Jason Clay
Dr. Jason Clay, the Executive Director of the Markets Institute at the World Wildlife Fund.
Jason is the author of 15 books, more than 300 articles and 700 invited presentations. His most recent books are World Agriculture and the Environment, and Exploring the Links between International Business and Poverty Reduction: A Case Study of Unilever in Indonesia. In addition to his role at WWF, Jason is National Geographic's first ever Food and Sustainability Fellow. He also won a 2012 James Beard Award for his work on global food sustainability.
Jason is a superb and recognized global thinker, and an expert on environmentally sound agriculture, sustainable supply chains, and the protection of human rights through ecological practices. He is a deeply committed practitioner, a researcher and prolific writer having published influential books and many precedent setting policy reports. His collective work has had a profound influence on governments, corporations, NGOs, and activists.
His current work with the World Wildlife Fund focuses on lessening the negative impact of global industries, large scale agrobusiness, aquaculture, and disruptive supply chains on deforestation, environmental degradation, and worker poverty.
He is noted for his distinctive extraordinarily effective consultation with Fortune 500 companies, focusing on sourcing, accountable and metric-driven corporate social responsibility, and responsiveness to the ecological pressures of global food systems.
He characterizes his role as that of an “extrapreneur,” who creates innovative and impactful relationships between diverse organizations and communities.
Jason has been a friend and colleague for decades. I had the honor of being his best man at his wedding.
I first met him in 1987 when he was a researcher and advocate at Cultural Survival, a human rights organization defending disadvantaged indigenous peoples globally, and helping to integrate them equitably into world markets.
He has helped me create the rationale for what became the Institute. He served on its first Advisory Board, and some of early themes that we explored were deliberate outcomes of his thinking, such as 1993’s Militarization of the Third World, which resulted from his work in Africa.
He is one of the most resourceful and intellectually provocative thinkers I know, and his intellectual impact at both the personal and systemic level is indisputable. Though a visionary, he is a very tactical and tangible results-driven person.
He writes powerfully about how coming from an impoverished farming background to learn and then teach at Harvard and Yale, he understands the challenges of overcoming poverty and the dilemmas of agriculture, climate, and sustainability.
Jason is tremendously thoughtful and his criticism, always meeting the full measure of constructive feedback and inclusivity. Strong-minded, he is nonetheless both flexible and very self-critical.
He is a man of disciplined passion, and rarely have I met someone who better fits the description “suffering no fools.” His intelligent voice and prescient warnings need to be resonated, and his advice heeded. As it often is.
"I learned early on that I needed to find a job that I was passionate about and that would make me feel good. While I got a PhD and was expected to teach in a university, I never really wanted that life. That said, I have taught at Harvard and Yale. What I have always been most excited about was being on the cutting edge of change and helping improve the lives of others.
Since childhood, I benefited so much from the support of others. It has always seemed only natural that I needed to pay it forward—not help those who had helped me but help those who had similar backgrounds to my own and needed a hand. My entire education was paid for by scholarships, grants and what I earned at the time. I had a total debt of only $500 for nine years of education. It was important for me to obtain an education without incurring a huge debt.
To this day, I have only applied for one job. After I got it, I turned it down. I have either created jobs for myself or have been asked if I would be interested in working with others I know and respect to do something that could benefit either people or the planet.
Jason on his work!
My career has focused on two key areas—human rights work with indigenous people (e.g. Native Americans or indigenous groups in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East) with a group called Cultural Survival based in Cambridge, MA and environmental work with the World Wildlife Fund-US based in Washington, DC.
Through a 45-year career, I have not only attempted to achieve results on my own, but also influence the strategies of others. Toward this end, I have:
• Worked in 80 countries, including 15 in any given year.
• Given more than 800 talks, with more than 70-80 talks per year at this point. One talk alone reached more than 700 million people through a Reuters article what went viral.
• Given one of the most influential TED talks with millions of viewers.
• Generated more than 3,000 news clips about my issues, solutions and work.
• Wrote 20 books and more than 500 articles, pieces, blogs, etc.
• Raised more than $500 million to reduce human rights abuses, support poverty reduction programs, and reduce key environmental impacts.
• Helped raise more than $5 billion for other institutions to address the same issues.
Here are a some of the main accomplishments of my career.
Human Rights—Giving a Voice to Those Who Aren’t Heard, 1980s and 1990s
• First to demonstrate that human rights violations could be predicted by showing the links between ethnicity, refugees, famine, armed conflict and the control of natural resources. Developed a database of 6,500 indigenous groups and their territories that is used by the US War College to predict armed conflicts.
• Proved that reliable, replicable research could be undertaken within refugee camps on the causes of refugee flows. More than $1 million was spent to discredit my research in Central America and Africa, but it withstood the challenges and generated credible data that changed US (as well as other countries’) policies towards Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mozambique, Sudan and Uganda.
• Proved that “victims” viewpoints (whether indigenous people, ethnic minorities, famine victims, refugees or displaced people) are no less credible than those of government officials, researchers, aid agency personnel, journalists or others.
• Documented the misuse of famine assistance in 1986 and redirected $2 billion of famine assistance to Ethiopia in 1985-86.
• Drafted the World Bank policy on tribal people for Africa.
• Founded and edited the award winning Cultural Survival Quarterly, 1980-1992, which generated $1 million per year of core support for the non-profit.
Rainforest Marketing—Proving the Value of Rainforests in the Marketplace
In 1988, established a trading company (with loans from US AID and the MacArthur Foundation for a company within an NGO) to buy and sell rainforest products.
• Founded the first Environmental/Fairtrade product certification program in the US.
• Created Rainforest Crunch ice cream flavor with Ben and Jerry’s (as well as Chubby Hubby) and more than 200 other products with 50 other companies.
• Generated sales in the US, Europe and Japan of more than $100 million per year.
• Leveraged more than $1 billion in assistance from foundations and multi-lateral and bi-lateral organizations to help local groups and their donors undertake similar work.
• Generated media coverage in more than 1,500 outlets over 4 years for rainforest conservation and rainforest marketing efforts.
• Featured as a Harvard Business School case.
Commodities—Reducing the Impact of Producing Food and Fiber
Since the 1990s, I have focused on drivers of deforestation—agriculture, cattle ranching, and mining; and developed strategies to halt deforestation that included governments as well as key private sector actors.
• Identified the impacts of producing 21 key agricultural commodities and what is known about measurably reducing those impacts.
• Identified the key impacts of producing the 13 fastest-growing aquaculture industries as well as how to reduce them to acceptable levels.
• Identified the 25 most significant minerals reshaping our planet in the 21st Century.
• Convened 8 global groups to agree on key impacts of commodity production, identify measurable indicators, and adopt performance standards. Each group includes producers, companies, researchers and NGOs. Each group includes retailers who represent 5-15% of global production.
Supply Chain Management
Since 2000, have focused on helping companies understand how they can use their supply chains to improve the quality of the products they purchase, reduce their negative impacts, and reinforce their “license to operate” in developing countries.
• Developing ‘carbon neutral food” beginning with payments for carbon sequestration in tree crops and for sugarcane that is harvested without burning.
• Advised Coca-Cola, Unilever and Mars about how to incorporate carbon payments into their product sourcing to comply with the Kyoto Protocol.
• Worked with Tabasco and Cadbury to purchase ingredients from landless producers and use forward contracting to help them obtain loans with contracts as collateral.
• Advised Mars on supporting tree planting to offset their carbon footprint while improving the quality of the cocoa they purchase.
• Worked with Unilever to develop carbon sequestration payment systems to cover 30% of the cost of planting new oil-seed, tree crops.
Corporate Responsibility
The power for change is increasingly with the private sector. What is less clear is that improving their performance regarding the environment or poverty, actually makes companies more profitable.
• Oversaw the first study of the impact of a multi-national food company on poor people in a single country, looking at Unilever in Indonesia.
• With WWF, the Calvert Group, Inter-American Development Bank, and the MacArthur Foundation, launched the first ever, $20 M investment fund to help small-scale producers and workers buy equity in downstream agricultural processing operations.
• Evaluated 15 different worker-owned agriculture operations in Brazil to determine which might be relevant models to guide World Bank investments."
Anne Goldfeld
Anne Goldfeld is a pioneer and a visionary leader. In work spanning clinical medicine, basic science, and human rights, she has broken through barriers and dogma to make fundamental paradigm shifts changing what we thought was not possible into a reality.
The quintessential physician-scientist, Anne has seamlessly and spectacularly straddled the interface between care in the poorest and most dangerous environments in the world, and the scientific bench at Harvard. All the while making fundamental scientific discoveries, and changing clinical practice impacting millions suffering from curable or treatable diseases, she has worked to change the tide of the great epidemics of her time, tuberculosis (TB) and AIDS. In parallel, she has addressed the great social issues of her time before they became celebrated causes, making a profound impact in each instance.
In all areas of her endeavor, she has challenged and overcome dogma, using her deep intelligence, commitment of heart, and gifts of insight and observation.
Trained as an internist and infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School, she was perhaps the first medical resident who understood the importance of working and devoting herself to patients in areas of conflict or of extreme poverty in the early 1980s, well before there was a field of ‘global health’. She lobbied hard at a time when it was not accepted, to spend a month on the Thai-Cambodian border in May 1983 when she was a second year medical resident at MGH. Working to provide health care in what was at the time a no-man’s land between Thailand and Cambodia with constant shelling in an active war zone, she cared for refugees from the Khmer Rouge genocide and became deeply interested in the medical scars of torture and war, and in treating curable tuberculosis. Upon her return to Boston she began to work on what would turn out to be a landmark piece of scholarship documenting the medical and psychological signs of torture. This study was the first paper to describe the high rate of sexual violence that women experienced in war and torture, and literally opened up the whole field of gender-based violence (1). And around this time Anne chose to turn her career towards infectious diseases so she could be best prepared to help in conflict zones and in areas where patients did not have access to medicines, and
After completing her clinical infectious disease fellowship at MGH, she received equally intense training in molecular biology in the Biochemistry Dept. at Harvard University so she could apply her scientific interests in developing new therapies and vaccines. It is there that she started her seminal work on the regulation of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) gene, the gene, which plays a major role in defense against infectious diseases whose overexpression is responsible for death from hemorrhagic viruses such as Ebola and malaria, and is at the root of many different forms of arthritis. In the lab, based on novel experiments, she first broke down the strong dogma at the time—facing down strong scientific resistance in the early years, that the TNF gene was only expressed in one cell type. Her studies led her to describe a new paradigm in understanding how genes are regulated in different cell types based on her discoveries (2). Furthermore, she was the first to describe how HIV avoided the host immune system and avoided triggering the activation of this gene and literally snuck into cells without setting off the cell’s antiviral responses (3). Even in those early years of her scientific training, her ability to make connections no one else was seeing, characterized her work.
In parallel with her scientific work, her profound commitment to the poor and afflicted in the world stayed strong. As this first phase of her scientific work came to a reflection point, she returned again to the Thai-Cambodian border in 1989, and was asked to lead the team of doctors and nurses for the American Refugee Committee team that ran the medical care for the 130,000 residents of the Site II South refugee camp. Confronted by daily human rights abuses by the Thai border guards, she began a systematic effort in the camp to document the violations using medical intake forms she developed based on her research of the medical signs and symptoms of torture. Her recording of clinical findings based on her research on torture, providing a first demonstration of a medical human rights approach that would be widely emulated.
As landmine victims were brought into the camp, she named it accurately a “medical epidemic” and began the first ever landmine prevention campaign in the world to educate refugees in the camp to not wander in the fields outside the camp to scavenge food or shelter materials in newly opened up and highly mined areas as the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese backed troops withdrew further into Cambodia. Again, she used her documentary and scientific skills and snuck her camera into the camp to document carefully each casualty to use it to show the world what a landmine does (4).
Anne made one of, if not, the first call publicly to eradicate landmines as a weapon of war in a press conference in Bangkok in December 1990 (6). She followed this with the first call to ban landmines before Congress in 1991 (5). And she began to write about what she had seen and about the global problem. She wrote op-ed after op-ed in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe etc. alone and with Holly Myers urging for a ban (7). Anne was one of the earliest members of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which eventually won the Nobel Peace prize in 1997. Serving as an advisor to the Campaign in its early years, she co-founded the US Campaign to Ban Landmines with Myers in 1994 (6).
Simultaneously Anne worked at Harvard Medical School going deeper into immunology and discovering new molecules that regulated TNF and new patterns of gene regulation—work that continues until today. And increasingly, she applied her scientific skills to address the monumental problems of TB and AIDS in the world and more recently in the last 2 years, Ebola.
As the landmine campaign gained extraordinary global traction, and the refugees who had been in the border regions of Cambodia repatriated, Anne began to turn her attention to TB, forming the Cambodian Health Committee with a Cambodian colleague. Begun as a tiny NGO in the post-war destruction of Cambodia in 1994 to provide care in this country with one of the highest TB problems in the world non-existent TB care, it has gone on to have a massive impact on the suffering of adults and children from tuberculosis (TB) and AIDS, not only in Cambodia but also in Africa, and regionally in southeast Asia—most recently in Myanmar. The community-based strategies Anne and CHC pioneered have been scaled up to the entire country of Cambodia and they were at the origin of treating AIDS in the country.
Anne was one of the first people to see the connection between TB and HIV and their deadly synergy and while she began to scientifically document the terrible toll of TB and HIV co-infection and to seek scientific answers, she began to advocate publicly to address the human disaster of TB and AIDS. She engaged the photojournalist and celebrated war photographer James Nachtwey to focus on TB and on TB and AIDS and they began a long collaboration to show the suffering of people unable to access treatment for curable TB and treatable AIDS (http://www.womensconference.org/struggle-for-life/). The photoessay Nachtwey did of Anne’s work in 2003 (http://www.poyi.org/61/mpoy/nachtweythree01.php), earned him his 7th award as Photojournalist of the Year in 2004 and began to raise awareness of the problem. Anne and Nachtwey showed their work together (his pictures and her documentation of the stories) in exhibitions in Paris, Bangkok and Berlin. Anne’s work was featured in Nachtwey’s exhibits at the UN at the US capitol, and in a myriad of publications highlighting the disaster.
Meanwhile, Anne’s focus in the lab turned more and more to TB and AIDS. She pulled together the French/US/Cambodian team that would eventually perform the CAMELIA (Cambodian Early vs Late Introduction of Antiretrovirals) Trial, which is recognized by many as the most significant contribution to TB/HIV in the last decade. The CAMELIA study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2011, showed that the earlier timing of AIDS drugs resulted in a 34% reduction in mortality (8), which translated on a global scale to ~450,000 lives saved yearly with the new regimen, which was then adopted by the World Health Organization. She would be awarded the Presidential Medal from the Cambodian Prime Minister in 2010 in recognition of this work.
Since 2008 Anne has expanded her work in Cambodia to Ethiopia where she began the countrywide program for drug resistant TB in the country with the NGO she co-founded in Cambodia, under its new name, Global Health Committee (GHC). Passionately committed to the basic human right of assuring that everyone has access to medicines for curable or treatable diseases, she brought the model that had been developed in Cambodia to Ethiopia. In a remarkable and almost unprecedented outcome, as she was told staring the program was impossible, the collaborative program of GHC and the Ethiopian Ministry of Health GHC has treated over 2000 patients as of May 2017 and has reported the highest outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa for treatment for drug resistant TB (11). Anne’s work again turned a dogma on its head—this time that therapy for this disease could not be offered safely and rapidly in a country such as Ethiopia. With the Ethiopian and Cambodian teams she is currently finding ways to expand care for drug resistant TB in Myanmar to children and hoping to initiate care in South Sudan in follow up to a mission she made there in 2014.
Apartheid In Israel and the West Bank
We convened a webinar conversation with my close friend Benjamin Pogrund, prominent Israeli-South African journalist. Benjamin was deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg, closed down because of its stand against apartheid. He has lived in Jerusalem since 1997 and was founding director of Yakar's Center for Social Concern. We discussed the nature of Israel’s internal governance, politics and social attitudes, its occupation policies, the looming annexation of large sections of the West Bank, and the potential reality of Israeli Apartheid.
In 2007, I has asked “Benjie” to become an INSPIRE Fellow at the Institute for our EPIIC year on Global Poverty and Inequality, and to advise the New Initiative on Middle East Peace. I encouraged him to write a book on his experiences living in both Israel and in South Africa, where he was a close friend of Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe (he is the author Sobukwe and Apartheid: How Can A Man Die Better). In his time at the Institute, he wrote the original outline and first chapters of what became Drawing Fire: Investigating Accusations of Apartheid in Israel. The book was published in 2014, and now only a few years later, Benjie now warns that if Israel adopts policies such as the Nation State Law, and pushes to annex much the West Bank, it will take the reality of an Israeli-Palestinian Apartheid “right over the edge.”
Urban Violence and Aggressive Policing
We held a webinar discussion with EPIIC ‘93 alumnus Teny Oded Gross, the Director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago; Chris Patterson, the Institute’s Senior Director of Programs and Policy, and a good friend, Professor John Hoberman, author of Dopers in Uniform: The Hidden World of Police on Steroids.
Please learn more about the critical work of the Institute for Nonviolence here, and consider supporting.
Over the July 4th weekend, many of Chicago’s neighborhoods erupted in a tremendous upsurge of violence, which resulted in ninety shootings and seventeen tragic deaths. In response, the Chicago Police Department is organizing a citywide “suppression” unit, to the concern of Chicago’s communities and advocacy groups, who remember the outcomes of similar police efforts in the past. What are the root causes of and solutions for urban violence and poverty, gang warfare, inter-community conflict, racial discrimination, and abusive police practices, in Chicago and other US urban communities?
Teny has a unique perspective on these realities at street level, having spent decades on the front lines in Boston, Providence, and Chicago. He has consulted on community engagement and nonviolence strategies with police departments and municipalities, domestically and internationally.
Chris is a Chicago native and a specialist on gang culture and its impact on society, with over a decade of experience in community engagement. His memoir is 21: The Epitome of Perseverance.
John is an expert on race and society. His research provides insight into Chicago’s history and ongoing policing dilemmas, particularly on the curtain of secrecy that protects both police brutality and police steroid culture. Along with Dopers in Uniform, he is the author of Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism, and Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race.
In Memoriam: Michael Hawley
Michael, his son Tycho, my former student and NPR reporter Tovia Smith, and my wife Iris Adler
I had the great privilege of befriending Michael Hawley. I was but one of thousands. A remarkably prodigious polymath, he is a person who for me defines the phrase sui generis. I greatly admired the thinking he epitomized in extolling the virtue and necessity of Renaissance education.
The four years of an undergraduate education (for the minority of the population that gets that far) have become less of an exploration and more of a routine. Even the path to college has become a pipeline of preparatory crash courses, tests, interviews, and campus visits. Graduate schools are even more constricting. In an age that is fomenting the greatest expansion of knowledge – and of its means of distribution – in history, our educational system is churning out ever more narrowly focused scholars. One wonders if, along with biodiversity and cultural diversity, the diversity of the individual mind might be another casualty of modern life.
I was honored when he agreed to be a mentor for Convisero. His dedication to his students was extraordinary, and he will be greatly missed. This virtual Festschrift speaks to his special warmth and humanity.
His adventurous, unprecedented eclectic accomplishments are legendary. I nominated Mike for the 2020 Tällberg Eliasson Global Leadership Prize. Here is what I had written then:
I am nominating Dr. Michael Hawley, brilliant distinctive icon of interdisciplinary thinking, and a champion of the critical need for eclecticism and versatility in education, especially necessary in the digital information age.
At the MIT Media Lab, where he has taught and innovated, and globally, through Fellowships, lectures, writing, and by example, Mike has inspired generations of flourishing cutting-edge thinkers, research professors, friends, and especially his students. He encourage all think boldly about their own educational and vocational pursuits, to dare to create, and to explore the intersections and hybridizations of their interests in innovative and exciting ways.
He lives and encourages others to live in a manner that is open to ideas, deeply intellectually curious, exploratory, experimental, daring, oblivious to failure, but grounded in rigorous preparation, practice and expertise. He is a perpetual student and thinker and tinkerer.
Disinterested in traditional incentives, academic "tracks" and standard rewards, he has courageously followed unusual paths, from the foothills of Himalayas to concert halls, from luge runs to Lucas Labs, to pursue his passions for art, music, photography, computer science, engineering, ecology, artificial intelligence, sport, and so much more.
I have been a teacher and global educator for fifty-five years. As a youth I was inspired by the biography of Benvenuto Cellini. The concept of a "Renaissance Man" never left me. Rarely has an individual approached this, and beyond, and continues to inspire more than Mike. Here is a true modern-day renaissance man. For the founders of the Media Lab - once branded the educational lab "inventing the future" - he is their avatar. From advances in digital publishing for LucasFilm to performance technology for the American Everest efforts he has produced extraordinary tangible results.
I knew of him since 1995 when I organized my Institute's tenth anniversary, and many Media Lab folks, including Mike's mentor Marvin Minsky, were engaged. Years later I read his inspirational seminal lament “Whither the Renaissance Man.” And now I have had the privilege of his personal friendship for the past few years.
What an Eliasson recipient he would make!
Harvard IRC & LEAP
We have initiated a meaningful sustained relationship between LISD and Harvard’s undergraduate International Relations Council. The Trebuchet has successfully collaborated with the IRC in the past - we secured the IRC as a permanent host for the Oslo Scholars Program of the Human Rights Foundation, and helped them convene a College Freedom Forum in the Spring of 2019.
For LISD we have mediated a very exciting and promising initial exchange with Peter Droege and Davis Tyler-Dudley, the IRC’s President for the 2020-21 academic term.
Mindful the virtual learning necessitated by COVID in addition to the ongoing LEAP offerings of embedded internships, reverse internship coaching, and opportunities with the LISD network, Peter has proposed to provide thesis guidance and support for students conducting capstone research on sustainability issues.
Particularly exciting, both as a conceptual direction, and as a framework for internship and research opportunities, are LISD’s new T2 Programs: Terra 2 - Transformations for a Changing Planet, and the Global Engagement for Active Interns Project. T2 is a call to universities, agencies, institutions and concerned individuals to squarely focus on the habitability of a future Earth with a far different and more extreme climate than our current one, and to envision a permissive economic, political, social, and cultural environment globally that will nurture the breakthroughs we need.
Lebanon Background for "Imagine: Reflections on Peace"
I wrote the following brief history and background of post-colonial Lebanon for the website that the VII Foundation is developing in support of the publication of Imagine: Reflections on Peace:
Shatila Refugee Camp, 2007
Nichole Sobecki, EPIIC ’06, EXPOSURE ’04-‘08
Lebanon has endured decades of sectarian struggle, bitter internecine conflict, bloody vendettas, suicide bombings, invasions, and wars.
Since its independence in 1943 from France’s Mandatory rule, Lebanon’s fragile governance has been based on its National Pact, a complex division of power granting preferential status to the then majority Maronite Christian community, over its Shiite, Sunni, and Druze citizens. The rationale for this was Lebanon’s 1932 census, the only official census conducted to this day.
Despite being the Arab world’s first democracy, Lebanon has been in a perpetual battle for supremacy between its eighteen sects, enflamed by religious hatred, extremist leftist secular politics, and Palestinian radicalism. This noxious brew ultimately immersed the country in a brutal civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990. The war was marked by many atrocities, including the 1976 Karantina massacre of approximately 1,500 Palestinian refugees by right-wing Christian militias. The casualties counted well over 100,000 fatalities, and an estimated one million internally displaced people.
In 1975, Syria, which always considered Lebanon to be part of “Greater Syria,” aligned itself with the Christian Maronites. In 1982, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards entered to arm and support their Shiite co-religionists. The nucleus of their army became Hezbollah, which in 1983 committed a devastating jihadi suicide bomber attack on the barracks of US Marine Peacekeepers, hastening the American departure from Lebanon.
The Saudi-brokered 1989 Taif Agreement finally ended the atrocities and enacted structural reforms in an effort to create a more equitable political balance of power. It disarmed sectarian militias, but allowed Hezbollah to retain its arms as a “resistance force” against Israel.
Lebanon’s sovereignty has frequently been violated. In 1948 and then again in 1967, the country was forced to absorb Palestinian refugees fleeing Israel. In 1970, a large number of Palestinian fighters fleeing Jordan entered Lebanon after failing to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom. The Palestinians attempted to create their own armed enclave among the Shiite Muslims in the south, but their presence was deeply resented. Palestinians cross-border incursions into Israel prompted two Israeli invasions of Lebanon, one in 1978 and one in 1982. The Israelis forced the Palestinian’s north into Beirut, beseiged the city, and forced Arafat’ and his fighters to depart for Tunisia. The Israelis then created a security buffer zone in southern Lebanon and occupied the twelve-mile territory through a mercenary Lebanese force for eighteen years, until 2000.
Recently, Lebanon’s fragile internal equilibrium has been further battered, with one and a half million civilians escaping the Syrian civil war crossed the border, seeking refuge. Currently, refugees compose a staggering one-quarter of the Lebanon’s population, the largest proportion refugee per capita in the world. Temporarily settled in camps, towns and cities, fifty-eight percent of them live in extreme poverty. The strains on its infrastucture and economy have been severe.
The Lebanese government’s problematic policies towards refugees further complicate its search for peace and stability. Palestinians are kept stateless. Even if born in the country, they cannot gain citizenship and they are banned from most professions and business ownership. Two-thirds of the estimated 175,000 Palestinians live in poverty in refugee camps.
The country also suffers from other challenges. Institutions are exceedingly weak, rule of law is ineffective, and corruption is rampant. These all contribute to stark inequality and wealth disparity. Given the decades of chaos, unrest and violence, far more of Lebanon’s citizens have opted to live abroad than in their own country.
While Lebanon’s civil society is weak, it has at times exposed the potential for reform. In 2005, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was killed in a truck bombing, in which the Assad Syrian regime was implicated. A massive, sustained non-violent protest movement, the Cedar Revolution, finally ended thirty years of Syrian occupation. And in 2015, a coalition of nonsectarian students, social actvisits, and remnants of a middle class, all disgusted with an ossified system of patronage and political paralysis, organized the “You Stink!” movement. Sparked a garbage collection crisis of many months, they organized mass demonstrations challenging the status quo. The mobilization ultimately had limited environmental impact, but the challenge was enough to unify the usually polarized factions, which came together to narrowly defeat the protesters in 2016 municipal elections.
To this day, Lebanon remains a hot arena for proxy warfare between Palestinian factions, Israeli forces, Hezbollah and other Shiite clients of Iran, and Saudi Arabian influence. In 2017, Saudi Arabia invited Sunni Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to Riyadh, where he was detained and forced to publicly resign in a humiliating attempt to collapse a Lebanese coalition government that empowered Hezbollah. Hezbollah nonethless gained strength and ministerial positions in the 2019 elections and remains a powerful and coercive force.
Domestically, the Taif Agreement failed to confront Lebanon’s intense underlying domestic emnities, providing no process for reconciliation of the powerful Christian, Muslim and other Lebanese sectarian factions. In her essay, “Fire Under the Ashes,” Robin Wright identifies how identity politics have hardened in Lebanon and in much of the Arab world. She believes that “perhaps the most enduring legacy of Lebanon’s civil war may be a string of new wars,” whether internal or external.
The odds of success seem remote for the demands of young reformers: that the country’s veteran warlords finally cede to a new technocratic leadership. Lebanon remains an avatar of what conflict experts term “negative peace,” the absence of overt violence, in stark contrast to “positive peace,” efforts at harmony and community healing. The Palestinian actress, activist and writer, Mira Sidawi, born in Lebanon’s Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp, asserts that “peace needs equality,” and speaks of her desire to “work in the path of peace. A path to freedom for everyone.” She asks, “Perhaps we should all lose the privilege of identity. Why can’t we all become refugees?
Suyu Zhang
Suyu is an alumnus of the 2012-2013 EPIIC “Global and Health” Colloquium. Suyu graduated in 2013 with a BS in Biology from Tufts University, and is currently pursuing a M.D. from New York Medical College.
Suyu was born in Zhengzhou China, and grew up in Sendai Japan, New Haven and Cheshire Connecticut. After he graduated from college, he eventually settled in Crown Heights, Brooklyn to “find himself” before medical school. He had the privileged opportunity to work with individuals facing the hardship of economic and healthcare inequality in NYC. Through this experience Suyu developed a deep passion for listening to the story of different people, and advocating for social justice. “You can learn something from everyone”, being a favorite quote of his. Through his work with Memorial Sloan Kettering, Suyu has developed a passion for taking care of the “whole patient”, understanding that the quality of life is a vital consideration of ethical medicine. As a first-generation immigrant American, and a global citizen, connecting with others, and building community is something that is close Suyu’s heart. Shortly before coming to NYMC, Suyu backpacked, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. His final destination was his childhood home of Sendai, which he had not visited for 16 years. Using old Kodak photos, he tracked down his childhood friends, and teachers. This touching reunion left an indelible mark on him, teaching him that people are worth all the efforts.
During his time in medical school, he continued to pursue his passion for the intersection of humanism, resilience, public policy and medicine. He founded a narrative medicine and social-connectedness project called Humans of NYMC. Modeled after Humans of New York, Humans of NYMC engages medical school students in free script interviews of peers, whereby the interviewee and interviewer work together to craft a narrative to be shared with the rest of the community. This project empowers students to develop narrative competence, that is the ability to better understand the purpose and the meaning from a story that better allows professionals/individuals to connect with others- a key component of providing humanistic medical care. This project also aims to create open dialogue between people of differing backgrounds. In 2019, this project was selected as one of 5 keynote student innovations to be presented at the annual Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Conference in Phoenix,Arizona.
During medical school, Suyu also pursued his interest in resilience. A topic heavily covered during his EPIIC course. He dove into the literature by Dr. Carol Dweck, Dr. Angela Duckworth, Dr. Trzeciak, Dr. Daniel Kahneman and many others on the metatheory of resilience, positive psychology, neuroplasticity, heuristics, flow, growth mindset, grit, compassion, empathy, antifragility, gratitude, mindfulness, overcoming adversity & trauma, and the science of wellbeing. He founded, and now directs the NYMC Resiliency Curriculum, an entirely student designed, driven, implemented and researched resiliency curriculum. He is currently writing the official curriculum that is training all medical students at NYMC to cultivate their resilience and resiliency in fighting burnout in the medical field to self actualize their journeys as healers. Suyu views resilience as an innate drive present in everyone, that can be fostered and strengthened through cultivating our values, and passion. Resilience thus can drive the development of our resiliency, traits that allows us to not only manage the adversities and challenges that the medical education journey and our profession presents us, but to learn to reintegrate these adversity into our lives as sources of growth. Suyu strongly believes in the growth mindset: that our abilities, lives, and futures are not fixed nor set in stone, but rather can be improved through effort.
https://nymcresiliency.wordpress.com/
What’s being your experience in medical school, and how has it brought back to the passions you cultivated during your time with EPIIC and the IGL?
I was a Longitudinal Integrated Curriculum Scholar as a third year medical student. Students undergo an application process to be selected into this unique learning program across medical schools in the United States. Specifically students engage in a patient-centered learning program, where instead of short block rotations (the traditional format of clinical medical rotation) , they learn the core skills of doctoring by following a panel of patients longitudinally, over substantial time. This experience allowed me to follow a preterm infant through her birth at 27 weeks until when she was discharged at 40 weeks, counsel the mother through the psycho-social challenges of managing the unexpected nature of the birth and helping her be resilient throughout the “wait and see” period; an elderly patient with limited family support suffering from stage III peripheral artery disease; a patient attempting to navigate managing seizures as a result of and rehabilitation from her neurological surgery to remove a meningioma. This patient centered education allowed me to see many wonders of biomedical sciences radically change the lives of those ill; erythropoietin and blood transfusion ameliorate a less than optimal delivery, lamotrigine controlling seizures, phototherapy clearing the newborn of excess bilirubin. Yet, this experience has also highlighted to me the frustrating shortcomings of health care in tackling complex problems that require both compassionate clinical care and a larger policy response.
One patient that I met, a 26 year old male, had suffered a relapse of his opioid addiction. On his chart, he had a multitude of other mental health disorders, including depression, and anxiety. He’d been in and out of rehab, and suffered social wounds as repercussions of his addiction. A recent study by a group of physicians at University of California Los Angeles found that social pain is processed in some of the same brain areas that process physician pain and is quelled by pain relivers. In a sense, the paper states that stigmatizing treatment of people who use drugs, such as ignoring or rejecting them maybe the equivalent of a shock in the cycle of drug addiction: it’s a powerful social penalty that spurts further drug taking. Discussing this patient with many of my physician mentors and teachers, they lamented that aside from stabilizing his post-overdose symptoms, recommending rehab (again), and offering compassionate support, they had little else to offer. I could see the burnout in their eyes; as providers we learn to numb the pain that result from not being able to alleviate our patients’ suffering. My mentors often tell me that “we need a larger policy response”. Incidentally, a recent scientific literature estimates that over half of practicing physicians and one-third of nurses in the United States suffer from burnout.
In 2013 I traveled to Kosovo as a student researcher, as a part of the Tufts Institute of Global Leadership Program on Global Health and Security. Having grown up in China, Japan, and now living in the United States as an American citizen, I’ve also had a natural curiosity for the diversity of our global communities. This interest blossomed into a scholarly interest in global development, human rights and healthcare during my undergraduate studies. In Kosovo, I was able to study the way in which the nation rebuilt its healthcare infrastructure after decades of conflict in the aftermath of Balkanization. I met and learned of the different ways that multiple institutions and various professionals coordinated to improve primary care, addressing health disparities of ethnic minorities, and design systemic interventions for a crisis of PTSD in a recently post-conflict nation. After graduating from my master’s program, I interned as a health policy researcher at New York University’s School of Population Health, where I had the opportunity to work on a national initiative aimed at improving the cardiovascular health outcomes for underserved populations in the greater New York City Area. Here, I had the opportunity to research different health care delivery and reform models that coordinated efforts between local and federal government, academic institutions and non-profit healthcare organization in an attempt to implement policy and structural changes that has the potential to move the needle on people’s health in a way isolated clinical alone cannot achieve. More importantly, I spent 2 years working one on one with the homeless at a soup kitchen in New York City. This experience taught me how much I loved hearing people’s stories, and making the work (clinical, policy, or academic) about me. To be frank, my time at NYU jaded me a little bit to policy work. Working at Memorial Sloan Kettering really helped realign my passion for the humanism, which set my course for medical school. It’s been great to slowly merge that passion for humanistic medicine, compassion, with the larger policy work that could feel depersonalizing/abstract.
In medical school, I have served on my school’s student government as an elected representative. One of the first thing that I did was perform a qualitative assessment of the needs of our peers (specifically addressing a lack of mental health support amongst my peers). This has led to my founding and directing of the NYMC Resiliency Curriculum. Our resiliency curriculum is based on extensive research into the literature behind resilience, neuroplasticity, the growth mindset, and the spectrum of mental health distress and burnout that exists in a continuum across the medical field: from medical students to residents to physicians. In designing this curriculum, I’ve had the opportunity to further my understanding of burnout, and mental health; along with the opportunity to apply strategic leadership skills in creating partnership with the administrative, different student organizations, peers, and mentors. 3 years after its founding, our program is now an integrated part of our medical school curriculum, trains every single medical school student at our school, and has been recognized nationally for its merits. Most importantly, through my research, I’ve realized that many of the challenges that our patients’ face: for example not being able to receive adequate primary care that not only manages disease but also promote health, are linked to several causes of student, and practitioner burnout: feeling as though their practice does not reflect what they believe medicine should be.
In designing this systematic intervention program, and directing its implementation and growth, I saw my passions for global health, health policy, intersect with my new found interest in the science of compassion and mental health; and most importantly my “ex-tra medicine passions” directly intersect with my career as a future physician. The literature pointed towards the connection between the rising deaths of despair (https://www.npr.org/2020/03/18/817687042/deaths-of-despair-examines-the-steady-erosion-of-u-s-working-class-life those from suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease) to the lack of resilience in our patients. If we can train our physicians to become more resilient, and teach resilience to our patients, could that bridge be overcome? Can we make evident the incentive for decreasing physician burnout is aligned with health policy changes that would better coordinate patient care, and improved health outcomes? These are some of the questions that I hope to answer in pursuing a career of patient centered innovation: bettering shaping medical care to effectively treat individual illnesses, advancing scientific understanding of disease processes, whilst designing, evaluating and implanting policy changes improve community health outcomes, along with better empowering physicians to heal their patients.
On a more personal note, I hope to continue to follow my passion for travel, and world futbol in the future. I’m trying to improve my Spanish, so that I can backpack Latin America before all my loan obligations become too burdensome. I’m looking forward to catch some of the classic futbol rivalries like the NorthWest Derby, El Classico, Superclasico, Milan Derby, and Der Klasskier in person. I need to go watch Manchester United play at Old Trafford and Lionel Messi play in person before he retires. How is this related to EPIIC? How is it not? Our passions are related to our success. And success to our passions.
Ananda Paez
Visiting a women’s livelihood center in Morocco
Describe your experiences with the Institute and its immersive education.
One of the first things I did at Tufts as a freshman was join the Institute for Global Leadership. In fact, IGL was one of the main reasons I chose to attend Tufts in the first place. Exposure to the Oslo Scholars program during my senior year of high school convinced me that Tufts had the international focus and opportunities that I was interested in. I joined EPIIC Global Health and Security as a freshman, and over my 6 years at Tufts (4 as an undergraduate and 2 at Fletcher) I was involved in EMPOWER, Oslo Scholars, NIMEP, FieldEx, and others. I also co-founded the Tufts Latin America Committee that became part of the IGL in 2015.
IGL shaped my experience as a student at Tufts in two ways. First, it offered a challenging and insightful environment in the classroom where, by being exposed to a variety of perspectives and tough questions, my learning experience was enhanced. Second, IGL provided the unique opportunity to have international hands-on experiences that were essential to shaping my career. For instance, it was through the IGL that I was able to do a summer internship at the World Bank. This positive experience contributed to my decision to return to the World Bank after completing my master’s. Throughout my involvement with IGL, Sherman’s mentorship and guidance was and continues to be invaluable to me.
How have these many activities at the Institute opened up opportunities and provided you with mentors?
While at Tufts, the opportunity to do research and internships abroad was invaluable. For instance, my experience with NIMEP in Jordan, Junaid at the World Bank and BRAC in Sierra Leone gave me a lot of exposure and helped me understand the international development sector fairly well. This is why I think I was excited to start my master's right after undergrad. They also opened the doors to a lot of opportunities I wouldn't have had access to otherwise. My experience with Junaid at the World Bank in particular was amazing because not only did he offer mentorship, but he also encouraged me to make the most for my experience at the World Bank. During my time in DC I spent a lot of time speaking to people who were happy to mentor me and it was in great part through these conversations that I identified my interest in the intersection of development and humanitarian emergencies. Most recently, the Convisero community has continued to be a source of mentorship for me. For example, Dan offered amazing career advise and access to his networks in the region that have been invaluable for me.
How will you engage with the Convisero community?
I definitely want to remain very actively engaged with the Convisero community, by continuing to exchange ideas with its members. In particular, I look forward to mentoring younger students or recent graduates who are interested in international development, in the same way that so many mentors helped me.
What are your intellectual passions?
I am working on expanding the work I did on my master’s thesis on coping mechanisms to drought and hopefully publishing a paper about it in the near future. Though my work right now focuses on specific projects, my core passion has always been broader policy and understanding how everything is connected. For example, given that I am currently working in an area that is affected by severe drought and previously worked in a conflict zone, understanding the nexus between humanitarian response and sustainable, long term development policy is something I have focused on a lot. I was recently surprised to find a UN document from the 1970’s that talked about this nexus, given that the discourse today continues to treat it as something that is new and upcoming. The fact that the humanitarian and development sectors remain separate and that synergies between them are yet to be fully understood or developed is concerning. On a more personal note, writing fiction has always been a passion that I am not trying to pursue more seriously as well.
Your aspirations?
In the short-term, I would like to continue to learn from mentors and friends to gain more experience and a nuanced understanding of key issues in development. In the medium to long term, I wish to work on broader international development and humanitarian policy. I am particularly interested in resilience and system-building and response.
What are your thoughts and critiques of aid assistance, and your reaction to the Jameel Poverty Action Lab winning the Nobel Prize in Economics?
I believe that the development sector still has many flaws but also important strengths. For instance, power dynamics in the aid sector are extremely pronounced and often shape relationships between donors and recipients in negative and unsustainable ways.
I was delighted when Kremer, Duflo and Banerjee won the Nobel as I believe that it is a big win for development economics and will give a lot more visibility to the benefits of this type of work. Randomized Controlled Trials and other impact evaluation methods can help assess the effectiveness of interventions and provide information on how to best use scarce resources. They are the basis of evidence-based decision-making in development which I think is crucial. That being said, there are certainly limitations to RCTs and I find that using them as panaceas is very dangerous. Experimental work can also be easily manipulated to yield particular results in a specific case that then compromises how generalizable they are and their policy relevance. I believe that the more investments in RCTs focus their policy relevance, the more the aid sector will benefit.
You are to me essentially a "cosmopolitan" - a world citizen. How does rising global ethno-nationalism impact your thinking?
It is definitely concerning to watch the rise of ethno-nationalism around the globe. I am very interested in humanitarian response, and issues of migration and forced displacement are extremely relevant to my work. In the past year I have had a lot of conversations with mentors at the World Bank and other organizations about refugee policy. Something that strikes me is that policy-makers seem to be increasingly clueless about how to address negative reactions within host communities to the presence of migrants and refugees. Evidence suggests that refugees and migrants bring more benefits than drawbacks to a society, and there is little relationship between numbers and the popular discourse, which means that negative reactions are entirely political in nature. It really saddens me to see how this and other issues have been exploited by the ethno-nationalist discourse to serve political gains at the expense of logical and evidence-based policy.
LEAP at Tufts
Chris Swan, Sarah Freeman, and Doug Matson
We met on February 21st, 2020 with Professor Chris Swan, Dean of Undergraduate Education at the Tufts School of Engineering, Professor Douglas Matson, and a wonderful Institute alumna, Sarah Freeman. One objective of this meeting was to secure the naming of Tufts’ Engineers Without Borders in honor of our deceased wonderful common friend, Fred Berger. He was a long time member of the Institute’s External Advisory Board. The occasion also allowed us to introduce LEAP to Tufts Engineering, EWB, and Sarah.
In 2004, Institute Board member David Cuttino had introduced me to Fred, then the Chair of the Board of Louis Berger, Inc. An engineer by profession, Fred was an alumnus of the Tufts Department of Economics, and became a member of the Tufts Board of Trustees. He expressed to me his interest in the creation of what he termed an “engineering Peace Corps,” and his frustration at the lack of traction this idea received at Tufts. With his support, the Institute suggested creating an Engineers Without Borders chapter, and honored Bernard Amadei, the Founding President of EWB-USA, with a Dr. Jean Mayer Award.
Our vision, and the EWB mandate, was to encourage students to work closely with faculty mentors and field experts to provide engineering support to serve the needs of communities in developing countries. To ensure the sustainability of their projects, the students built relationships with the communities that they work in before beginning their projects, and developed a plan in collaboration with, and fully sensitive to the interests and concerns of, those community.
EWB’s very first trip to Tibet was led by Sarah, then an undergraduate engineering student under the advising of Doug Matson. The project created latrines and solar-powered cookers to destroy medical waste. Mindful that they were traveling to a Chinese-controlled zone, we sensitized the students to what it means to work in such a sensitive environment, providing orientation sessions on language, culture, and China-Tibet governance and politics.
I have reconnected with Tufts Shafiqul Islam, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor of Water Diplomacy at Tufts University, a good friend, and the father of one of my wonderful former students, Maia Majumder. Shafiqul and I affectionately call each other “Bunky,” commemorating the time we spent as bunkmates during an EPIIC Outward Bound retreat.
For the 2005 EPIIC Oil and Water year, together we convened a professional workshop on “Water as a Source of Conflict and Cooperation: Exploring the Potential,” which then became the Water Diplomacy Project at Fletcher and the Water Systems, Science, and Society initiatives. These are part of the wonderful legacies that the Institute left for Tufts. Shafiqul will serve as a Convisero and LEAP mentor.
Wellesley "Global Tea" on Middle East Peace Plan
I led a discussion for Wellesley’s “Global Tea” series, on the repercussions of Trump and Netanyahu’s recent announcement of their “peace plan” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which aims to outright annex much of the West Bank and potentially strip many Arab-Israelis of their citizenship. According to many commentators who had previously resisted the comparison, the plan would fully realize apartheid in Israel, and create a Bantustan-like Palestinian state with no real sovereignty or control over its security.
I presented the interactive satellite maps of B’Tselem to students. They cover the fifty-plus year history of settling and encroachment of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 war, in a remarkably thorough, factual, and irrefutable way.
I was asked to present by Ify Nwolah, an Albright Fellow from Nigeria helps direct “Global Tea.” Given Ify’s aspiration to one-day become the Minister of Education in Nigeria, I was pleased to introduce her to my friend Oby Ezekwesili, who has served in that role.
Gregg Nakano joins LEAP
Gregg who I affectionately call the “Ramrod” of ALLIES has become part of the LEAP network. Peter Droege will help Gregg create an overture to UNESCO and its Small Island Developing States (SIDS) program, framed by “slow onset disaster” and the existential risk posed to the territory and cultures of Pacific island nations, and help secure a potential UNESCO delegation to the Festival of the Pacific (FESTPAC).
Introducing Maheen Akram to Gaurav Tiwari
I continue to work with Albright students. I introduced one of the Albright Institute Fellows I mentored, Maheen Akram, to Empower alumnus Gaurav Tiwari. Maheen, who intends to work towards socio-economic development in her native Kashmir, is graduating from Wellesley this year, and seeking mentorship as she begins her professional trajectory in finance and business strategy.
Empower with Muhammad Yunus, Gaurav second from right
It was a pleasure to introduce Maheen to Gaurav, who has a remarkable background as a strategic thinker and practitioner. As an Empower Fellow during his time at Fletcher, he won Tufts’ $100,000 social entrepreneurship prize, as well as $100,000 from both MIT and USAID, for Sanergy, a firm Gaurav co-founded that provides sanitation and waste management in under-developed areas.
Gaurav is now at State Street, and has enthusiastically agreed to advise Maheen on her future, as well as other students as a mentor for Convisero.
Marcy Murninghan joins LEAP
I introduced Peter Droege to Marcy Murninghan, who was an Institute INSPIRE Fellow during the 2007-08 EPIIC year on “Global Poverty and Inequality.” In her time at the Institute, she wrote a report on Fighting the Fury: Climate Change, Natural Disasters, and the Stewardship Ethic - building on her decades of experience in corporate social responsibility and ethics - which links the military services and civil and business sectors in a integrative framework to respond to climate disaster.
Fighting the Fury examines existing practice and opportunities for cultivating private sector and civil–military partnerships and leadership, opportunities that traverse the humanitarian community, and the overlapping arenas of corporate and investor social responsibility, as well as academe. It suggests how these partnerships might be strengthened and new ones created, while engaging, too, other actors such as social entrepreneurs, foundations, and the media.”
Marcy has developed a new Equity Culture / Civic Fiduciary initiative that encompasses the concept of a civilian disaster corps that she developed at the Institute. In addition to being an integral contributor to ALLIES - my Institute’s civil-military program - with her emphasis on civil-military collaboration on climate response, she is now a LEAP fellow, and with Peter and LISD’s insight will continue to develop and advocate for this framework.
A Convisero Retrospective
Dear Friends,
Allegedly retired, I have actually begun what Iris terms a “new chapter” in my life. Reminiscences and active continuities….
Jerome and I are constructing a new platform, Convisero, (Latin for “Unite”), as The Trebuchet's effort to create a dynamic interactive interface, among experts and alumni from my fifty years of teaching and programming, and the new people I now interact with in my Emeritus life.
What follows is a recounting of a weave of recent encounters and interactions with friends, old and new. It spans approximately two month’s activity from November 2019 to January 2020.
I could have easily chosen any such time period in my Emeritus life over the last three years, and created such a tapestry.
Alumni Networking
Chris and Petar
• I recently had lunch with two wonderful Institute alumni, Petar Todorov and Chris Ghadban, who in the context of EPIIC’s year on Global Health and Security created two derivative IGL initiatives, one an iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) competition team, and after the team’s success, a synthetic biology club. Petar is now in a PhD program in Copenhagen, and Chris is a bioinformatics scientist with AstraZeneca in Boston.
They are enthusiastic about Convisero, and will be writing profiles and mentoring. They have already begun the mentoring aspect, having cofounded a forum called GapSummit, a global intergenerational gathering of biotech experts featuring a “Voices of Tomorrow” cohort of 100 young leaders in the industry. This all began with my introducing them to Juan Enriquez, who enabled a select number of Institute students to attend the Whitehead Institute open house, which is usually only open to donors.
Having Petar and Chris aboard particularly exciting, given that they not only represent the true interdisciplinary of what I tried to create, but open up broad vistas to enable me to help students in the bio sciences that I ordinarily would not have access to.
David Walt is a close friend, and I am asking him and Juan to purposively join Convisero, not only to help students, but to help me enlarge the Pugwash model that I am working on.
At times, this helps even my direct family. I have introduced Petar and Chris to my son Nathaniel and his girlfriend Kelly. Nathaniel is advising Chris on his application to business schools, and Kelly has begun a conversation with them about her own work at Artemis, a firm developing innovative farming techniques. Chris has previously worked in this field with the Good Food Institute and Granular Farm Management.
Chris also knows the founder of a potential platform to begin connecting our community, called Lounjee, and will introduce us to see if he can create a closed network for Convisero
• Suyu Zhang, an EPIIC alum from the 2012 Global Health year, a few weeks ago sent me a curriculum he designed with peers on mental resiliency for medical students. He is currently at New York Medical College, and deeply concerned by the ability of students to cope with the immense stress and pressures of training to become a physician. I sent his project to my personal physician, whose brother is the former dean of the Harvard Medical School. I soon will share it with Professor of Psychiatry Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, the Director of the Columbia Lighthouse Project who spoke for EPIIC’s colloquium on the recommendation of her close friend, my wonderful alum and Trebuchet Secretary, Jennifer Selendy. They are the founders of the unique Speyer School.
And I had the pleasure of connecting Suyu to another EPIIC alum and Synaptic Scholar, Nnenna Okoye, who is finishing her medical residency at UC San Francisco. In time, I hope to link many of my former students now in medical school, and our recent medical school grads, to this effort. I am also sending it to Professor Stephen Soumerai, who is very interested in this topic.
• Josh Malkin, an EPIIC alum and one of my former “aides de camp,” sent me his proposal for a program helping high-achieving, but underserved, middle school students in New York to pass the SHSAT high school entrance exam. Josh who taught for Teach for America in New Orleans, is now a student at Columbia Law School.
I introduced him to Josh Laub, an EPIIC alum from 1989, and one of my most activist students, who remains deeply concerned with societal inequality. He was a high school principal in the Bronx for twelve years, and is now the Director of Youth Development in New York City’s District 88, working with youth transition from jail, back to school. They have begun to correspond. Josh L. also disrupted EPIIC’s 1988 forum on Covert Action when we brought CIA Director William Colby, and was detained by Tufts Police. I missed several hours of the symposium to talk with him, and he enrolled in our EPIIC 1989 Drug year, and it was a wonderful moment when a radical brilliant young man saw the virtue in open non-polemical environments. He has remained a very close friend.
I also introduced Josh M. to David Puth, as cares deeply about youth development in his role on the board of Robin Hood. He was my Tufts student in 1978, (yes 1978!...I was there for one semester and never expected to return ) in a political science course on Middle East politics. In true Convisero fashion, we remained very close. I once had the pleasure of being interviewed in Bloomberg news, speaking to David's integrity and intelligence. Of course I reached him to become Trebuchet’s Treasurer.
• I Skyped with a member of my first EPIIC class, Professor Turhan Canli. Turhan just published this piece in EuropeNow, the monthly publication of the Council for European Studies. As a member of the Development Board of CES, I had introduced Turhan to their Director, Nicole Shea, in early 2017. Together, they co-edited the issue of EuropeNow, "Forced Migration, Cultural Identity, and Trauma," in which I interviewed Mike Niconchuk about his socio-neurology work in the Za'atari refugee camp.
Turhan shared with me his newest project on "War-Trauma and Disease." I am putting him in touch with Many Stefanakis, a former Institute Advisor Board member and a friend of the Niarchos Foundation, and Alan Stoga of Tällberg, for potential funding.
Middle East Activity
I am creating a community of Israeli/Americans, American Jews and Israelis, living and studying in Boston to support existing and new progressive Israeli and Boston/Israel initiatives. We are resonating a new collective voice that will reassert itself against very intensifying conservative trends in Jewish communal life.
We also seek to effectively address the resurgence of anti-Semitism, while also confronting actions within our community that we consider antithetical to our values, such as attempts locally to stifle freedom of expression in the Newton South High School system, by Jewish activists alleging that its curriculum is biased against Israel; or as in Trump's recent regrettable executive order on Title VI that affects Universities.
Over time we hopefully will ultimately be significant enough to influence U.S policy towards Israel, and Israeli policy.
• Amitai Abouzaglo, a Harvard senior, is a member of our nascent community. I met him two years ago through my ongoing effort to support Combatants for Peace (I have joined the Academic Advisory Board of their American Friends organization). His academic major is religion. I successfully nominated him to become Harvard's first Human Rights Foundation Oslo Scholar, a new program I have embedded in the offerings of the Harvard undergraduate International Relations Council, which I advise.
Larry Bacow and Itai
I am also an advisor to Amitai's new promising NGO, Embodying Peace.
Amitai wanted Itai Kohavi, the founder of International Peace Accelerator to meet me. On November 20th, while talking with Itai at Harvard’s student center, Harvard President Larry Bacow stopped by to warmly greet me. Larry was a strong supporter of my efforts while President of Tufts until 2012, and germane to MENA region issues, he helped support the creation of NIMEP.
Anna
Witnessing this by chance, Anna del Castillo came by and reintroduced herself to me as a former IGL Synaptic Scholar. Now a Harvard Divinity School graduate student, her project, as a Harvard Presidential Fellow, centers on the potential for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, I introduced her to Itai, and Amitai, and they all expressed interest in collaborating.
Itai and I have now had several detailed conversations. I have agreed to join his Advisory Board, and I am considering his offer to direct an IPA workshop in the region. He has extraordinary links to the highest echelons of both Israeli and Palestinian political leadership and entrepreneurship. Enclosed a picture of Larry, Itai and myself; and Itai sent me a picture of himself with his Palestinian co-founder, Huda El-Jack of Ramallah and former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert.
Janette, Shula, Shai, and Amir
• On November 15th I met with Daniel Sokatch, the CEO of the New Israel Fund, and Stephane Acel-Green, NIF's Deputy VP for Regional Development in Boston. Together with Harvard’s Shula Gilad, a member of our group who works closely with J-Street, we met again with Stephane, and with J Street’s Regional Director Janette Hillis-Jaffe, seeking to investigate and encourage the utility and value of leveraging integrated, common efforts between NIF and J Street. Heretofore, they have traditionally operated in differing domestic and international spheres.
I reached out to an EPIIC alumna from my 1987 West Bank and Gaza year, Brenda Needle (now Brenda Needle-Shimoni), who immigrated to Israel, and who was a long term consultant for Shatil (1992 through 2003), the NIF’s operative arm and initiative for social change. (By what I term serendipity, she is the one who hired Daniel to originally come to NIF)
Amitai had met the Israeli Policy Working Group last summer in Israel while working to grow Embodying Peace. He introduced us, as one of the original concerns I had with convening our group in the first place, is to support groups working specifically on human and civil rights in Israel. The PWG is chaired by Israeli Ambassador Alon Liel. We have begun a meaningful correspondence.
The Convisero web thickens. The Ambassador’s wife, Rachel Liel, is currently the chair of ACRI. She and Brenda had also worked closely together when Rachel was Shatil’s Director.
Understanding what we are hoping to create now, Brenda alerted me to an informal coalition of progressive Jewish organizations she had helped create in Boston in the late 1980’s with Donny Perlstein, who was then regional director of NIF for New England.
Donny had introduced me to his son, Ben Perlstein, when Ben was still in high school. Ben participated in our Inquiry high school program, enrolled in Tufts, and joined EPIIC and Synaptic Scholars. Now a friend, he is currently finishing his rabbinical studies at Jewish Theological Seminary.
Ben has joined our effort, and I have invited his father. Yes, we are truly intergenerational…
• We learned of an important article “Arab Thinkers Call to Abandon Boycotts and Engage With Israel” about a distinguished group of journalists, scholars, diplomats, and artists that share a view that "anti-normalization," isolating and demonizing Israel was self-defeating. We have reached out to one of their group, Dr. Mohammed Dajani, the Palestinian professor who created the Wasatia initiative.
I had brought Dr. Dajani to Tufts in 2014 for EPIIC’s Future of the Middle East and North Africa colloquium, and honored him with a Dr. Jean Mayer Award. The student BDS movement at Tufts was in opposition. He was later expelled from Al Quds University for taking his students to Auschwitz to better understand the Holocaust.
I had already introduced him to Dr. Dajani, and now we have introduced another member of our group, Amir Grinstein, and his organization 50 50 Startups, to hopefully stimulate collaboration.
Shula and Yousef
Shula introduced me to Yousef Alzaeem, the Founder and CEO of the Gazan-based Everest Trading Group who is currently at Harvard HKS. I have introduced Yousef to Sara Roy, a member of our group, and they have arranged to meet. I am trying to reach another of the group to Eglal Gheita, a British-Egyptian lawyer through my friend Mona Mowafi, founder of RISE Egypt.
• I was called by Anne Josephson, a lawyer and good friend, regarding my advice on the Newton South High School controversy over an alleged anti-Semitic curriculum. Both the Newton controversy and Trump's Title VI executive order play into the right-wing Israeli narrative equating any criticism of the state of Israel, or of Judaism with hate speech.
Anne and I will be reaching out to my friend, and Tufts alumnus, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, regarding his position on the Trump executive order.
Convisero Mentors
• I have been involved with the Tällberg Foundation since participating in a Tällberg workshop on the Greek island of Lesvos in 2016. Their President, Alan Stoga, has since become a friend.
On November 26th, the Tällberg Foundation announced the recipients of their prestigious 2019 Eliasson Prize for Global Leadership. I had the pleasure of nominating one of the three winners, Dr. Anne Goldfeld, one of over fifteen hundred nominees from one hundred and fifty countries.
Mike, Anne, and Alan
Anne, a good friend of several decades, is a former member of the Institute's Advisory Board. She was an exceptional mentor in our immersive education program, including taking two of our students enrolled in the 2012 EPIIC Global Health year on a research trip to Cambodia. I awarded her the Institute's Dr. Jean Mayer Award in 2013.
By serendipity, one of Anne’s Tällberg reviewers was my alum, Mike Niconchuk. He had been asked to join the Tällberg Board after meeting Alan, while accompanying me to the Lesvos workshop.
Anne and Mike are now Convisero mentors.
• At times, the level at which Convisero works is from expert-to-expert. On December 4th, a friend, Ambassador Samantha Power delivered the Institute's inaugural lecture on “Global Moral Leadership” in memory of our extraordinary mutual friend, Ambassador Jonathan Moore. I first asked her to give this talk when we were ushers at Jonathan's Harvard memorial service in June of 2017, and she asked me to wait until she finished her book, The Education of An Idealist.
I first met Jonathan in 1980 during his tenure as the director of Harvard's Institute of Politics. I was teaching two study groups there, on covert action and U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. MENA affairs. He was in many ways my mentor, and responsible for my Institute's ability to conduct our global experiential immersive education programs, knowledgeably, safely, and responsibly. As a member of the Institute’s Advisory Board for ten years, he stimulated the creation of our Voices from the Field program.
The lecture was a wonderful inspirational moment, joining former UN Ambassadors, whose ethics and idealism permeated everything we've done at the Institute when I was director.
• Two days later, I saw Samantha speak again, this time at WBUR's CitySpace, in conversation with a wonderful alum and friend, Sasha Chanoff, the founder of RefugePoint. The forum was convened by another good friend, Ina Breuer, the Director of New England International Donors. Ina was the Executive Director of the Project of Justice in Times of Transition when it was hosted at the Institute at my invitation for six years, and we created many programs together, viz. ACCESS.
Samantha spoke for the first time at the Institute's gathering of VII Photo Agency, for Exposure in 2005. Now as part of my responsibilities on the Advisory Board of the VII Foundation, I had just edited the afterword she wrote for the forthcoming VII Foundation volume Imagine: Reflections on Peace.
Sasha first interacted with the Institute when together we created the “Game of Nations” in 1998, creating a community soccer team to play the Tufts soccer team, comprised entirely of Boston-area refugees from across the globe seeking asylum in the US. I helped him create Mapendo International, the precursor to RefugePoint, and then had the honor of successfully nominating him in 2010 for the Bronfman Prize for his humanitarian achievements. I currently serve a Strategic Advisor to RefugePoint.
Jerome and I went to CitySpace with another good friend and former Institute INSPIRE Fellow, Dan Holmberg. He has recently returned from the field as Regional Advisor for Disaster Assistance for USAID in Nairobi. He had spoken for Voices from the Field with Sasha in 2012, during the EPIIC Global Health year. Knowing Dan is now looking to remain stateside, we went together to reconnect him with Sasha, and intentionally to meet Sam. I also introduced Dan to Ina, for whom he will now become a resource person for her international donors.
Samantha, Ina, Sasha and Dan are now also all integral to Convisero. Attached is Dan’s letter to us.
• Many of you know that I have a golden doodle pup named Remi, who continually delights me. A couple of weeks ago, on a late evening walk, she began to surprisingly bark at a silhouette neither of us recognized. It turned out to be a young woman vigorously jumping rope, as a boxer might, in Coolidge Park across from my home. And so we met Anna Savolainen, a young Finnish political scientist living in Boston for the year with her husband, who is doing a postdoc in nanotechnology at The Broad Institute.
We had a delightful conversation, and soon met again at my home over tea and scones. I asked her the question I am fond of posing when people seek advice from me, "If you close your eyes and imagine your immediate future right now, what is your ideal outcome?" In this case, Anna, who completed her masters in Upsala on peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, expressed her interest in pursuing that course of study, and doing a PhD on transatlantic security cooperation.
She went on to tell me she continued to have a sustained interest in peacekeeping, and also of an ideal PhD position she was interested in applying for, at the University of Leiden. Immediately, I was able to volunteer to put her in touch with another friend, and "Voice from the Field," Nick Birnback, a veteran field peacekeeper, now in charge of public relations for UN Peacekeeping Operations in New York. Then, I was able to aim a laser beam at her specific objective, when I realized that the supervisor for the PhD position she desires is none other than my friend Professor Joachim “Joe” Koops.
Joe and I had several meetings with his faculty in Belgium where he offered me the position of Distinguished Professor of Ethical Global Leadership at the Vesalius Institute in Brussels he directed; and an offer to create and direct a potential new center with the felicitous acronym, VITAL (Vesalius Institute for Transatlantic Leadership). I really wanted to remain stateside, and ultimately it came to naught when he took the new position of Chair of Security Studies and Scientific Director of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University’s campus in The Hague. (in any case, Iris has done a brilliant job of keeping me on a “short leash” by agreeing to the aforementioned Remi!)
Even though Finland is hardly on this side of the Atlantic, if it works, I will consider it a "vital" success.
• One of my very close friends, Jason Clay - I was the best man at his wedding - wrote to tell me of this Markets Institute newsletter on food trends. I sent it on to my son's girlfriend Kelly Ward, who is an Enterprise Account Executive at Artemis, and to my good friend Boaz Wachtel, the founder of the Green Leaf Party in Israel, now a developer of innovative agriculture with Roots. They are in contact now.
Criminal Justice Concerns
• I attended a benefit concert to endow student scholarships for Roxbury Community College, organized by a close friend, the jazz impresario, Ted Kurland. The evening was in honor of the legendary drummer and Roxbury resident, Roy Haynes, now in his nineties, who was in the audience. His grandson Marcus Gilmore is already a force. The incomparable Pat Methany was the featured artist. Ted is their agent, as he was, and is, for many other jazz greats, from Nina Simone to Wynton Marsalis.
There, I met the president of Roxbury Community College, Valerie Roberson. We briefly discussed my intent to link her College's criminal justice program to the Innocence International archive of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. I had brought him to Tufts to speak and we became friends in the last years of his life. At my intervention he agreed to house his archive at Tufts' Tisch Library.
A wonderful 2010 EPIIC alumna, Taarika Sridhar, who just passed the Massachusetts Bar and is joining the prestigious Boston law firm, Ropes and Gray, will be doing her pro bono work with the Innocence Project, and she has agreed to take on students from Roxbury's criminal justice program as interns.
At the concert, I also met a former TA of mine from Emerson College days! 1984! Lisa Zopatti. She remembered me immediately when she saw me, and in conversation asked me to get engaged with Year Up. We have pledged to meet.
Daniel Holmberg
Daniel H Holmberg has 30+ years as a principled humanitarian Assistance professional in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. He is currently the senior program policy advisor for the UN World Food Program Country Offices in Libya and Iraq on the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus.
How did we first meet?
I first met Sherman Teichman through his former student, acclaimed photo-journalist Nicki Sobecki. I met Nicki in Pakistan in 2010 where I was serving as Country Director for International non-governmental humanitarian aid organization Action Against Hunger / Action Contre la Faim. We had employed Nicki to update our web-page in regard to the work we were doing with populations in North West Pakistan displaced by the Taliban. At a dinner one night in the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad I opened up to Nicki about my two decades in conflict zones, family separation, burn-out, and the feeling that I was trapped in a career path that had no out. She immediately thought of one person. "You need to meet this guy. He is called Sherman Teichman and I think he can help.” I remained in Pakistan for several more months to address humanitarian needs precipitated by the 2010 Indus river flooding, and then followed my wife and kids to the U.S. My wife had just emigrated there 6 months before. Manic and cynical, I met Sherman at Tufts University. After narrating my 20+ years of international experience to him he had two messages for me. 1) "The cynicism has to go, and you need to remember the reason you have devoted your life to this work", 2) "I need you as an INSPIRE fellow at Tufts, to promote the new generation of public service-oriented doers and thinkers". He then directed me towards the Feinstein International Center, and in that one day, not only had I emerged from my cynical funk, but I had been requested by the Feinstein Center Director to apply for a masters program. That was a pivotal day in my life.
Describe your time as an INSPIRE Fellow with us.
I was an INSPIRE Fellow at Tufts for over two years. Having left the U.S. in 1984, and as a non-stop humanitarian practitioner acclimatizing to my home country after several decades, this experience turned out to be pivotal and inspiring door that opened on a new stage of life for me. I was surrounded by excited idealism. I was forced to see my life experiences as valuable, challenged to drop any tired cynicism I had built up, and encouraged to translate my experience to a new generation. It was cathartic and reaffirming of the time bound human tradition of mentoring, which has led to so much good in the world. Somewhat self-centered, I participated in round-table discussions with professionals with whom I had previously seen as 'not part of my highly focused world,' only to discover that we were all part of the same complex mosaic.
· ex- U.S. military immigrants from former Yugoslavia who were experts in cyber-warfare
· U.S. military former commanders of provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq and Afghanistan
· Humanitarian Assistance professionals who had found a niche in refugee resettlement that catered for the most vulnerable
· business leaders with a profound sense of social responsibility.
· Individuals with amazing combinations of academic, military, diplomatic and humanitarian expertise encapsulated into focused capacities
The list went on and on, but the most exciting part was the mentoring I provided that went on after my tenure as an INSPIRE Fellow. The way that Sherman helped me translate my experience into something new, I can now proudly say that I have and continue to do the same for people that Sherman has directed my way.
How were you introduced to the Masters in Humanitarian Assistance program at Fletcher?
As previously stated, Sherman, on the day I met him, directed me towards the Feinsterin International Center and introduced me to the Director at the time (Dr. Peter Walker). I was accepted into this specialized graduate degree program along with four other individuals. It was a mid-career level Joint graduate degree at both the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Though the program was ostensibly for humanitarian practitioners, I quickly discovered that I was the most experienced practitioner in the program and at the Fletcher School. Recognition of my experience led to Dr. Walker asking me to critique graduate projects on humanitarian assistance in complex emergencies at Harvard University, and eventually to offers from both the Fletcher School and George Washington University to be an adjunct professor. This degree put into focus my two decades of field experience, filled in the gaps of knowledge I had, and made me into a sharper tool. Shortly thereafter, I became the U.S. Government's Senior Humanitarian Advisor in Sudan, a country I have worked in extensively since 1992.
Give us a thumbnail of your work? What your passions have been? Your aspirations at this point?
As with most focus topics in the international affairs arena, any given topic has within it a plethora of specialized focus areas. For many years, I worked in a sub-culture of field practitioners in conflict and transitional areas of fragile states. Over time, as I became more senior and a part of the humanitarian architecture that influences political policy decisions, I became aware that INGO voices, while powerful from a 'reality check'-moral basis, were also compromised by their reliance on donors. When I became a U.S. diplomat and the humanitarian representative for the largest donor in the world in a given context, I carried with me the moral compass and operational knowledge from my past and inserted it into the sometimes timid, transactional and dogmatic world of engagement with foreign governments, diplomatic missions with their many equities, and United Nations bureaucracy where it is adverse to change in the status quo. As the former U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia put it, "Daniel speaks truth to power." At times, this had negative effects on my political capital and personal well-being, but through this approach I became the de-facto humanitarian lead voice in both Sudan and Ethiopia. With the support I garnered from INGO's, like minded UN allies, and other diplomatic missions, I was able to challenge comfort zones of big power and big egos, and shift the humanitarian architecture and diplomatic policies towards outcomes that had huge effects on the lives of the millions of vulnerable people we are meant to serve in these countries. Through my years of experience, my almost obsessive devotion to research and having the right information, the correct amalgam of components, and my inclination towards doing better than what is acceptable, to many I have been, on several occasions, one of few in the room with the understanding of what needs to be done ' five steps ahead,' and the risk-taking orientation to act. This is my passion, and now the arena of 'a single humanitarian response' has become an arena I no longer want to commit to. I want to contribute a step further to the thoughtful design of new approaches based in operational and political reality that address the inefficiencies of the current practice and norms of humanitarian assistance. The budget for Humanitarian assistance grows larger every year. Climate change, population youth bulges in developing countries, fragile states faced with a swing to the political right, isolationism of wealthy donor countries, and their subsequent disengagement with issues of regional stability, all denote the heightened relevance of the capacities of the humanitarian assistance community and a need for new approaches. My passion is to be one of the global think tank contributors to this need.
How you have helped our students in the past, and how you are available now to continue doing so?
I recall a persistent inclination I have had throughout my career. When I had a supervisor or colleague who demonstrates ego, arrogance or ineptitude in the work-place, either towards me or towards another, I made a mental note to 'never be like that'. This is easier said than done, because it implies sometimes standing up for change in the status quo and in sub-cultural norms. It is this that has guided my approach not only to assisting students that Sherman has sent my way, but to empowering those I see who have been dis-empowered in the workplace owing to norms of social status and the tendency those with access to information to hold it for themselves in support of the power base they have established. I have taken colleagues and subordinates who are not recognized and divulged to them what is going on in the decision-making realm above them. I actively de-mystify power and decision-making structures to those who are excluded from such knowledge. In doing so, I have seen seeds become flowers and timidity become confidence, in some cases leading to promotions to positions of power and access for individuals I have believed would be worthy of such responsibility, and for whom there was no one else assisting them. My approach is not uncommon, but it is still generally a minority social orientation.
Sherman directed Barbara Majid to me. She had an MPH and was working in New York for the international Rescue Committee. She wanted to go to the field and be a humanitarian practitioner, but didn't know how. I spoke to her at Sherman's behest with a template of 'need-to-know knowledge' in hand as I did so. She impressed, not just her technical knowledge, but with her humanity and work ethic. I reached out to former colleagues at Action against Hunger (the premier nutrition INGO) and told them I found a gem. They followed up. I prepped her for the interview and helped her decompress afterward. Long story short, she became an emergency nutrition coordinator for them in the Congo. I stayed in touch with her, trying to be of help with the adjustment to the field, and the process of taking that field operations energy as a catalyst for inspiration towards shooting for excellence. She kindly offers me up as having gotten her the job. I am honored by such sentiment, but know full well that I was only a helper who de-mystified a piece of the world for a qualified individual. I encouraged her to do the same for others.
I have assisted several other students with guidance and networking introductions, and I am currently assisting IGL grad Ananda Páez Rodas with intro's, guidance on where she can exploit her talents and de-mystifying the seemingly mystifying.
It is this part of my life that inspires me to revitalize former opportunities I had in the field of academics. I was offered an adjunct teaching gig at the University of Denver when I was the head of OFDA in Ethiopia. My organization did not value this enough to give me the time off, but now that I am on a different and new path, it seems obvious that advancing my academic participation as a professor and potential mentor would be one of the things that would be of benefit to myself and others.
Daniel as a young UN staffer in the rebel HQ of Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement faction leader Riek Machar (Now the vice president of South Sudan) in his Rebel HQ in Nasir, South Sudan ~ 1992. Also in the picture was his British wife Emma Riek, and to the right of Daniel, two nurses from International Rescue Committee.
With Jean Louis Romanet, we finally met!
Ambassador Jonathan Moore
I first met Ambassador Jonathan Moore in 1980 during his tenure as the director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. I was teaching two study groups there, on covert action and U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. MENA foreign affairs. Jonathan was formerly the US coordinator for refugees and Ambassador to the United Nations responsible for economic and social issues.
He was in so many ways my mentor, and responsible for my Institute's ability to conduct our global experiential immersive education programs, knowledgeably, safely, and responsibly.
I invited Jonathan to join the Institute’s Advisory Board, on which he served for ten years.
He wrote this of the Institute:
It is easy for me to assess the EPIIC program at Tufts from an academic viewpoint and that of a competitor…And I do so with admiration and event envy. There are three characteristics of EPIIC which I would like to mention specifically. The first is the kind of research which is at the same time rigorous and relevant, analytically sound by requiring a political and cultural respect and a practical value. The second is the full-scope and full-bore engagement which this program invites of its participants, which apparently becomes irresistible, given their enthusiastic immersion, thirsty to apply the knowledge they are acquiring in their very high-quality, formal education to challenges of a human scale. The third is the confidence which the program instills in idealistic and spiritual commitment, the understanding that the joining of ideals with intellect and competence is to be pursued rather than shunned.
He inspired and mentored generations of our students and especially stimulated the creation of our Voices from the Field program.
The last program I initiated for the Institute before I became Emeritus in 2016 is an annual lecture on “Global Moral Leadership” to be given in his honor. Finally on December 4th, 2020, a mutual friend, Ambassador Samantha Power delivered the Institute's inaugural lecture in memory of our extraordinary mutual friend. I first asked her to give this talk when we were ushers at Jonathan's Harvard memorial service in June of 2017, and she asked me to wait until she finished her book, The Education of An Idealist. It was worth the wait. The lecture was a wonderful inspirational moment, joining former UN Ambassadors, whose ethics and idealism permeated everything we accomplished at the Institute.
Jonathan and his wonderful wife Katie are greatly missed.
Cody Valdes
Cody A. Valdes is Senior Lecturer and Senior Tutor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Sai University, where he will be leading the development of the University’s tutorial system for undergraduate students as well as its Communications foundation course. He will play a role in fostering intellectual life, international projects, and opportunities for holistic growth on campus.
He received his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University in 2017 and his BA in Political Science from Tufts University in 2013. At Tufts he served in leadership positions in numerous programs of the Institute for Global Leadership under its Founding Director Emeritus Sherman Teichman, including its EPIIC colloquium, Empower Program of Social Entrepreneurship, Discourse Journal, Poverty and Power Research Initiative, Solar for Gaza/Sderot, and Synaptic Scholars. He later served as a Teaching Assistant for Tufts’ Department of Political Science, for which he gave lectures in the history of political thought and international relations. He has worked with Healing Minds Foundation’s team of therapists in Srinagar, Kashmir to introduce a mind-body integration programme for youth throughout the Valley. As an Instructor in the traditional martial arts with the School of Oom Yung Doe, he taught self-defense and moving meditation seminars to students and teachers at the International School of Kashmir and the Government College for Women in Srinagar.
***** MY INTERVIEW WITH CODY *****
It was my great pleasure and fortune to be able to introduce Cody to Jamshed Bharucha, who hired him at Sai University, where he is the indispensable fulcrum for my Global Challenges colloquium.
You joined EPIIC for our Global Cities year, and helped to create some of the more significant projects of the Institute - our look at corruption and oligarchy in the Philippines with the PPRI; the efforts to help ASYV with the Mango Tree Project; Sisi ni Amani, Solar for Gaza.
Why were you drawn to these initiatives? Did your efforts yield results?
For the Global Cities year (2008-9) I studied the potential impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics on Vancouver’s homeless and its Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. That same year I joined the Povrty and Power Research Initiative which had returned from its inaugural research effort into oligarchies and corruption in Guatemala and impressed me as being a serious team of very smart older peers. I sometimes wonder if my attraction to the theme of corruption as a freshman anticipated my later attraction to the theme of decline, which includes corruption in the Transparency International sense, but some other significant dimensions besides. In almost all of these efforts I was attracted by the seriousness of the issue at hand and the people I ended up working with.
How would you describe your temperament? On the one hand, I see tremendous equanimity. On the other, great restlessness.
Yes there is much restlessness. I might refer to Nietzsche’s Gay Science, section 351, or Faust:
Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest.
I would ascribe my restlessness to the fact that in many respects I have not allowed my personality to develop along a normal and healthful course, which instinctively seeks equilibrium and ease in self-definition. I have tried to see all sides of things, which naturally makes one try to be all sides of things. My motivation has been the same naïvely expansive humanism espoused by Faust.
What are your aspirations at the crossroads where you currently find yourself? What will inform your decision? What are important and vexing political or social issues you want to engage with?
I am looking for an organic way forward. My work in Kashmir has been abruptly curtailed by the Indian government’s actions on August 5th, 2019, but the events of that day also galvanized me to engage in Canadian public life. The annulment of Kashmir’s status within the Indian federation demonstrated the utter fragility of constitutional democracy, especially where the qualities of forbearance and humanity can no longer be assumed of publics and their politicians. I would like to see Canada shore up its commitment to the letter and spirit of its federalist constitution and to respect the process of decentralized self-governance and self-determination by all of our provinces, territories, and peoples. I wish that this spirit of self-definition would prevail in our culture as well. I am not satisfied with the pseudo-multiculturalism of our cities where in fact everybody thinks and acts the same. I think it will weigh on humanity’s conscience very heavily, second only to the ecological crisis, if we press the homogenization of human culture any further.
My vision for an academy in Haida Gwaii reflects this latter concern for the future of human development. There is a rich heritage of knowledge accessible in books and the living lineages of disciplines that is more available to us than ever and yet fast slipping from our grasp. Our world is dying of thirst next to these inexhaustible reservoirs. Our minds are no longer cut out to access this knowledge – to participate in culture in the German sense of Bildung or the Greek sense of paideia. I was born around the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Internet was invented. The overwhelming trend during my lifetime has been the breaking down of barriers. Our culture has yet to propose an integral vision of a human being to its youth, i.e., a person who knows the worth of the different varietals of freedom.
What kind of role models do you admire?
I admire what were called in English class ‘round characters,’ people who in their way have assimilated a high degree of contradiction. These are the true empaths of the world because some part of them really is that which they seek to understand. The cost is inner turmoil for as much time as it takes to work out an equilibrium between the opposing elements. Then again, I appreciate the qualities of truly singular and unalloyed individuals and epochs too. For example here is a couplet by the Arab poet Ta’abata Sharran that has always evoked for me the Bedouin spirit of freedom:
[He is a man who] seldom complains of whatever calamity befalls him,
But has plenty of desires, many different directions to move in and ways to go.
Qalil al-tashakki lil-mulimm yusibuhu
Kathir al-hawa shatta al-nawa wa-al-masaalik
To his Jahiliyyan verse one could counter a saying of the prophet Muhammad, and then one would have a pair of remarkable yet contrasting personalities; and one could do this with pairs like Christ and Caesar, Socrates and Alcibiades, Confucius and Chuang Tzu, Hegel and Nietzsche…
What was your experience like creating the Cambridge Reading Group on decline?
When you think of decline, how do you explain what is happening in our own country, or the world at large? What construct makes sense to you at this moment in political terms?
We gathered an eclectic group of participants not one of whom was a student of political theory. We had an ecologist, a physicist, a lawyer, a political scientist, Brendan Simms our patron and resident historian, and various others. I convened it in early 2017, less than a year after the Brexit and Trump phenomena that had suddenly made the topic apropos. The group culled some interesting insights from the texts which were documented in a summary we published on Simms’ Forum on Geopolitics website.
I will say that the tendency in the modern social sciences towards materialistic or impersonal explanations of rise and decline is, in my opinion, misguided. These scientists could take as a model Ibn Khaldun, who derives general laws or patterns of rise and decline from observable facts, yet foregrounds the human element of personality, character, and spirit in the last analysis.
You have many physical practices to balance your intellectual discipline:
Hockey - what does it fulfill for you, and why had you left it for so long?
You have chosen to dedicate yourself to traditional martial arts. Is there any eschatology involved? What informs your dedication to two disparate sports?
Hockey was an important phase in my youth but I left it when my interest in political issues began to eclipse my interest in sport, which coincided with my introduction to the IGL. I would characterize the next seven years as the steady decline of my off-ice fitness regime, until its monotony became unbearable and I went searching for something that was more mental than physical, which I found in traditional martial arts with the School of Oom Yung Doe. This form of movement concentrates the processes of mental development and self-awareness. The rigour tests one’s commitment to certain ideals and also lets one to test certain propositions one might hold about basic problems of the mind and body or mind and matter. The practice has convinced me of the intimate connection of self-knowledge and self-development, the premise of the academy I aim to create.
Your life is a life dedicated to, and is an avatar of the “mind/body” duality, a fusion that few have achieved at such a level, especially at your age.
How do you integrate the disparate parts of your life? What continuities and discontinuities are there?
If the question is the degree to which I have achieved a workable synthesis of my values and ambitions, I think I have not met with very much success. I am an unwieldy grotesque of motivations. I took especial note of Nietzsche’s early characterization of Socrates and the rest of the pre-Platonic philosophers as each being “hewn from a single stone,” single-ingredient and singular individuals, in contrast to Plato and those who followed him, who he characterized as mishmashes of all kinds of Eastern and late Hellenic influences. The latter types are forced to impose a form on their lives arbitrarily, or conform themselves to their times, or aspire to the Renaissance ideal of l’uomo universale and unify their manifold natures. Naturally, these options, if not properly mediated, introduce new incongruities of their own. I think this is one of my principal struggles in life.
If the question concerns the share of my life that transpires inside of me, as opposed to externally, that share is very much. The greatest events in my life have been thoughts, insights, internal struggles, victories, etc. I have made my decisions about what to do and where to go based on an internal sense of necessity and this has made my life feel integral, even in bad times, and perhaps made its incongruities more apparent than real.
What do you mean by the "theory and practice of existential philosophy" that you have taught? How does this relate to your work on political thought and intellectual history?
In Kashmir part of my remit has been to engage our team of therapists in a continual process of self-inquiry. To take this seriously one has to make a practice of it and live moment to moment in a struggle for awareness. The danger with developing a theory and language to speak about awareness is that these quickly replace the real thing. The point is to overcome spiritual lethargy and release blockages, and over the past year we tried this by many means: conversations about death, guided journaling, a group reading of Victor Frankl’s memoirs from the Holocaust, and physical and mental challenges to bring the problem “into the moment,” where it needs to be.
Awareness is only aroused for a reason. In our team’s case it was the ethical and professional imperative to work with clients sensitively and effectively. A therapist needs to discern and respect the existential dimension of a person’s struggles – the questions of value, priority, ethics, identity, etc. that the client must learn to resolve. Practically, we were trying to develop the intellectual acuity and self-control to not impose one’s own understandings of life and values on a person in a space where there are countless opportunities to do so. This is a principle that many teachers embrace who teach by the so-called Socratic method.
My training in intellectual history was less relevant to this work than one could have anticipated. It is true that modern existential psychology derives from the existential turn in modern philosophy of the late 19th century, but that was part of a larger crisis of faith in the West that is mostly irrelevant to Kashmir, where piety and religiosity remain robust. We had no need to study the intellectual history of existentialism. Instead we drew on our own experiences of working through these issues.
You spoke of an aspiration to create an academy on the island of Haida Gwaii. What attracts you there? You had never spoken about the profession of teaching, yet you have taught and you are skilled in explanation and mentoring. Are you reluctant to choose that path?
I have had extraordinary teachers and I have drawn from life-changing bodies of knowledge, and I want to share what has most enriched my life. The academy would challenge its students to live with the greatest possible simultaneous commitments to self-development and self-knowledge, and to exist continually at their point of tension.
I envision a holistic education as a counterpart and compliment to the narrower kind of education our undergraduates are getting, one that is at once too cerebral and yet inadequate to the goal of teaching individuals how to think, and not just how to speechify and formulate arguments for set convictions but to truly understand their convictions. The syllabus would be both typically Western and Eastern, in that it would entail an investigation into the character of modernity that would involve a serious study of the history of ideas, as well as a much more visceral and internal process of acquainting the individual with his or her own psychic process. The goal is to posit and establish a link between one’s flesh-and-blood consciousness and one’s ethical, political and aesthetic commitments, while helping one to access richer states of consciousness that one’s upbringing in Western modernity has perhaps left attenuated. Western philosophy itself has reached the point where it recognizes the necessary connection between embodied persons and their ideas, yet it utterly lacks a discipline such as the ancient rishis of India developed to purify and refine that connection and prepare individuals to liberate themselves from their conditioning and access the full range of powers of their own minds. This is why I include traditional martial arts in the curriculum — although traditional yoga could just as well serve the purpose. Western science cannot develop such a discipline, and nobody should wait for it to do so. A popular mythology of suspect provenance even holds that individuals are incapable of overcoming their conditioning, or of gaining any significant control over their psycho-mental process, and that freedom of will and freedom of thought are illusory. This is a formidable perspective that deserves consideration; but I would tempt the prospective student to consider that this is the conclusion of a dispirited kind of person, for whom the myth may indeed be true, but that there exist other possibilities for those willing to realize them. My role as an educator would be to present a student with this possibility. Our syllabus would be designed to prepare them for this work.
Haida Gwaii is an extraordinary land with a powerful energy and it is the traditional home of a remarkable people. This academy would be open to all, but I would hope to work closely with Haida youth and to find ways for non-Haida students to substantively learn from the Haida. The academy would aim to attract students from other parts of the world for a ‘gap-year’ that they could take at some point after graduating high school and before turning thirty, or as long as they retain the labile quality of youth.
People speak of privilege, admittedly often in a disingenuous way. How do you understand this concept, and what have you done with it in your life?
I have misgivings about the ascent of the concept of privilege in our culture. In its current usage it carries strong materialistic and individualistic overtones and implications that put it in direct contrast to what would otherwise be its counterpart in traditional culture, namely an expression of gratitude for the fact of one’s existence and for the endless bounties and harmonies of the world, including the blessings conferred on us by other people. It is extraordinary that the etymology of kufr, the word for the cardinal sin of Islam, disbelief or apostasy, in pre-Islamic Arabia denoted extreme, arrogant ingratitude. That this concept should have been adapted to express rebellion against God suggests the centrality of gratitude to at least one of the world’s major spiritual traditions. It would be found to have a central place in the others as well, I am sure. But modern culture characteristically perverts the sentiment by foregrounding privilege in its stead, actually rendering gratitude taboo. A privilege is something one enjoys for oneself or which others aspire to enjoy for themselves. It is spoken of as if it did not entail a proportionate duty, or the possibility that its possessor would choose to distribute its fruits. Gratitude is an attitude that actually encourages one to possess one’s advantages lightly by continually placing them in a higher perspective. But today the weightiest expression of civic morality, exercising power in a position of public trust, is reinterpreted as a privilege, as if it were not a sacred duty and a burden. This is why I think that the ascent of this concept points to a decay of our understanding and practice of power. The ethos of the modern world naturally sees only material advantage to the individual when it speaks of privileges. It is striking that this ethos has found an outlet in the progressivism of our day. To be sure, the fault lies primarily with our leaders and with those who have been given every opportunity to become valuable members of society but failed to wield their power with wisdom. Seemingly without fear of posthumous reproach and incapable of resisting conspicuous emolument, they have contributed most decisively to this breakdown in public trust. But I think it is important not to admit a way of speaking about privilege and access to resources that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of power and sees only people who win and people who lose. The empirical reality might suggest that this is our world, and the hustlers themselves might think they are triumphing over such a world, but it is imperative to sustain, not the illusion, but the proper understanding of what power is for. To reinterpret power as mere privilege is to reproduce the social corruption that one decries.
I underwent a phase when I thought the cosmos was basically devoid of any compelling reason to abide by a sense of morality and duty or to aspire to anything. Then I realized that my life was something given to me on trust, and that I had to steward and develop myself for the sake of what I understand to be life’s imperatives. From this realization there was a relatively sensible road via Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel back to the conception of civic responsibility that is motivating me today.
As to what I have done with the opportunities given to me in my life, I have tried to do them honour by brooking no slackness or half-measures from myself. That said, I have been on a winding path whose inner logic I have had to follow, and which often took me very far from ‘active duty.’ There was a seven year gap between my work in Kenya and my work in Kashmir during which I mostly lived the life of the mind, although I did some teaching. While I was working in Kenya, I realized that I would only be able to do as much good in the world as I had made good in myself. I resolved that I would acquire some substance and wisdom before I attempted to help others again. I also had the crisis of faith to which I just referred, which compelled me to search for a greater understanding of myself anyway. This led me into teaching and further formal study. My curriculum vitae has exactly mirrored my intellectual life since then.
You are a voracious reader, eclectic and yet disciplined to an extraordinary degree. How do you choose? What works had the most impact? What are you reading that has surprised you?
How do you understand the breadth of your intellectual curiosity? How have you explored it?
I try to read the right book at the right time. Usually I have an instinct for what would further my understanding. But there are times when I try something out prematurely or when I push my interest in a certain batch of books too far, when a sense of discipline detaches from a sense of pleasure and tries to carry on austerely. There should always be pleasure in reading.
When I was a teaching assistant at Tufts I was deeply impressed by the majestic scope of Hegel’s philosophy of history. I gave myself a comparable syllabus – I wanted to comprehend the world’s peoples and civilizations and especially their literary, religious and philosophical achievements. This elided with my specific interest in the problem of decline in history that I was contemplating at the time and that I continue to study. Because we have far more sources and translations available to us than 19th century philosophers of history did, the syllabus has grown to ridiculous proportions; but this fact is also a principal consolation of my life. I admire the emission of the 15th-16th century German humanist Ulrich von Hutten: ‘Oh century! Spirits wax strong; studies bloom; it is a joy to live!’
You live the life of the mind in both some of the most abstruse and sophisticated ways of thinking and argumentation. How does that translate into working with non-literate societies? Across cultures?
I do not have any interest in the abstruse way of communicating practiced by our campus philosophers and academics. I would think that good rhetoric is an obligation for the learned, especially for those with a ‘postmodern’ understanding of the nature of their work as entailing not the discovery but the creation of knowledge. I could no longer pursue my studies in academia because these kinds of contradictions were too pronounced.
My work with our team of therapists in Kashmir has been so challenging and rewarding because to present oneself as a coach among a team of highly trained individuals, one has to be what one wants to communicate. This had nothing to do with a language barrier, but with the basic fact that actions speak louder than words, and that people are greater arguments for ways of being than their arguments.
Giovana Manfrin
Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Giovana is an alumna of the 2015-16 EPIIC '“Future of Europe” colloquium, where I first met her as a classmate. She graduated the following year with a BA in International Relations and a minor in Economics.
Originally from Curitiba, Brazil, she is currently a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she analyzes data-driven policies, interventions, and evidence-based gender research for policy design and delivery with the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP). She works closely with the WAPPP Executive Director informing policymakers and stakeholders in different nations on strategies that close gender gaps in political leadership. Giovana also works with a network of international projects inspired on WAPPP’s political training program, the "From Harvard Square to the Oval Office: A Political Campaign Practicum," to help bring more women to the highest levels of political decision-making and statecraft.
The exchange below was conducted in the Fall of 2019. We discuss her unique and remarkable story, her time in EPIIC and at Tufts, her current aspirations and motivations, and the role she envisions for herself in the future.
As her friend, I value Giovana’s determination, candor, and warmth tremendously. It’s an honor to know her, and to be able to present her here.
- Jerome Krumenacker, 2019
EPIIC was one of the first experiences you opted into upon entering Tufts. What drew you to the course as a recent transfer student? What was most meaningful to you about the experience?
The theme was “The Future of Europe” when I transferred to Tufts in the Fall of 2015. What first drew me into EPIIC was my novice problematization of Europe. Brazilian by nationality, I didn’t know much about studies of Europe. But I knew enough to find issues with that broad categorization – just as Brazil has very little in common with other regions in Latin America (more so internally and across many pockets of Brazilian communities), being insensitive to the minutiae of the European fabric, I thought, would make any student of the world very shortsighted.[1]
Unlike any other class, “The Future of Europe” – and the larger EPIIC colloquium experience – turned out to defy any and all neat assumptions of statehood, unity, conflict, peace, and statecraft. In every session, I felt a level of pressure and chaos that would boil my blood. I never ceased to feel challenged but, strangely, I also felt homeward-bound. Now that I look back, it had indeed been a while since I had last felt the drive that EPIIC re-installed in me.
Perhaps because I was brought up that way, I am someone who gets interested in navigating complex situations, people, and places. I grew up in a somewhat turbulent environment where poverty, angst, and dreams met. As a result, very broadly, I learned to appreciate – and frequently look for – some degree of chaos in life. Complex and convoluted situations and domains – from individuals to ideas and work-place environments – have always taught me how to seek the highest levels of wisdom, to come up with the most creative solutions, and to find the greatest fulfillment in working with others. So, when I quit my decades-old career as a ballerina to continue my undergraduate studies of international relations at Tufts, I was uncomfortably numb.
Gladly I met the IGL, and was accepted into the EPIIC 2015-2016 cohort. The class itself was my own version of Brendan Simms’s Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present – our first assignment, the 720-page book that we read within the first few weeks of the semester. Just like Simms’s book, EPIIC delved deeply into the account of the past half-millennium of European history, but (unlike the book) never forgetting the traditionally-marginalized angles that are often left out of conversations about state formation: multiculturalism (as read in Pallavi Aiyar’s The New Old World); the politics of memory (as we learned from Dan Stone’s Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945); and political disfranchisement (as seen from the many readings on migration referred by Mark Miller, Julia Stewart-David and Kelly Greenhill). Just like the many ideas of Europe, every EPIIIC session that year was illuminating, and revealing. EPIIC brought color again into my every-day.
All in all, I needed the level of difficulty and intensity that EPIIC was about to offer; as soon as I heard the rumors about the class being “too much,” I was sold. I wasn’t wrong – it was indeed very demanding. But it became one of my most enriching life/school experiences. Little did I know that the friendships that I made in EPIIC would also come to stay. Today, they are my dearest and most trusted circle of friends. Liam, Jérôme, Maria, Mile, Paulina, Raasika, Reece (in alphabetical order, or else they’ll lose my number) and everyone else from our year, as well as folks who were also part of the larger EPIIC/IGL ecosystem – Cody Valdes, Heather Barry, Jacob Throwe, Rizwan Ladha, and most uniquely, Sherman – are essential components of one of the strongest pillars of my support system.
To “what was most meaningful to me” about the EPIIC experience community, not only I rediscovered my purpose as a student, but I also found my most loyal friends. Overall, I also regained the best version of myself – one which I thought had gotten lost for good.
You had a very unique background compared to others in that EPIIC class, or at Tufts in general - most of us expected from a much younger age to come to an American liberal arts university for our chosen field of study, and I don’t recall meeting anyone else who was on track to become a professional ballet dancer. How did you come to your interest in global affairs, and what can you say in retrospect about the transition? Did you perceive your relatively circuitous path as an advantage, or as barrier? How do you feel about it now?
I became interested in “international relations” as a field of study from a professor at Miami Dade College (where I studied before transferring to Tufts), an inspiring woman of incredible character who did an even more incredible job helping us understand the impacts of international security on individual people’s lives. Later on, I studied these links again at a class at The Fletcher School on nuclear politics with Francesca Giovannini. But my ever-growing interest in deeper cultural intelligence has been part of me much earlier than that.
It is hard for me to explain in words, but I remember always thinking about how other parts of the world behaved, so as to see how we could learn from one another, in an effort to become better citizens of the same globe. Likely because of the pervasive inequalities that surrounded me, I was never satisfied with the theories from geography, religion, and history alone. I always tried to look for better answers for why politics and modern economic growth have led some places to be so institutionally dysfunctional. Fast forward to now, I like to think of IR as an ideal opportunity to absorb the contributions from every individual social science. Jérôme and I were talking about this the other evening over jazz records and wine.
Letting go of my ballet career wasn’t easy. I was dancing since I was 2 and had my last performance was when I was 21. Like I mentioned, I lacked a bit of purpose as the years went by after I stopped dancing. But experiences like EPIIC reaffirmed my passion for that deep curiosity and solicitous worldview to addressing the world’s most gruesome problems. I got to act on that childhood tenacity, because the constant turmoil and instability of regions that I was learning about put me on an unending road of learning from people.
On adapting from being a ballerina to an aspiring diplomat – it felt to me nearly the same as when I took my first solo flight to Miami, when I was 16, when I left home. When I watched the plane contour the immense curve from the south of Brazil to the south of Florida, I realized that there were more than two Americas, and a bigger world to be understood; other “theaters” to be studied.
On the roads that stretch behind us, this hasn’t always been possible, but I learned to embrace my background as a ballerina. Today I think that my understanding of people and of the world to be much more unconventional – in terms of being nuanced and apt to integrate factors that traditional IR theories have forgotten about. To me, this essentially means studying gender, racial and cognitive diversity, heterogenous preferences within a state demographic, faith, food, dialects, and all of the intersectional variations of the social, intellectual, economic, political, cultural, geographic, linguistic, analytical, human gamut that compose international affairs.
You found unanticipated new passions and sources of inspiration during your senior year at Tufts, not least the course on nuclear security you took at Fletcher. How did your experience in EPIIC draw you to these opportunities, and prepare you for them? How do they continue to influence you?
What I learned in EPIIC became a valuable tool that I will always take with me – to be always analytical and humble, however the segment within international affairs. I like to think that we will always be students of world politics, independent of the level of field experience acquired. World/international politics are complex by virtue and in “kaleidoscopic” levels; as such, EPIIC showed me that by being humble in garnering and seeking all facets of knowledge, studying politics can be a very efficient approach to potentially solving problems of global scale.
This encouraged me to venture into the politics of nuclear energy, which turned out to be a very meaningful way that I found to understand international security. Nuclear, both as a technological and foreign policy tool, is source of geopolitical instability. I saw it recently happen with Brazil at the turn of administrations, with the rapid expansion of our nuclear-fueled submarine that had been somewhat dormant – to the worries of the IAEA.
That aside, I will always strive to be most humble and analytical in my pursuits within the IR field. Currently, I work on the intersection of politics and economics, assessing evidence-based policy across countries that focus on the merits of gender equality in political leadership. More simply put, I analyze political, economic, and social landscapes, in an effort to disseminate data-driven solutions to governments about what works to create gender equality in parliaments around the world.
The collection of these experiences showed me that I am very “data-heavy.” By data I mean everything from the intangible qualities that are very hard to code in a dataset, such as preferences or patterns of behavior, to the coordinates of geospatial data. Although I am fierce about working within the domains of international security within international relations, EPIIC has broaden my horizons by teaching me to be, again, analytical and humble.
How did the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School become your destination after graduation? How have you grown in your roles there, and what you learned from them?
I think that the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) is one of the very few evidence-based think-tanks within a larger policy environment that is the Harvard Kennedy School. In my senior year at Tufts, I was looking to get more proficient in applying that deep level of analysis into the practical world of politics. My objective after graduating was to learn how to be an effective political analyst regardless of area of focus within world politics. Not having had any prior formal teaching on the role of gender, the focus of WAPPP on global gender equity really challenged me, and gave me the opportunity to enrich the range and depth of my knowledge of international affairs more than I expected.
I started at WAPPP first as an undergraduate intern working part-time during my senior year. I was then hired into working very closely with the Executive Director after graduation in 2017. A year after, I became a fellow managing research projects on gender and politics, traveling internationally at short notice, and always analyzing data-driven tools that help governments effectively capacitate gender diversity, parity, and inclusion into political leadership. It has been the mission of creating intersectional diversity in politics and how important that is for peace and security that motivated my long hours and unexpected travels.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have learned how to apply a gender lens in international relations from WAPPP. Unfortunately, this has been severely under-appreciated by IR scholars left and right. I very much hope this can change and would expect that, going forward, it becomes its own required module in IR curricula, and that it also further becomes more actively sought by students and teachers, academics and practitioners alike.
What’s next for you? Longterm?
I have always thought of myself as becoming a diplomat within defense and security later on. The job of a diplomat working with disarmament affairs or ethical AI governance, for example, would fall in that category.
Because I think the road into diplomacy is a long one, I would love to gradually grow into that direction. With that, I see myself working next with geopolitics and intelligence. I know that this may sound like a diversion, but to be successful in these roles, I would love to purse an advanced degree in economics. As a researcher working with political data, I have developed great respect and value for evidence-based, data-driven strategies, which is enabled by quantitative research. This is confidential for now, but I am going to apply (and hopefully get accepted into) the Tufts MS in Economics.
In essence, I see myself being able to work very well across the spectrum: (1) mastering data collection and analysis (which my current role at WAPPP has allowed me to do, and which a master’s degree in economics would take me to a higher level); (2) distilling and disseminating information to stakeholders (which the role of a geopolitical or intelligence analysts entails); and (3) enacting a policy decision in the realm of defense and security. The core problem that I see with diplomacy is that diplomats don’t have much of a role in informing political decisions. But right now, I am only 25, and have plenty of time to reflect on, and to learn.
[1] One of the class readings, The Idea of Europe: An Essay by George Steiner, made me settle on a just notion what Europe is. The Idea of Europe is now my favorite prose.
Reece Wallace
I am a Tufts alumnus and proud member of EPIIC’s 2015-2016 colloquium on the Future of Europe. With encouragement from Sherman, IGL staff and my EPIIC classmates, I was supported at every step of my college journey across the social sciences and humanities and from Medford to Oxford and back.
Graduating with a degree in philosophy in 2019, I went on to focus in philosophy at the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. My thesis centered on the moral and political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., weaving together longstanding interests in the interface between philosophy, intellectual history, and “the real world”.
I have since worked as a writer in a range of professional contexts. After a stint as a reporter on the financial industry, I worked as a proposal writer for the Foundation and Institutional Advisory practice at AllianceBernstein, a global asset manager. I currently work on proposal writing and business development for the Foundations and Endowments Specialty Practice at Truist Bank.
I look forward to more professional twists and turns as I explore the challenges and opportunities around me. For now, I’m happy to have landed back in my hometown of Houston, where I enjoy reading, fishing, and mild winters.
This exchange was had during his time as a Masters student at the University of Chicago. We begin with his time at Tufts and in EPIIC. We touch upon his chief interests in moral and political philosophy, literature, history, and the humanities generally. We also discuss his aspirations to find a vocation in teaching, practicing journalism, or otherwise engaging in the publishing and editorial world. I expect he will find the means to combine his many interests and pursuits, knowing him to be both a deep thinker and an integrator of ideas. I know he will do great things in any and all domains he engages in.
Reece is among the most thoughtful and intellectually principled people I’ve met. It’s a privilege to have known him as a classmate in EPIIC, and now to have him as a friend.
- Jerome Krumenacker, 2019
EPIIC was one of the first experiences you opted into entering Tufts. What drew you to the course as a freshman? How did it shape the rest of your college experience?
I probably would never have heard of EPIIC if it hadn't been for Caitlin Thompson, who at the time I started at Tufts was an upperclassman instructor in the Experimental College and my orientation leader. She spoke about EPIIC in a way that no one else was talking about their schoolwork. I couldn't quite tell what she was getting at (who can know what they're really getting into before they actually get into EPIIC?) but something about the challenge, the camaraderie, and the clarity of purpose she described cut through the noise of orientation week. I went to Sherman's information session a few days later and somehow decided I would give this thing a shot. It was the first academic and intellectual risk I'd ever really taken, but it felt like the right one to take.
In the short term, EPIIC gave me a taste of social science and its complicated interface with the world. It helped me hone in on themes I found resonant and let me follow up on those interests. In my case, those interests tended in the direction of political theory, which is part of the reason I went on to major in philosophy.
As much as any experience I had in college, EPIIC taught me to seek out difficulty. To seek out difficult ideas and debates, but also to seek out the complex social circumstances they're embedded in. It's easy (for me, anyway) to go through the motions, seeking the path of least resistance and avoiding the intellectual and social-emotional risks of important work. But you just can't do that and succeed in a project like EPIIC. You need to learn to be confident in what you know and honest about everything you don't. You need to trust other people and take seriously the trust they put in you. You need to know how to lead and how to follow. You need a sense of your horizons. I think EPIIC gave me those skills and that sense.
Overall, The experience was breathtaking--breathtakingly challenging, breathtakingly fun, breathtakingly meaningful. I came away from the year with new standards for myself and my work, and friends who continue to hold me to them.
Is there anything particularly unique and meaningful about the friendships you made?
I'm definitely introverted, and often shy to boot, but I love people. More often than I'd like, I have the experience of wanting deeply to connect with and feel comfortable around people I admire and feeling like I fail at it. There are steps I can take to improve myself and manage that feeling, but to some extent I think it'll follow me wherever I go. For whatever reason, though, the friends I made in EPIIC are that rare type who put me totally at ease. Not intellectually at ease (they can think circles around me), but as their friend and fellow traveler. My friends from EPIIC are some of most thoughtful, kind, and humane folks I know.
You studied philosophy at Tufts, and I know you to be sensitive to the tension between the life of the mind and the call to civic engagement. How have you navigated that tension through your time at Tufts? How did EPIIC influence your approach?
Philosophy felt like the right place to sit with various tensions. For one, it's right there at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, disciplines I love and whose boundaries are very porous. Although they're often hybrids, I think philosophers are very much humanists in this respect: they worry about how and whether they can justify their work in a world that demands action. There are purists who dismiss this worry, but more who take it seriously. The professors and classmates I found in philosophy, as in so many other places at Tufts, grappled honestly with the tension of theory and practice. In particular, I'm grateful to have been a student of Lionel McPherson and Erin Kelly, excellent thinkers who shaped the academic interests I'm pursuing in grad school. Maybe most of all, I admire Susan Russinoff, my advisor. She's a fantastic teacher and an advocate anyone would be lucky to have. They are all people who recognized their stake in the world and took responsibility for it. I think I discovered that ethos in EPIIC, and I've tried to stay close by it ever since.
Near the end of my time at Tufts I had the chance to join the Ethics Bowl team, one of the nerdier things I did as an undergraduate (and that's saying something). I joined up at the prompting of some good friends and with the encouragement of Professor Russinoff, our coach and sponsor. As a practical ethics contest, it falls naturally at the intersection of philosophy and the world, of thinking and acting. This was a place I wanted to be.
I didn't realize at the time that Ethics Bowl would lead me farther beyond the ivory tower than I had imagined. In my last semester, my teammates and I traveled to MCI Concord, a prison, to work with incarcerated students on ethical reasoning and help facilitate a version of our competition. It was intense, humbling, and amazing to start a conversation with the students at Concord about justice and punishment and the ways we have of thinking through our responsibilities to each other. I can't imagine a higher purpose for philosophy, for academia, or for life than to struggle with these issues.
You have a deep interest in a broad range of eclectic topics, including, for example, international justice, theory of mind, and nuclear security. What core principles and convictions tie together how you think about these themes?
I wish I had a good answer! The honest through-line is probably that I have too much time on my hands. Like a lot of topics I'm interested in, they are all conditions in the lives we live and the society we share. They’re all given, in the sense that they came before us, but not in the sense that they're unchanging. I think if we pay attention, we can notice the circumstances under which they do change, and consider what that means for us.
I've been thinking especially about how notions of identity condition us to think about ourselves and the problems we face. Racial, ethnic, gender, and national identities are all critical background conditions which, as we're seeing now, sometimes break into the foreground in our personal and political lives. They are incredibly consequential, and yet they change constantly, and faster than we recognize. I'm interested in how and whether philosophical analysis can pinpoint what we mean when we talk about these identities, how we use these identities in practice, and how we ought to think about, talk about, and use them.
What drew you to the Masters in the Humanities at the University of Chicago? Will you gravitate to a particular discipline, or choose a multidisciplinary focus?
I'll probably focus somewhere between political philosophy and literature. If that doesn't sound like a focus, well, I can't argue with that. Unlike a lot of other, more specialized master's programs, the MAPH allows you to work across and even beyond the traditional humanities disciplines over the course of the degree. I think a tragedy of the disciplines, or at least of grad school, is that you have to sacrifice so much interesting, worthwhile stuff in order to gain "expertise" in something. I really appreciate that I can make my own way here and stave off some of the pressure to specialize for a little while.
What are the virtues of generalizing? How does resisting specialization allow you to grow in ways you might otherwise not?
Hopefully I'll learn more and more about the virtues of generalizing as I go! As far as growth is concerned, I think being a generalist forces you to first articulate and then address problems and projects, making the case for their importance in terms that aren't domain-specific. Needless to say, we can't do without specialists. But I think specialists sometimes fall into a blinkered worldview that sets the agenda for them. Often that's what we want--it's an efficient way for super-competent people to prioritize and throw themselves at prescribed challenges. On the other hand, there's always going to be an important place for people who, because they don't have the scaffolding of a particular professional community or a narrow skill set, have to set think hard about setting the agenda in light of the connections they see between things.
What’s next for you? What are your aspirations?
I'm using this year to hone my academic and non-academic writing skills, which I'd love to put to use somehow.
From there, whether I go the PhD route or not, I plan to give myself at least a year out in the real world, and I'd like to fill it with something worthwhile.
By "real world," I mean the world that exists outside the incentive structure of the research university system. I think it's hard to overstate how much that incentive system distorts values, relationships, and self-image (in good and bad ways), and it's always worth reminding myself of that fact as I consider the costs and benefits of a career in or outside academia.
Journalism really interests me, for example. Teaching, too. Ultimately I don't want to be too precious about what comes next. I want to be grateful for now, and for all the opportunities I'm unbelievably lucky to have moving forward.
What draws you to writing and journalism? The joy of the act? An impact you aspire to have?
Both! My own writing certainly hasn't made an impact in the world, but it has definitely impacted me. There will never be anything else like writing as a tool for learning. And when it's done really well, it's one of the best forms for sharing what you've learned. I hope that someday I'll have learned something well enough to help someone else understand it. I would be in a position to do for others what great writers do for me every day.
Whose writing and philosophy do you admire?
These days I'm interested in Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and especially Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of them formulated compelling responses to unimaginable injustice. In King's case, he's only fairly recently been taken up by scholars as a full-fledged philosopher instead of rather than just a great orator. This is long overdue--his thinking about justice, ethics, and nonviolence are subtle, powerful, and highly relevant today.