DOC NYC - "Nasrin" and "A La Calle"

We are bringing your attention to two films currently featured in the DOC NYC documentary film festival: Nasrin and A La Calle. Both can be purchased and streamed on the DOC NYC website:

These remarkable documentary efforts represent the crucial and courageous work of the community that we aim to support. We are involved in the campaigns spearheaded by both films, and developing collaborations with their respective filmmakers.

On September 21st, forty-two days into Nasrin Sotoudeh’s hunger strike in Evin Prison in Tehran, Convisero co-sponsored a panel in her support, recorded here, with IGL alumnus, author, and activist Amir Soltani, Karin Karlekar of PEN America, the Hon. Irwin Cotler of the Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, and Roya and Ladan Boroumand of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. Nasrin has since broken her strike, and has been granted temporarily leave from imprisonment due to her deteriorating health.

The film Nasrin, profiling her extraordinary efforts to promote human and women’s rights in Iran despite the resulting dire threat to her safety, was created by Jeff Kaufman and Marcia S. Ross, with whom we are now in contact to help amplify the impact of the film. Convisero will remain dedicated to supporting Nasrin’s cause, and that of human rights in Iran.

A La Calle, co-directed by Maxx Caicedo and Nelson Navarette, follows the fight of Venezuelans to reclaim democracy from the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Through secretive means, the filmmakers were able to capture interviews with opposition leaders, including the political prisoner Leopoldo López, and ordinary Venezuelan citizens whose lives and rights have been utterly disrupted.

We are now in contact with Maxx, and with veteran impact campaign strategist Bonnie Abaunza, thanks to the introduction of Lily Anderson, an IGL alumna who by serendipity is Maxx’s partner. We have begun envisioning a Convisero event with them for early in the New Year, and have introduced them to a friend, Professor José Ignacio Hernandez, Special Prosecutor of the Interim Government of Venezuela.

Human rights and corruption in Venezuela are an ongoing concern of The Trebuchet. We befriended José when he participated in our study group on “Confronting Corruption in Defense of Human Rights” at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of the Harvard Kennedy School. At that time, in my capacity as a Senior Fellow of the Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, I was also advising the Hon. Irwin Cotler as he chaired the OAS Panel of Independent International Experts investigating crimes against humanity in Venezuela. These are issues that we are eager to continue pursuing with José, Irwin, and the social campaign of A La Calle.

Wendell Wallach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irwin Cotler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irwin Cotler, International Chair of the RWCHR

FIRST TO STAND: The Cases and Causes of Irwin Cotler

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

Susannah Sirkin

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

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

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

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

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

Padraig O'Malley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Constitution on the Edge

Akhil Reed Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School.

Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 after clerking for Judge Stephen Breyer, 1st U.S Circuit Court of Appeals.

Of his many publications, Amar is co-editor of a leading constitutional law casebook, “Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking.” He is the author of several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles, Yale University Press, 1997; The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, Yale University Press, 1998; and America's Constitution: A Biography, Random House, 2005. His book The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic, Basic Books, 2015 was released last year. Amar’s next book The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era will be published in September 2016.

Amar was awarded the Devane Medal—Yale’s highest award for teaching excellence in 2008. He served as a consultant on the popular show The West Wing and his work has also been showcased on several TV shows, including The Colbert Report, Charlie Rose and The MHP Show. Amar has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and Slate.

Amar received his J.D. in 1984 from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of The Yale Law Journal, and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale College in 1980.

Philip Bobbitt is a leading constitutional scholar and influential writer on constitutional law and theory. His early work including Constitutional Fate and Constitutional Interpretation first identified the six fundamental forms of constitutional argument. His later work has concerned the nature of the constitutional order and its relationship to international security. His recent teaching, essays, and best-selling books address the most challenging issues of the day, including presidential impeachment, responses to terrorism, and coming changes in world order.

Bobbitt has written 10 books, including the award-winning The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. His most recent work is a new edition of the authoritative Impeachment: A Handbook, written in 1974 by former Columbia Law Professor Charles Black. Impeachment, he notes, will not tell law students what to think about constitutional problems, but “how to think’’ about them.

Bobbitt, who began teaching at the Law School in 2007, has served in the federal government through seven presidential administrations. He was formerly Associate Counsel to the President for intelligence and international security; the Legal Counsel to the Senate's Iran-Contra committee; the Counselor on International at the State Department; and the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. He has been a member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law and most recently, a member of the External Advisory Board of the CIA.

Caroline Fredrickson served as the President of the American Constitution Society from 2009-2019, where she helped grow ACS, which now has lawyer chapters across the country, student chapters in nearly every law school in the United States, and thousands of members throughout the nation. She was an eloquent spokesperson for ACS and the progressive movement on issues such as civil and human rights, judicial nominations and the importance of the courts in America, marriage equality, voting rights, the role of money in politics, labor law, and anti- discrimination efforts, rule of law, congressional oversight, and separation of powers, among others. This fall, she joined Georgetown Law as a Visiting Professor.

Fredrickson has published works on many legal and constitutional issues and is a frequent guest on television and radio. She regularly contributes opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other news outlets. She is also the author of Under The Bus: How Working Women Are Being Run Over, The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections, and most recently, The AOC Way.

Before joining ACS, Fredrickson served as the Director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office and as General Counsel and Legal Director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. In addition, she served as the Chief of Staff to Senator Maria Cantwell, and Deputy Chief of Staff to then-Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. She served as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Legislative Affairs.

One of the nation’s leading appellate attorneys, Caitlin J. Halligan has argued six cases and served as counsel of record in more than 45 matters in the U.S. Supreme Court, and has handled scores of cases in the federal appellate courts, the New York Court of Appeals, and other state appellate courts. She has been praised for her “impressive track record” by Chambers USA, and named a “Litigation Star” and one of the “Top 250 Women in Litigation” by Benchmark Litigation.

Caitlin served as solicitor general for the State of New York from 2001 to 2007, after serving as deputy solicitor general. Before that she served as the first chief of the New York attorney general’s Internet Bureau, where she developed cutting-edge law enforcement and policy initiatives regarding online consumer fraud, securities trading, and privacy practices. Caitlin also served as general counsel to the New York County District Attorney’s Office. She currently teaches a seminar on states and public law as a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, and previously taught a course on statutory interpretation and administrative law at Columbia Law School. She speaks frequently on topics that include appellate advocacy, the Supreme Court’s docket, and the impact of litigation brought by state attorney general offices.

Caitlin earned her J.D., magna cum laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center, and her B.A., cum laude, from Princeton University. She clerked for the Honorable Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Honorable Patricia Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Sanford Levinson joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. Levinson is the author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals. He has also written six books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award, 2d edition 2011); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012); An Argument Open to All: Reading the Federalist in the 21st Century (2015); and, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and teh Flaws that Affect Us Today (forthcoming, September 2017). He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.

He has been a visiting faculty member of the Boston University, Georgetown, Harvard, New York University, and Yale law schools in the United States and has taught abroad in programs of law in London; Paris; Jerusalem; Auckland, New Zealand; and Melbourne, Australia. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1985-86 and a Member of the Ethics in the Professions Program at Harvard in 1991-92. A member of the American Law Institute, Levinson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.

Jennifer Selendy is a seasoned trial and appellate lawyer, and the Secretary of The Trebuchet. She has been named a "Distinguished Leader" by the New York Law Journal, a “Litigation Star” by Benchmark Litigation, one of the “Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers in America” by Lawdragon, and noted for her skill in complex commercial litigation by The Legal 500.

In addition to representing plaintiffs in high-stakes disputes, Jennifer also specializes in complex defense work and is frequently tapped for sensitive internal and governmental investigations into antitrust, financial misconduct, and employment-related matters. She has represented private equity and investment companies in precedent-setting litigation, represents renewable energy companies and related interests in cutting edge litigation aimed at protecting competition in power generation for the benefit of consumers, and has extensive expertise in RICO, bankruptcy, domestic and international arbitration, and cross-border disputes.

Jennifer received her law degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School after completing an M.Phil. in International Relations at Oxford (St. Antony’s) as a Marshall Scholar. Jennifer maintains an active public interest practice, focusing on poverty and women’s rights, climate change, and education. Since 2012, she has served as the board chairman for the National Center for Law & Economic Justice. Jennifer is also the co-founder and board chairman of The Speyer Legacy School, an independent K-8 school for gifted children that focuses on educating low-income, high-achieving children in New York City.

Professional Ethics and the FASPE experience

“Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) challenges graduate students and future leaders to recognize and confront their ethical responsibilities as professionals by analyzing the decisions and actions of Nazi-era professionals, integrating history and contemporary ethical issues.”

A conversation on a remarkable program and organization, with Executive Director Thorsten Wagner, three alumni of the IGL who participated in the Fellowships - Ben Perlstein, Duncan Pickard, and Tomo Takaki - and Talia Weiss, a Yale Phd student in physics who has written and led programs on science, technology and ethics for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Thorsten Wagner is a German-Danish historian. Born and raised in Sønderborg, Denmark, Thorsten completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Tubingen, Germany, and has lived in Berlin since 1993. He conducted graduate work at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Technische Universität Berlin, and the Freie Universität Berlin, earning his MA from the TU and FU Berlin in 1998 in modern history, political science and German literature. After serving as an educator at the Jewish Museum of Berlin and a research fellow at the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, since 2010 Thorsten has held a permanent position as associate professor at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad (DIS)/University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Ben Perlstein is in his final year of rabbinical training at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he is also completing an M.A. in Jewish Thought focused on ethics and mysticism. Ben was a 2018 FASPE Seminary Fellow and previously graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University, where he studied political science and participated in the Institute for Global Leadership's EPIIC and Synaptic Scholars programs. Through the international Jewish education organization Kivunim, Ben has spoken at the U.N. on the complexities of Holocaust commemoration and participated in the first Holocaust conference in the Arab world. Now serving as a rabbinic intern at Romemu, Ben is passionate about creative, multidisciplinary and multifaith applications of spiritual wisdom and practice to issues of public concern and pastoral need.

Duncan Pickard is an associate in the International Dispute Resolution Group of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, a global law firm based in New York, where he represents States, international organizations, and public companies. He previously worked for Democracy Reporting International, a Berlin-based organization promoting democracy worldwide. He was a 2017 FASPE Law Fellow. Duncan is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he holds degrees from Stanford Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School, and Tufts University.

Tomo Takaki is a recent graduate of Yale Law School, where he was a member of the Veterans Legal Services Clinic. He was a 2018 FASPE Law Fellow. Prior to law school, Tomo worked as an AmeriCorps Fellow and served in the U.S. Army, most recently at the Office of the Chief Prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions. He previously graduated from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service with a M.A. in Security Studies in 2015 and from Tufts University with a B.A. in International Relations and a minor in Arabic in 2011, where he was a member of the IGL's EPIIC and ALLIES programs.

Talia Weiss is a physics PhD student at Yale University. Previously, she received a B.S. in physics from MIT and an M.A. in political science from the University of Chicago, where she focused on political theory and international affairs. Talia’s masters thesis investigated how scientists who invented gene editing technologies understood the ethics of their research and acted in response. Talia has developed and moderated expert panel discussions on climate, nuclear, and emerging technology policy for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She also wrote for the Bulletin on the moral failings of Nazi physicists. While in college, Talia worked for the MIT Washington Office, where she reported on federal R&D policy developments for university leadership.

Civil-Military Relations and Democracy in Polarized America

Whereas this event was not recorded, we are working to collect the written remarks delivered by our panelists:

Sherman Teichman - Introduction and the ALLIES Program

Professor Damon Coletta - Moderator

Professor Suzanne Nielsen on Morris Janowitz and Samuel Huntington

A significant constituency for this forum will be the community of the Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES). We are particularly excited to utilize this forum and our subsequent panel on December 1st for the virtual convening of our ALLIES community.

Two of our panelists are ALLIES “veterans:” Dr. Jim Golby, a former ALLIES academic liaison at West Point, who has written or spoken publicly on these issues in War on the Rocks, the Washington Post, and his podcast with CSIS; and Professor Suzanne Nielsen, Head of West Point’s Department of Social Sciences, another West Point ALLIES chapter academic liaison, and the co-editor of “American Civil-Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New Era.” A new valued ALLIES ally, USAFA Scowcroft Professor Damon Coletta, will moderate.

The concept for this forum originated in my conversation with our wonderful friend, Ben Paganelli, the former ALLIES faculty liaison at USAFA who also led our ALLIES Joint Research Project to Rwanda. We shared a concern over the unsettling nature of the election, threats of disruption and violence, and the role that the military may take, or be pressured to take, in any outcome. We were, and remain, deeply alarmed at developments that threaten the apolitical professionalism of the military, and the ethos we sought to develop and spread through ALLIES - respect for the Constitution and the demonstration of strong ethical leadership, perhaps best exemplified in the ALLIES National Security and Civil Liberties program we convened with the Law Library of Congress.

Dr. Risa Brooks is the Allis Chalmers Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, and a non-resident senior associate in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dr. Brooks' research focuses on issues related to American and comparative civil-military relations, military effectiveness, and militant & terrorist organizations; she also has a regional interest in the Middle East. Her research on the United States focuses on issues of military professionalism, military advice and civilian control of the military. For the 2017-2019 academic years, she was an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. She is currently an associate editor of International Security.

Dr. Jim Golby is a Senior Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin and a Lecturer in the Department of Government. Jim is also the co-host of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' "Thank You for Your Service” podcast. Jim served twenty years in the United States Army. He previously served as a defense policy advisor at the United States Mission to NATO, as a special adviser to the Vice President of the United States, as a special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as an assistant professor of American Politics, Policy, and Strategy at the US Military Academy at West Point. Jim was the US Mission to NATO co-lead for the 2018 Brussels Summit.

Colonel Suzanne Nielsen is a Professor of Political Science and the head of the Department of Social Sciences at West Point. An intelligence officer by background, she has served on the personal staff of the Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, and she has also been a Special Assistant to the Commander, U.S. Cyber Command and Director, National Security Agency. Her research interests include change in military organizations, civil-military relations, and cyber policy and strategy. Her most recent book, American National Security, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018. She serves on the governing council of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Colonel Heidi Urben is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and an active duty colonel in t he United States Army with more than 23 years of service. Dr. Urben’s research interests include civil-military relations, public opinion, political behavior, and national security strategy. Dr. Urben recently finished command of a military intelligence brigade at Fort Meade, Maryland. Her previous positions include: Vice Deputy Director of Current Analysis and Warning in the Joint Staff Directorate for Intelligence; Deputy Director for Intelligence in the Joint Staff’s National Military Command Center; and Military Aide to Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

Moderated by Dr. Damon Coletta is Scowcroft Professor in the Dept. of Political Science at the United States Air Force Academy. He edits the Eisenhower Center peer-reviewed journal, Space & Defense, and recently completed a book on technology and international security, Courting Science: Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century (Stanford University Press, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University; a Master’s in Public Policy (S&T) from the Harvard Kennedy School; and a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Dr. Coletta recently was a visiting scientist at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Our second forthcoming session will be convened by Benjamin Paganelli (LtCol Ret USAF). A combat veteran of Operations Northern and Southern Watch, Enduring and Iraqi Freedom, and the International Security Assistance Force, Ben holds a BS in Int Affairs (Air Force Academy) and an MS in Int Relations (Troy Univ). Ben finished his military service as Assistant Professor of Political Science back at the Air Force Academy, and while there he started the USAFA chapter of ALLIES, and conducted research in civil-military relations in Turkey and Rwanda. Upon retirement, he founded Viable International Applications Unlimited, LLC (VIA Unlimited) a consulting firm helping organizations build culturally strategic success.

Juan Enriquez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nirmala Rao

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Bobbitt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impact of COVID: The Human Dimension

At November’s Brink

What Will Decide The Election of Our Lives?

The most consequential US presidential election in living memory is fewer than fifty days away. At stake are the foundations of US democracy, growing contempt for the rule of law, and the politicization of justice and public institutions.

What factors will decide the outcome? What lessons have we learned or ignored from 2016? How will our most pressing problems - a chaotic response to COVID, racial discrimination, a coast ablaze, and staggering wealth inequality - play in this election season?

We convened an urgent exploration of these questions with Tufts Professor of Political Science Eitan Hersh, author of Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change, and Matt Bai, former NYTimes journalist, Washington Post political columnist, author and screenwriter. Their interlocutor was my wife Iris Adler, former News Director and Executive Director for Programming, Podcasts and Special Projects at NPR affiliate WBUR.

Matt’s writings on the dangers of our current politics can be found in his column for the Washington Post. Eitan’s research and findings are summarized in a recent article for The Atlantic and interview with NPR’s Hidden Brain. 

Nasrin Sotoudeh: Iran's Mandela

On August 10th, Nasrin Sotoudeh began a hunger strike to protest the conditions and risk of COVID-19 infection in Tehran’s Evin prison, where she is currently being held. Nasrin was arrested and sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, on charges of acting against Iran’s national security through her advocacy on behalf of detained women who had protested the compulsory hijab law. 

We have become involved in the PEN campaign to bring attention and support to the woman called “Iran’s Mandela,” through the intervention of Amir Soltani, a dear beloved longtime friend and a former student from my first full year at Tufts University, 1985-86. Amir has been a consistent human rights campaigner and activist whose consuming passion has been to restore dignity and justice to people.  Here is but one example – Zahra’s Paradise.

On September 21st, 42 days into Nasrin’s hunger strike, we convened the first in a series of webinars with PEN America, featuring a panel with Amir and other new and old friends:

• Karin Karlekar, Director of Free Expression at Risk Programs at PEN America. 

  Here is the PEN America petition demanding Nasrin’s release, signed among many others by Kweku Mandela, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, Hillary Clinton, Geralyn Dreyfous, Azar Nafisi, Samantha Power, and Gloria Steinem.

• The Honourable Irwin Cotler, former justice minister and attorney general of Canada, Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) and Nasrin’s international legal counsel. 

• Roya Boroumand, Executive Director, and Ladan Boroumand, co-founder and Senior Fellow, Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.

  ABC’s goal is to "prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition in Iran and build a more just future in which citizens’ rights are respected and mass killings and crimes against humanity belong in the history books.” Here is ABC’s library documenting pro-democracy movements and human rights violations in Iran.

  Here is ABC’s report of the threat of COVID in Iran’s prisons.

As part of Convisero’s effort, we have also reached out to secure support and social media activity from Samantha Power, Ken Roth, Michael Ignatieff, Jianli Yang, the Human Rights Foundation, and the Senior Fellows of the Wallenberg Centre.

The Olympic File of Israel and Palestine

A Convisero discussion with San Charles Haddad on his recent book, The File: Origins of the Munich Massacre. San was a participant in the IGL's 2000 EPIIC year on Global Games: Sports, Politics, and Society, and shortly thereafter became Founding President of the Palestinian Rowing Federation. He has served as a consultant to the Palestine and Qatar Olympic Committees.

San presented the remarkable and troubling history of sport in Mandate Palestine between the world wars. That history, meticulously researched and unrivaled, includes the true story of the first Palestine Olympic Committee, the influence of Nazi Germany in Mandate Palestine, and the long-forgotten attendance of a Palestinian delegation to the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

These elements, buried until San unearthed them, fueled a distorted and dangerous narrative that he argues contributed, in part, to the tragic 1972 Munich Massacre, the 48th anniversary of which will be observed this year on 5-6 September. The same false narrative helps sustain the Palestinian-led movement to sanction Israel in international sport, which further encourages activists of anti-normalization and the Boycott Sanctions Divestment (BDS) movement.

San discussed the potential reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians through recognition and commemoration of their shared sport history. He proposed joint sport initiatives to promote the spirit of friendship, solidarity, fair play, and “the harmonious development of humankind” that is foundational to Olympism.

San’s interlocutor was the award-winning journalist Ken Shulman.

The File can be purchased here in print, ebook, and audio formats. San is also contributing a series of articles to the Journal of Olympic History on the research he has chronicled in The File, and further findings he has made since the book’s publication. Here are his first (pp. 35-50) and second (pp. 20-35) contributions thus far.

San Charles Haddad graduated from University of Rochester in 1997 with a BA in Art History and Italian Studies. He moved to Cambridge to train for a spot on the 2000 U.S. Olympic rowing team. However, the Oslo Peace Process presented a unique opportunity to qualify a Palestinian rowing team for the Sydney Games. Haddad founded the Palestinian Rowing Federation and served as its president for eleven years.

In 2002 and 2003, Haddad was a consultant at the Palestine Olympic Committee. From 2009 to 2015, he advised the Qatar Olympic Committee on strategic, financial, and executive training as part of its increasing presence in the Olympic Movement.

Haddad holds an Executive Masters in Sport Organisation Management and a Masters of Arts in Teaching. He is author of Managing Finances in Olympic Solidarity’s textbook Managing Olympic Sport Organisations (2007). He is an adjunct and visiting professor in organizational behavior, organization development, and corporate strategy with a focus on international trans-organizational systems. He was a participant in the IGL EPIIC Colloquium in 2000’s Global Games: Sports, Politics, and Society.

Ken Shulman is a longtime international correspondent for NPR’s “Only A Game,” and host and executive producer of “Away Games,” a television travel show and learning platform based on sport and social justice. He is a two-time RTDNA Edward R. Murrow winner for excellence in broadcasting, and was named a Champion of Justice by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

A veteran print and broadcast journalist, Ken has explored the intersection of sport, politics, and human rights for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, The International Herald Tribune, National Public Radio, and the BBC.

Ken is a graduate of Middlebury College, and holds a Masters Degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Confronting the Deportation Machine

On Tuesday August 4th, Professor Adam Goodman (EPIIC ‘00) discussed his new book, The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants, and contemporary U.S. Trump Administration policies, with Diane Rish (EPIIC ‘05), Associate Director for Government Relations of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Though the iniquities of our immigration system have rarely been as stark as in the present moment, they are preceded by 140 years of unjust expulsion policies. The Deportation Machine is a meticulous, passionate, and devastating rendering of that history, unveiling the underlying fear, economic realities, and human costs. It delivers a painstaking understanding of the systemic mechanisms of use-of-force, militarized borders, mass incarceration, and consistent violations of due process.t

The question at the core of these issues has immense importance today: is the United States to be a nation of immigrants - multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual - or a nation of anti-migrant sentiment, racial prejudice, and xenophobia? Public involvement and action are urgently needed to tackle that question, and to begin confronting the past that has gotten us here.

The event entailed an engaging discussion of The Deportation Machine with Adam, and then turned to ways in which individuals can help challenge the machine by advocating for those who are currently detained and calling for a more humane and just treatment of immigrants in our communities. 

Justine Hardy

For decades, Justine Hardy has conducted extraordinary international work dealing with the critical issue of trauma and mental health in conflict zones. A trained psychotherapist, author, and longtime journalist in India for the BBC, she founded Healing Kashmir, having become very involved in the region in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake. Healing Kashmir provides unique paramedic training, mental health education and training in the midst of the ongoing often violent, dangerous separatist conflict in the Kashmir Valley in India, a region with dramatically underdeveloped mental health resources. It has been able to reach and treat tens of thousands of people in need, and has developed a unique youth program to break cycles of anxiety and depression in adolescents and young adults. It has done this with a determined egalitarian sensibility, intentionally with a majority Kashmiri staff.

I first met Justine ten years ago, at the Oslo Freedom Forum of the Human Rights Foundation, (HRF) for whom I am a senior strategic adviser. She was a distinguished featured speaker and honoree for her work with Healing Kashmir. I had then just founded the Oslo Scholars Program at the Institute for the HRF, which invites undergraduate and graduate students to attend the Freedom Forum, and pairs them as summer interns with carefully selected Forum activists to assist their work  The Institute sent many of its students to very successfully work with Justine, and Healing Kashmir, on the ground in Kashmir over the years through the Oslo Scholars Program. Some alumni of the Institute have continued on working with Healing Kashmir professionally, and thus inspired and mentored, as later professionals in mental health around the world. 

I have tremendous admiration and awe for Justine’s intellectual depth, cultural sensitivity, staunch courage, deep empathy, and determined resilience, working with distressed people in an environment that is highly challenging both emotionally and politically. This is especially true since Modi has taken the leadership of India and ethnocentrism and xenophobia reign unchecked.  

In 2014, I invited Justine to become an INSPIRE Fellow at the Institute, to help instruct and mentor my students, and to provide insights into her remarkable experience, distinctive cultural sensibility, and extremely impressive positive approach to global mental health. Her work is not restricted to South Asia. Its models are adapted in many circumstances and locales, in the MENA region, England and the U.S. She continues to advise and mentor our community. Many alumni have personally told me time and again of her remarkable value.  I was honored by Justine when she agreed to speak about our Institute at our 30th Anniversary Gala celebration.

Her decades of tremendously important work with UK's New Bridge Foundation, focusing on the rehabilitation of life sentence prisoners before their release, and with India's Development Research and Action Group defying slum politics to create schools in Delhi, is likewise indicative of Justine's passion and concern for people in need.

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

A conversation with 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. He is the author Sobukwe and Apartheid: How Can A Man Die Better, and Drawing Fire: Investigating the Accusations of Apartheid in Israel. Benjamin will speak on 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. His interlocutor is Sherman Teichman, Founding Director Emeritus (1985-2016) of the Institute for Global Leadership, and Founding President of The Trebuchet. He was a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from 2017 to 2019, and is the Senior Strategic Advisor of the Human Rights Foundation.

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.”