to recognize, address, and redress this violation of the Genocide Convention.

• Lesson Four: The Danger of Holocaust Denial and Distortion, Inversion and Banalization. Holocaust distortion is not only an assault upon history but an assault on memory and truth - a conspiracy to whitewash and cover up the worst crime in history.

• Lesson Five: The Danger of Silence in the Face of Evil - where silence becomes complicit with evil itself - and the importance, the responsibility, to speak up, and stand up, and combat the conspiracy of silence.

• Lesson Six: The Rescue of Raoul Wallenberg - the Responsibility to Pay Tribute to the Rescuers - the Righteous Among the Nations - of whom the Swedish non-Jew and Canada’s first Honourary Citizen, Raoul Wallenberg is metaphor and message. Raoul Wallenberg demonstrated how one person with the compassion to care, and the courage to act, can confront evil, prevail and transform history.

• Lesson Seven: The Danger of Indifference and Inaction in the Face of Mass Atrocity and Genocide. In the face of such evil, indifference is acquiescence, if not complicity in evil itself. For years, we knew but did not act to stop the slaughter of the innocents in Syria, ignoring the lessons of history and mocking the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine. What makes the Holocaust, and genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, and more recently the Rohingya and the Uyghers, so unspeakable is not only the horror of the genocides – which are horrific enough – but that these genocides were preventable. Nobody could say we did not know. We knew but we did not act. The international community cannot be bystanders to such horror – we must act.

• Lesson Eight: The Dangers of Impunity. If the twentieth century, and the first decades of the twenty-first century are the age of atrocity, they are also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice; and so it is our responsibility to ensure that these hostis humanis generis - these enemies of humankind - are brought to justice, lest the culture of impunity incentivize more atrocity crimes.

May I close with a special word for the Holocaust survivors amongst us. For you have endured the worst of inhumanity, yet you somehow found, in the resources of your own humanity, the courage to go on, to build a family, to build a future, and to make an enduring contribution to each of the global communities in which you reside - and where we have all been your beneficiaries. 

And so, may this Holocaust  Remembrance Day be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but may it also be a remembrance to act - on behalf of our common humanity, and our universal values.

Irwin Cotler, International Chair of the RWCHR

FIRST TO STAND: The Cases and Causes of Irwin Cotler

First to Stand is about committed human rights activists who know if they stand up, it won’t be long before others are standing with them.

Susannah Sirkin

Susannah Sirkin is the former director of policy and a senior advisor at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), where she worked from 1987 to 2022, helping to launch the organization and lead its many investigations and advocacy initiatives spanning almost four decades. In her most recent capacity, she oversaw PHR’s policy engagement, including with the United Nations, domestic and international justice systems, and human rights coalitions.

Her work at PHR over the years included overseeing the documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Darfur, Sudan; coordinating exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals; and documentation of the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. Sirkin played a lead role in PHR’s extensive documentation of attacks on health care facilities and personnel in conflict zones, including Syria and Yemen. She initiated PHR’s program to train doctors, lawyers, law enforcement officers, and judges to respond to sexual violence in conflict zones, initially working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, and Kenya. Sirkin has authored and edited numerous reports and articles on the medical consequences of human rights violations, physical evidence of human rights abuses, and physician complicity in violations.

Today, Ms. Sirkin serves as a member of the Steering Committee for the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition. She represented PHR from 1992 to 2001 as a member of the Coordination Committee of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. From 2017 to 2019, Sirkin was a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is a recipient of Tufts University’s Jean Meyer Global Citizenship Award.

Sirkin holds a BA in Modern European studies from Mount Holyoke College and an MEd from Boston University

I have known Susannah for decades, since late 1970’s when we worked together to secure the freedom of emigration of Soviet Jewish democratic “refusniks, traveling to Moscow, Leningrad and elsewhere. She has participated in numerous Institute events, including EPIIC symposia, and professional workshops and simulations for decades since 1988. I had the honor of awarding Susannah Sirkin, my good friend, our Institute’s Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2012.

Padraig O'Malley

Padraig O’Malley is the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies of UMass Boston. 

There are few people who over thirty years have had a more intricate and direct relationship with the Institute for Global Leadership.

Padraig is an award-winning facilitator and convener, author and expert, on democratic transitions and divided societies, with special expertise on Northern Ireland, South Africa, Iraq, and Israel. His unique fifteen-year documentation of the transition from Apartheid to democracy in South Africa, “The Heart of Hope,” is available at through the website of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

During the very first EPIIC colloquium, on International Terrorism, I assigned Padraig’s 1983 book The Uncivil Wars: Ireland Today, which I admired, and invited to speak at our symposium.

Since, we became involved in many of his research projects and publications, and he in numerous Institute projects. 

Padraig is the founding editor of the New England Journal of Public Policy, a publication of the McCormack Graduate School. Several Journal volumes were collaborations with our Institute – including a ceremonial bound set of journals WAR 20/20, with NEJPP and EPIIC celebrating both of our twenty-year anniversaries. Many of the articles were derived from presentations given at the EPIIC 2003 Sovereignty and Intervention symposium, and the EPIIC 2004 Dilemmas of Empire and Nation building.

On that occasion, Padraig said of us: The EPIIC program is truly an inspirational educational achievement. The students who participate in it are provided with the tools to play active roles in their communities, whether at the local, national or global level. Its graduates can be found in Kosovo, Iraq, Sri Lanka – wherever there is the need for man to reach out to his fellow man.”

Our Institute’s our first immersive experiential research effort occurred in 1986, the first of several thousand, when Padraig took one of our EPIIC International Terrorism symposium program chairs to Belfast to interview the families of the IRA hunger strikers seeking status as political, and not criminal, prisoners. He was acknowledged in O’Malley’s book Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair, a New York Book Review Top 10 Book of 1990. 

When Padraig published Sticks and Stones: Living with Uncertain Wars in 2006, many of the chapters were contributed by EPIIC participants – and he acknowledged EPIIC this way: for it is certainly through their long-term acquaintance and friendship with many of our authors that we were able to proceed. Among them were Jonathan Moore, Brian Urquhart, Michael Glennon, Cornelio Sommaruga, Stanley Heginbotham, Romeo Dallaire, Robert Jackson, Gwyn Prins, Alfred McCoy, and John Shattuck.

His Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj & the Struggle for South Africa (with a 15,000 word introduction by Nelson Mandela) came alive when together we brought Mac to discourse with Hentjie Botha, a Durban South Africa police torturer, at the EPIIC Politics of Fear symposium in 2006. It was an extraordinary confrontation of reconciliation, as Mac was identified by Mandela in his forward as the most tortured man in the Anti-Apartheid struggle.

Deliberate, thoughtful, and determined in his efforts over many years, Padraig is an extraordinary courageous facilitator/convener. 

From the mid 1970’s onwards, he brought significant leaders across all sectarian lines, including Irish paramilitaries and British Ministers, and facilitated the landmark Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving the Republic of Ireland a say in how Northern Ireland was to be administered. He also brought senior Irish figures and members of the African National Congress (ANC) constitutional committee to Boston to discuss “The Role of a Bill of Rights in a Divided Society.” 

Padraig carefully established connections between key individuals from divided societies deep in conflict, relationships which continued to result in follow-up conferences in each of their jurisdictions. 

He brought chief negotiators Cyril Ramaphosa (ANC) and Roelf Meyer (former National Party’s Apartheid government), who had successfully concluded a historic settlement in South Africa (SA) two years earlier, to Northern Ireland to meet with leaders of all political parties, including leading members of the paramilitary militias, helping to facilitate the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and bring peace to Northern Ireland.

In 2007, I asked Padraig to head our Institute’s track-two diplomatic project Iraq: Moving Forward, which we constructed with The Project on Justice in Times of Transition and ultimately with the Crisis Management Initiative (an NGO established by former president of Finland and Nobel Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari). Beginning at Tufts with a major multi-day forum including representatives from Bosnia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and South Africa, we secured the confidence of senior Iraqi officials, including Iraqi National Security advisors, and a future President of Iraq. We convened in Helsinki, bringing together Iraqi officials and chief negotiators from Northern Ireland and South Africa to share experiences of conflict and the processes of peace negotiations and reconciliation. 

Participants included 16 senior officials from all Sunni and Shia parties, the Minister of National Reconciliation Akram al Hakim, former chief of staff of the IRA Martin McGuinness, and Nelson Mandela’s chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa. The result was an extraordinary agreement – The Helsinki Principles - which was submitted to Iraqi political leaders for ratification. Padraig then orchestrated a follow up conference in Helsinki attended by 37 of the most senior leaders in Iraq, representing all political factions, parties, and tribal sheikhs, including the Awakening 5 Councils. “The Helsinki II Conference on Iraq,” the product of six weeks of intensive work in Iraq facilitating the final framework for future inclusive negotiations, was signed by all 37 political leaders and tribal sheikhs. Its principles, outlining the code of political behavior for participation in future negotiations, as well 15 implementation mechanisms to ensure compliance, were announced in Baghdad on July 5, 2008. Throughout, Institute students were engaged in creating forums, background research, policy papers, and traveling to Helsinki and Iraq to facilitate and record the proceedings.

Padraig was always innovative. In April of 2009, following the EPIIC Global Cities symposium,  he worked with our students to convene a three-day conference, Forum for Cities in Transition from Conflict, at UMass Boston. Participants included representatives from four participating cities: Derry and Londonderry, Northern Ireland; Mitrovica, Kosovo; Nicosia, Cyprus; and Kirkuk, Iraq. This program grew to include Mostar, Beirut, Jerusalem and Haifa, Ramallah, Mitte, Kaduna, Tripoli, and Baghdad. The concerns discussed included ways to assist each other in areas such as policing, water infrastructure, and business development, and talks on power sharing among the political parties and the public sector.

Padraig has garnered many significant awards, including the Peacemaker’s Award of Association of Dispute Resolution, and the Liberal International Freedom Prize of the European Union, and is the protagonist of the documentary film on his life, The Peacemaker. 

We have talked, conferred and collaborated innumerable times over the years. At his last formal presentation for the Institute, on his prescient book, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives, we presented him with our Dr. Jean Mayer Award. 

Given this intimate background, I asked Padraig O’Malley to present at our 30th Anniversary Gala.

Juan Enriquez

I have known Juan Enriquez for several decades. Now a good friend, I first met him when after attending three consecutive symposia of our EPIIC programs, as an anonymous audience member. He invited me to lunch in Harvard Square and expressed his interest in joining the Institute’s External Advisory Board. Accepting was one of the wisest decisions I made as Director. 

He is one of the most intriguing people I know. A description from his TED profile: 

“A broad thinker, Juan Enriquez bridges disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. He is the managing director of Excel Venture Management, a life sciences VC firm. He cofounded the company that made the world's first synthetic life form and seed funded a company that may allow portable brain reading.”

A pioneering thinker, innovative entrepreneur, and driving force in the promise and “creative destruction” of the life sciences, I think that it would be more appropriate at times to say Juan operates carefully on the “bleeding edge,” rather than simply the “cutting edge.”

Perhaps best known for his creativity in the arenas of synthetic biology and genetics, he gave substance to the concept of “genomics” as head of the Harvard Business School’s Life Sciences Project. Among his compelling books:  As the Future Catches You; Homo Evolutis: Please Meet the Next Human Species; and Evolving Ourselves. 

Yet Juan also writes and lectures on a much wider swath of politics, science, and international affairs. A quick review of his TED talks will attest to his extraordinary breadth of knowledge and intellectual curiosity.

He is a solid “futurist.” Sadly prescient, as we experience the radical polarization we must confront now, was one of his earliest books, The Untied States of America, on which he lectured on for one our EPIIC Outward Bound retreats.

His is a powerful ethical voice. We will host an upcoming webinar with Juan on his latest book, Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms our Ethics. As one review has importantly cautioned in these often viciously judgmental days, it “shows why we should be a little less harsh in judging our peers and ancestors and more careful in being dead certain that what we do today will be regarded as ethical tomorrow.”

Eclecticism is a pallid word for a man active in the experimentation of transforming genes,

Shaping global institutions, and advising Presidents; who once crewed, as both a scientist and sailor, the world sailing discovery voyage following the path of Darwin to the Galapagos, led by J. Craig Venter, who sequenced the human genome, to discover a great number of new species; and who was the coordinator-general of economic policy and chief of staff for Mexico's Secretary of State, and a member of the Mexican peace commission that negotiated the cease-fire to Zapatista rebellion of the state of Chiapas.

Juan is unstinting in his efforts to educated, in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Challenging, iconoclastic, Juan was responsible for so much of the development of the Institute. He lectured in many of our colloquia, participated in many EPIIC symposia and intellectual retreats, and created professional workshops with us. His parties for our Board in the wine grotto of his Newton home, once housing small basement rooms for escapees of the Underground Railroad, were wonderful.

He first came to participate in our community in the 1998-99 EPIIC year on “Global Crime, Corruption, and Accountability” at our Outward Bound retreat at Hurricane Island in Maine. He lectured on “Dilemmas of Accountability: The Human Genome and Corruption in Mexico.”

This powerful workshop on privacy and progress in gene sequencing led to the first ever undergraduate internships for students by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

Thoughtful, gentle in criticism, probing, provocative, and intellectually daring, he has been advising, assisting, recommending students, and creating our community on every level for years. 

Having watched him maneuver in our volleyball games in Truro, Cape Cod, he knows all the strategic angles, and exerts the least energy, with the most effective of results. Typical.

The best part of community - his son and mine are fast friends.

Nirmala Rao

Professor Nirmala Rao, a good friend, is passionate about advancing the higher education of Indian students. She has just been announced as the Vice Chancellor of Krea University. Passionate about educating women, she previously served as the Vice Chancellor of the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. A British political scientist, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences, and awarded the Order of the British Empire, she is a distinguished scholar on urban government. I first knew of her through her admirable global scholarship and cosmopolitan sensibility when I was researching and preparing the syllabus for the EPIIC year on Global Cities. 

Her book that intrigued me, Cities in Transition: Growth, Change and Governance in Six Metropolitan Areas, was a comparative topical treatment of how major cities in Europe, North America and Asia - London, Tokyo, Toronto, Berlin, Hyderabad and Atlanta - were contending with the dynamics of intensifying globalization. It is appropriately lauded as a “major and original addition to the comparative literature on urban governance.”

While these cities had all experienced population expansion, the disparity was not only the traditional tension between cities and suburbs, but the increasing challenging migration of often diverse ethnicities, races and cultures. I was particularly interested in her sensitive emphasis on citizen involvement, and the efforts she explored to foster local responsiveness and popular participation.

I then had the pleasure to meet her in person for the first time when I traveled to England in 2016 to visit the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, at the invitation of then SOAS President, Paul Webley. I had been invited to interview for a position as the director of their Middle East and North Africa division. I had been recommended by a valued member in our EPIIC year on the Future of the Middle East and North Africa, Professor Robert Springborg. A distinguished scholar, he had held the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at SOAS, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute.  Professor Springborg had attended and participated in all five days of our program. He wrote Paul that SOAS needed the pedagogical and heuristic nature of EPIIC’s immersive and non-polemical approach to learning.

Professor Rao was SOAS Pro-Rector, and their Academic Director of Research and Teaching. During her tenure at SOAS, she had lead responsibilities for academic developments, learning and teaching strategy, strategic reviews of centers and departments and international collaborations. It was good timing, as she was also engaged in major reforms of the School curriculum and portfolio review of undergraduate courses and postgraduate programs.

As part of the SOAS plan to create more global partnerships, and knowing of my directorship of the Institute’s China-centric TILIP program, Paul asked me to travel to China together with Professor Rao. There, we had interesting discussions on the potential to create joint programs between SOAS and the Beijing Foreign Studies University.

I was asked to consider an adjunct position to create an Honors College at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, by their President, Hao Ping, then China’s Minister of Education, and to teach leadership and communications course. The themes I suggested - historical memory and politics, corruption - and even the environment - were enthusiastically embraced by students and young faculty I met, many with the PhD’s from major U.S. universities, but it became clear they were too sensitive for the BFSU Administration. Ultimately, my wife Iris was adamant that I not be in Beijing’s political, nor environmental, environment.

And while there were extended conversations and visits, the SOAS option did not materialize when Paul sadly died passed away. Professor Rao did not succeed him, and left to become the Academic Director of the Asian University for Women. 

AUW is a fascinating young international university with a liberal arts curriculum in topics ranging from public health to politics to environmental studies. I knew of this university for we had worked with its officers and its founder, Kamal Ahmad, and had placed our several IGL students there as mentors. 

Prior to joining SOAS, Professor Rao served as Professor of Politics and Pro-Warden at Goldsmiths College of the University of London.  Professor Rao has extensive experience of public service and served as an advisor to a range of bodies including the UK Audit Commission and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). Professor Rao was also a lay member of the General Council of the Bar, an appointed member of the UK Architects Registration Board, Council Member of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs and of the Institute of Education, University of London.   

Professor Rao is passionate about the advancement of women, especially in the majority world, and about providing students with a distinctive, transformative experiences. Iris and I now have the opportunity to further a wonderful relationship with her, and now also with her one of her sons, who is a cardiology and sports medicine Fellow in Boston.

Philip Bobbitt

Philip Bobbitt has been a friend for now slightly over three decades. It is hard to describe this thoughtful polymathic person adequately, and it would hard for me overemphasize the intellectual influence and impact he had on the thirty years of my Institute’s directorship.

In 1988, he came to speak for the Institute twice, first for our symposium on Foreign Policy Imperatives for the Next Presidency, speaking on The Link Between Nuclear Strategy and Proliferation: Future Problems for American Nuclear Thinking. His germane recently published book was Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy.

Later, he addressed our second symposium of that year, Covert Action and Democracy, on the findings of the Iran contra hearings. He was then counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Iran/Contra Affair.

He again he visited us in 2002-03 for EPIIC’s Sovereignty and Intervention year as a Fellow of our Institute Scholar and Practitioner in Residence (INSPIRE) program.

My students embraced his seven-to-nine-hundred page tomes and digested them eagerly! The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002) was a magisterial history of strategic innovation, major wars, peace conferences, international diplomacy, and constitutional governance standards for states. Here is one compelling insight into the book, and a way in which my students might have tried to “escape” 900 pages of reading…

His Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-first Century (2008) argued that the defeat of terrorism must be brought about within the context of law. His possible future scenarios and policies often became applied simulations. 

One of the nation's leading constitutional theorists, Professor Bobbitt is currently the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Jurisprudence and the Director of the Center for National Security at Columbia University. He is also a Distinguished Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas Law School, and Senior Fellow in the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. Professor Bobbitt is a Member of the Commission on the Continuity of Government. His book, Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution (1982), a study of judicial review, asserts that all branches of government have a duty to assess the constitutionality of their actions. Bobbitt's "modalities" of constitutional law are now generally considered to be the standard model for constitutional arguments.

In his recent work, The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made, Professor Bobbitt presents Machiavelli as the ‘spiritual forefather’ of the US Constitution and conceptualizes the state as a distinct apparatus of power. In 2018, anticipating events, he updated Yale Law Professor Charles Black’s Watergate classic work, Impeachment: A Handbook.

He was ideal to convene our 2020 Convisero panel on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the electoral college in the shadow of the Trump/Biden Presidential election.

He has served extensively in government, for both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the 1970s, he was Associate Counsel to President Carter for which he received the Certificate of Meritorious Service and worked with Lloyd Cutler on the charter of the Central Intelligence Agency. He served on the External Advisory Board for the CIA until 2017.

As noted, he later became Legal Counsel to the Iran-Contra Committee in the U. S. Senate, as well as the Counselor for International Law at the State Department during the George H. W. Bush administration, and served at the National Security Council, where he was director for Intelligence Programs, senior director for Critical Infrastructure, and senior director for Strategic Planning during Bill Clinton's presidency. He was a principal draftsman of PDD 63, the first presidential document to establish a strategy for critical infrastructure and cyber protection. He is also a Fellow of the Editorial Board of Biosecurity and Bioterrorism.

Bobbitt’s works are punctuated by fascinating poetic and literary references, be it W.H. Auden or Shu Ting, Homer or Wislawa Szymbroska, Thomas Hardy or Czeslaw Milosz. Since 1990, Bobbitt has endowed the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded biennially by the Library of Congress. It is the only prize given by the nation for poetry. When he was with us as an INSPIRE Fellow, we had a special delightful session dedicated to poetry and politics.  

Many of the EPIIC themes over the thirty years of my directorship resonated Professor Bobbitt’s thinking - global transnational threats, vicious and virtuous cycles of globalization, the tenacity and tension of state sovereignty, human rights, the fragility of democracy, nuclear war, pandemics, environment degradation. He has posed many nuanced and intriguing future scenarios. It has been fruitful to think and spar with him.  

Ever conscious of the dynamic complexity of the interrelated nature of our world, Professor Philip Bobbitt has even given a name to the human tendency to assume the present situation will remain the same. He calls it the “Parmenides Fallacy,” after the misguided Greek philosopher who argued that the world was static and that all change was an illusion. 

A historian of war and peace, of nuclear strategy, of law and constitutional order, Bobbitt is an original, elegant, and rigorous thinker. He is refined, of character and thought. He is a wonderfully decent man. 

I am honored that he spoke in my honor at my retirement on the occasion of the Institute’s 30th Anniversary Gala. His talk was a reprise of what he thought about with us almost thirty years earlier on international terrorism. 

A final admission – he cares about human rights.  I especially love that he is a juror for the Civil Courage Prize and made my students aware of the courageous story of one of my personal heroes, the WWII French resistance leader, Jean Moulin.