SFS Magazine 2017

SFS Alumni Commit to Exposing the Truth Global Business Comes Front and Center Centennial Labs Prepare Students to Solve the World's Biggest Problems

CHANGING THE WORLD How the First Women of SFS Led the Way

Contents

02 Dean Hellman Reflects

Walsh School of Foreign Service

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY • 2017-2018

SFS is published regularly by Georgetown University's WALSH SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE , in conjunction with Washingtonian Custom Media, a division of Washingtonian Media (washingtoniancustommedia.com).

We welcome feedback and suggestions for future issues. Please contact Jen Lennon, Director of Communications, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Intercultural Center 232, 37th and O Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20057; by phone at 202-687-5736; or by email at jll87@georgetown.edu. Website: sfs.georgetown.edu

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04 Fast Facts 06 Student Profiles Meet three standout SFS students.

08 Global Reach On three continents, SFS students work together online to study the consequences of borders.

14 Showcasing Alumni Two alumni fight wrongdoing in important but very different ways.

26 Meet Our Faculty These two faculty members bring extraordinary experience to SFS. 32 Alumnus Spotlight An SFS alumnus becomes Japan’s foreign minister.

“Because we are leading up to the centennial anniversary, we’ve been trying to identify the historic impact of SFS, which is the oldest school of international affairs. We have had an imprint on a range of issues that affected the United States and the world. But one thing that kept coming to us was our impact in shaping the role of women in international affairs.”

— DEAN JOEL HELLMAN

COVER Photograph by

Julia Birtolo.

CONTENTS Photograph by Michele Oenbrink/Alamy

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In an inaugural Centennial Lab, SFS students went to India to help local experts fight crippling drought.

Long before other universities were coed, SFS admitted women. Here, for the first time, is their remarkable story.

The first class of global business majors graduate and move into the world.

A New Kind of Learning

Women at the Gate

Ready for Business

 facebook.com/georgetownsfs  twitter.com/georgetownsfs  instagram.com/georgetown_sfs

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SFS

Dean’s Welcome

(SSP‘94), Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command; and our new class of Centennial Fellows who will be working with students, faculty, and alumni: Nasser Judeh (SFS‘83, P‘18), former Jordanian Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister; Anne Richard (SFS‘82), former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration; Richard Verma (L‘98), former U.S. Ambassador to India; and Claudia Escobar, former Magistrate of the Court of Appeals of Guatemala and legal scholar. And we were honored to welcome back Bill Clinton (SFS‘68) upon his return to campus this November, marking the 25th anniversary of his election in 1992.

Universal values combined with Anniversaries are much on our mind right now, as innovative new curriculum makes an SFS the SFS Centennial is less than two years away. In adeducation more important than ever. dition to our Centennial Fellows, SFS has been busy working on innovative programming to sharpen our impact on the new century. In this magazine, you can read about one of our pioneering Centennial Labs, in which students engage across disciplines to look at hen I joined the Walsh School of a problem or project with partners in the real world.

Foreign Service as dean in 2015, These classes often take students around the world— few predicted how quickly and in this case to Maharashtra, India, where they worked dramatically longstanding as- with its government regarding solutions to drought. We sumptions about international also feature examples of how SFS is increasing its effort affairs would be seriously questioned—not only in to provide every student a meaningful global experiWashington, D.C., but across Europe and in every oth- ence—for example, Professor Betsi Stephen’s thrilling er corner of the globe. Critical, unanticipated ques- “tri-local” class that engaged students in Washington, tions have been raised. Internal challenges to national Italy and Qatar at the same time. We are also develsovereignty, complex non-state actors, disruptive new oping curriculum that will be increasingly important technologies, unraveling alliances and international to international affairs in the 21st century. In addition agreements, and rising nationalism and protectionism to engaging more students in science and technology on multiple continents have become the norm. (such as in the course on drought in India), you can read This dramatically shifting landscape, however, here about our new Global Business major and fellows affirms the importance of SFS. It program in conjunction with the is here, at Georgetown, where so McDonough School of Business. many of the world’s top thinkers Every day as I pass through and practitioners gather to tackle the front gates of our world-class the new questions and problems university, I see the Georgetown "SFS is increasing presented by our time. seal, reminding me of our univerits effort to We might have expected that sal values, which include: acaprovide every global uncertainty would depress demic excellence, men and womstudent a applications to a school of interen for others, care for the whole meaningful global national relations. Precisely the person, and pursuit of faith and experience." opposite has been true. Underjustice. I hope you will read the graduate applications for the SFS article on some of Georgetown’s Class of 2021 were the most in our first—and truly brilliant—female school’s history: nearly 4,000 students from all over graduates: a part of the SFS story that hasn’t been the world applied for admission, and a brilliant class told before, and a story that reminds us that SFS has of 338 new students joined us on the Hilltop. been central to Georgetown’s legacy, its meaning The fall semester has proven again the vitality and its values. These values will always be front and and relevance of Georgetown as the international center as SFS pursues its mission of preparing young crossroads where crucial conversations take place. people to have a positive impact on the world—parJOEL HELLMAN, Recent visitors have included Former Secretary of ticularly at a moment of change and uncertainty.

Dean of the State Colin Powell; German Ambassador Peter WitPlease enjoy these stories of your school—and I hope Walsh School of tig (P’20) discussing the German Bundestag election to see you on campus in November 2019 for our CentenForeign Service at Georgetown just days after it took place; Admiral Harry Harris, Jr. nial Gala, if not before! — JOEL S. HELLMAN, DEAN

LOOKING AHEAD

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E D M U N D A . WA L S H S C H O O L of F O R E I G N S E R V I C E

PHOTOGRAPH BY COLE TRUDO

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SFS

Fast Facts

U N D E R G R A D UAT E E M P LOY M E N T O U TCO M E S

Employed Full-Time Graduate Education Seeking Employment

71 13 7

%

Fellowship

%

Service, Military, Volunteer

%

Employed, Part Time

CLASS OF 2016

4 4 1

By Sector

%

%

%

By Sector

PRIVATE

39%

PUBLIC

38%

NON-PROFIT

MULTILATERAL

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16% 6%

EMPLOYED

G R A D UAT E E M P LOY M E N T O U TCO M E S

PRIVATE

76%

NON-PROFIT

15%

PUBLIC

9%

CLASS OF 2016

94 16

Pursuing Further Education Postponing Employment Seeking Employment

Working Abroad

%

03 01 02

% % %

%

SUPPORT SFS

Alumni frequently ask how they can help SFS. Here are a few ideas:

Do we have up-to-date contact information? Make sure your information is correct and re-introduce SFS to your classmates. Email: addup@georgetown.edu

Facilitate philanthropic support of SFS by providing introductions to foundations, corporations and organizations. Email: Becky Pfordresher, Office of Corporate & Foundation Relations, becky.pfordresher@georgetown.edu

Sponsor a dinner, reception, or lecture for alumni, parents, friends, students, and faculty to foster SFS community engagement.

Email: Eleanor Jones, eleanor.jones@georgetown.edu

Join fellow alumni online for GUAA Alumni Career Services webinars, offered on a variety of professional development trends.

Web: alumni.georgetown.edu/careers

Suggest additions to the “Prominent Alumni List,” which is posted on the SFS website.

Web: sfs.georgetown.edu/prominent-alumni/ Email: sfscontact@georgetown.edu

Set up a student internship, post job openings, arrange a site visit, volunteer for a career panel or serve as a career resource for resume reviews and mock interviews.

Email: Anne Steen, sfscdc@georgetown.edu

Your support of Georgetown University directly benefits thousands of Hoyas every day, enabling them to make a difference in their communities and around the world.

Web: giving.georgetown. edu/#howtogive Email: Katherine Smyth Haskins, kes34@ georgetown.edu

Apply to join the Georgetown Alumni Association Board of Governors.

Web: bog. georgetown.edu Email: guaa@ georgetown.edu

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SFS

Meet Our Students

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Her undergraduate experience at Georgetown inspired Emma Stokien to pursue a career in the military.

Now, 17 countries later, she’s back for a master’s at SFS.

by CANDY J. COOPER

ON THE RIGHT PATH

A little-known truth lies between the lines of the website William Bilicic created for children facing hospital surgery: he’s an expert.

“When I was little I would go into surgery with my stuffed animal, Spot,” William Bilicic writes. A photo of the floppy Spot fills the home page of www.Spot-Aid. “The doctors would give Spot a hat and name tag. He would be there when I would fall asleep and when I would wake up.”

Bilicic, 20, was born with Hirschsprung’s disease, a misfire of the nerve cells in the colon. On his first day of life, he underwent his first surgery. Forty-odd surgeries followed.

At 11, he was diagnosed with familial adenomatous polyposis, a pre-cancerous condition that required removal of his colon.

Today Bilicic is a sophomore in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, navigating his coursework with excellence and resolve. He is ready to declare a major based on a first-year course in international relations with Professor Elizabeth Arsenault, the Director of Teaching in the Security Studies Program. She has become one of Bilicic’s go-to people.

“She helped me realize that I was really interested in security studies and that I could do a five-year major,” Bilicic says.

He will apply for the intensive program in his junior year. If accepted, he will begin taking graduate level courses as a senior, then graduate in five years with an MA in

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Security Studies.

Bilicic hopes that After academics, the normality of Bilicic embraces camhis student life pus life, first as head of can serve as a speaker events for the guide to children campus branch of the facing hospitalizaACLU. Before Georgetions.

“I want to town, he worked on help any patient the national finance see a trajectory team of Hillary Clinfor themselves.” ton’s presidential campaign. Now he’d like to invite notable speakers like her to campus.

He’s also a grillmaster in the Georgetown Grilling Society, flipping burgers with friends every Friday in Red Square.

The normality of his student life, he says, can serve as a guide to children facing hospitalizations. That’s why he talks openly about himself on the Spot-Aid website. I have been there, he seems to say, and you can be where I am now. “I wanted to help any patient see a trajectory for themselves,” he says.

Whether offering tips to young patients or considering a future in international security, Bilicic is guided by a principle. “To help,” he says. “To help people. To help make the world a better place somehow.”

Emma Stokien’s mother is a teacher; her father is a stock trader, her sister, an architect. She grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where higher education paved a path to professions in maybe the arts or sciences.

But the military? Not so much.

And yet that is precisely what Stokien did. After getting her undergraduate degree at Georgetown, she became an intelligence officer in the U. S. Marine Corps. Her parents were more than a little surprised.

Stokien says that Georgetown is partly to blame for her military turn. As a freshman she landed by accident in a senior seminar taught by Professor Kathryn Olesko, an historian of physics and an expert in comparative nuclear cultures.

Stokien loved the class, Olesko

PHOTOGRAPH OF WILLIAM BY BRIAN FUREY; EMMA BY JULIA STOKIEN; KATELYN BY NICOLE MCCANN

became a mentor, and the mentee signed up for another Olesko class, Math In Society.

Stokien grew interested in game theory as it developed during nuclear proliferation.

“It was fascinating that something so uncontrollable could be so quantified,” she says. That led to courses in security, which persuaded Stokien that a true understanding would require field experience.

An invitation to a Marine Corps birthday party on campus revealed to Stokien that an elite education could lead to military service. She admired the selflessness of the people she met and felt a kinship, too.

She graduated with a degree in government and prepared for Officer Candidate School by taking long runs in combat boots. She was sent to Okinawa where she led a team of intelligence analysts on matters related in large part to North Korea.

She was later sent to Qatar.

Now she is back in Washington, D.C., once again, this time pursuing an MA in Security Studies at SFS. “It was very important to me to come back to Georgetown,” says Stokien, 27, who was stationed mostly in Asia, “to be part of the community, to give back to the school and to help to educate my civilian peers.”

Living in 17 countries over four years enlarges anyone’s perspective, and Stokien brings that to her Georgetown homecoming. She works to recreate the tight-knit quality of the Marine Corps on campus. One night after class she invited everyone to her apartment. “We got to discuss nerdy things,” she says. “I love the intellectual camaraderie.”

She sees her future in policy analysis, rather than intelligence. But Stokien will go wherever that work takes her.

STEPPING IN AT A CRITICAL MOMENT

A trip to Soweto brings a surprising opportunity.

Katelyn Shahbazian had always been the English-speaking women in Soweto. drawn to literature and languages, on the Mendenhall, who had returned to the U.S., one hand, and math and science, on the asked Shahbazian to take on the critical role. other. Within the School of Foreign SerThe research was thrilling yet “defivice, she looked to join the two. Last year, nitely very scary,” Shahbazian says. she found her major in Science, TechnolShe conducted three-hour interviews ogy, and International Affairs focusing on with 18 women in Soweto, asking about global health. Meeting with her advisor, everything from their early lives to their Professor Emily Mendenhall, she asked cooking habits. She was glad to keep the about jobs as a research assistant. project afloat, but was shaken by the stories “I’m going to South Africa,” the profes- she heard of violence and sexual abuse. sor said. “You should come with me.”

She learned to cope by listening openShahbazian, 20, was already scheduled ly to the women but also, later, by putting for a spring semester in Morroco. After, she their stories aside. “You are the interviewwent home briefly to Northern California, er, you build up rapport, you empathize,” then flew to Johannes- she says. “You don’t want to be flat-faced “Once you leave burg to meet Menden- and cold. But once you leave the interview the interview hall and her team. room you need to put those emotions away. room you need to Mendenhall, a med- You’re back to being a researcher. Separatput those emo- ical anthropologist, was ing the two roles is really important.” tions away. You’re studying low-income peoAs a senior, Shahbazian will write her back to being ple with cancer plus a sec- thesis using research from Soweto. She is a researcher.” ond disease. Her research seeking fellowships and internships with is in “syndemics”—the an eye toward graduate school in public synergy of epidemics—or how two or more health. She expects to continue traveling diseases interact with social, environmen- around the world, doing research like tal and economic factors to worsen health. Mendenhall’s. Understanding the cultural Shahbazian’s role was to manage the data. contexts of illness can lead to better policy But unexpectedly the project manager and treatment of illness, and alleviate the dropped out, leaving no one to interview suffering Shahbazian saw first-hand.

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Global Reach

BORDERS ... WITHOUT BORDERS A unique online class crosses the world’s boundaries by SARI H ARR AR

U

NOGALES, MEXICO At the fence between the U.S. and Mexico.

Artwork shows migrants returning to Mexico.They carry a dead body and a washing machine, representing the lives lost in exchange for capitalism.

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ndergraduates from Georgetown University campuses on three continents—in Qatar, Italy and Washington, D.C.—are exploring the meaning and experience of geopolitical boundaries and other borders through an innovative online course that’s the first of its kind for the university.

Borders and Security Concerns, developed and taught by Elizabeth (Betsi) Hervey Stephen, associate professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, was offered in the spring and fall semesters of 2017.

It’s the university’s “first online class for multiple campuses, and the first undergraduate online class offered during the academic year for Georgetown in D.C.,” Stephen notes. The digital class allows a wide range of students to exchange views and collaborate on projects that take a close and often deeply personal look at some of the most controversial walls, fences, checkpoints and lines (both official and unofficial) separating nations and people in the world today.

Issues explored include those in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Israel and Palestine; the U.S. and Mexico; and Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The course also expands the notion of borders to include religious, cultural and economic divides.

The world’s border-security issues are a particularly hot-button concern right now. The world is on the move,” Stephen says. “In 2016, more than 5,000 persons died attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Europe; at least 300,000 migrants did cross. And

recently, we have experienced the difficulties of Syrian refugees crossing from Turkey into Greece, and then on into other EU countries. Just recently, two ‘countries’ have voted to become separate entities: Catalonia/Spain and Iraqi Kurdistan/Iraq. What will it mean if the elections are seen as valid and we have two new countries carved out of existing countries?”

Recent GU-Q graduate Sheba George (SFS’17) says the class was intriguing because it encompassed three starkly different regions of the world. “While students in D.C. spoke about the proposed wall at the Mexican border and its consequences, students on the Italian campus spoke about borders in the context of the ongoing refugee crisis faced by Europe. Students in the Qatar campus, on the other hand, spoke about borders in their political context—with reference to countries trespassing on the political sovereignty of the borders of other countries.”

Coursework includes extensive reading assignments and plenty of writing, along with lively online discussions, as well as a simulation of a border crisis that requires students to assume various roles and take action. A final project has students creating a virtual museum exhibit around a chosen border issue. George, a current graduate student in public policy who plans to work with refugees in the future, created a group exhibit with other GU-Q students around personal border experiences. Their stories are dramatic illustrations of 21st-century boundary issues and include a Muslim student’s frustration over religious borders in her native India (where “we are often seen as traitors, terrorists or religious fanatics”), a Sudanese student’s heartache when her long-held plans to spend a semester at Georgetown’s D.C. campus were dashed by President Trump’s early 2016 travel ban and a young Palestinian student’s experience traveling from Jordan to Jerusalem. “The trip… that used to be a two-hour drive is now a series of ‘security checks’ that can extend to 12 hours,” she writes. (View the virtual museum at https://apps.cndls.georgetown.edu/projects/borders.)

For James MacGregor, associate dean for Academic Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar, the class provides a unique opportunity. “The student body of Georgetown’s Qatar campus is extremely diverse, currently comprising 252 students from 44 countries,” he notes. “The perspectives that they bring into the classroom are similarly diverse, thereby ensuring that all of the students enrolled in Professor Stephen’s course have a learning experience that can truly be deemed global.” The online component also makes it convenient. “One of our D.C. students is a professional soccer player in Florida,” notes Stephen, who will teach another innovative online course in Spring 2018 focused on sports and diplomacy.

Graduate students from D.C. and Qatar will travel with Stephen to the site of the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Doha, Qatar and collaborate on projects.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BETSI STEPHEN

SFS

(LEFT TO RIGHT) Juliette Leader (SFS’20): Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, France; Gina Kim (SFS’18): internship at Skypoint Ventures in Flint, Michigan; Mai Nguyen (GHD’18): internship with GU Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Nick Na (SFS’18): Education and Social Justice Research Fellowship in Sydney, Australia; Leonor Morrow (SFS’19): study abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia; Joseph DiSilvio (GHD’18): internship with Education Development Center in Kigali, Rwanda; Hannah Urtz (SFS’20): internship with Vicente Ferrer Foundation in Anantapur, India; Pete Giannino (MAGES‘18): internship with U.S. Department of Commerce in the Office of Energy and Environmental Industries; Olivia Bisel (SFS’18):internship with GU Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation in Kampala, Uganda; Meagan Dooley (GHD’18): internship with Mercy Corps in Amman, Jordan; Steele Burrow (MSFS’18): internship with health care startup Koe Koe Tech in Yangon, Myanmar; Tipa Attasivanon (LAS’19): study abroad in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

SFS Supports Students in Summer Internships and Language Study #SummerSFS

Internships are an integral part of the SFS education and prepare undergraduate and graduate students for careers in the international arena. Internships provide students with the opportunity to enhance their academic coursework; gain professional experience and insight into career opportunities; develop contacts in their fields of interest; and explore the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. SFS students intern around the world for organizations that include the U.S. State and Defense departments, the United Nations, international NGOs, and Fortune-500 companies. Some attend intensive language courses to achieve mastery of their chosen foreign language, or conduct research for their theses.

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SFS

How many times can you say as a student that you worked on a problem that could affect someone’s life, whether they could pay off their loans, or even survive?” says Nandini Mullaji (SFS’17), who is now working for the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and plans to pursue an MBA and master’s degree in education. “I was lucky that at 21, when I was a teaching assistant for this class, I knew I’d found my dream job.”

Twenty undergraduate students participated in the course, Designing for Droughts. They spent an entire year studying the issues and collaborating with Indian and other government officials, policymakers and NGOs to develop solutions to drought in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Last June, the course culminated in a 10-day trip to the region, during which the students presented their recommendations to experts and officials working on the problem.

The Designing for Droughts course is among the School of

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Walsh School of Foreign Service

ON THE GROUND SFS students discuss water conservation technologies with a local farmer (in white cap) in Gunjalwadi, a village in the Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra.

Bottom: Abraham Fraifeld (SFS‘17) in traditional Maharashtrian headdress at the Maharashtra State Legislative Council.

Foreign Service’s inaugural Centennial Labs—so named to honor the school’s upcoming 100th anniversary during the 20192020 academic year. According to SFS Dean Joel Hellman, it creates a new model of the classroom and will be a signature feature of an education at SFS. “The Centennial Lab brings all the advantages of the SFS education,” says Hellman. “It’s focused on problem solving. It’s hands on. It’s multidisciplinary and it also has a travel aspect in that it brings students to a different part of the world. Ultimately, it’s oriented to our goal, which is helping students to develop real solutions to intractable global problems.”

In the spirit of a new learning model, SFS professors Irfan Nooruddin and Mark Giordano, who led the project, set out to teach an unscripted course that would give students the tools to innovate and think creatively about solutions.

“Most classes, even at an excellent university like Georgetown, follow a script. Professors are the experts, and they come to the

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILY PARAGAMIAN AND ANYA BHARADWAJ

The Centennial Lab

A NEW KIND OF LEARNING When SFS students signed up for a lab course about drought in India, they expected an innovative learning experience. What many of them found was a calling. by MEGHAN LEWIT

class with a syllabus,” says Nooruddin, director of the Georgetown University India Initiative. “With this course, every day was an exercise in improvisation. We let our curiosity drive what came next.”

The decision to focus on Maharashtra—the wealthiest state in India, which contains the population centers of Mumbai and Pune—came out of a trip in 2015 when Nooruddin and Hellman met with Maharashtra’s chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, who cited drought as the most pressing issue facing the region.

The course came together through a combination of the professors’ expertise—Nooruddin in Indian politics and Giordano, director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program, as a leading expert in water issues.

“There are very few parts of the world where Georgetown doesn’t have a strong presence. India until recently was one of them,” Nooruddin says. “India was also a place where our students CONTINUED

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wanted to have more expertise and engagement. The university also Foreign Service. They want to work on these complex problems.” has a lot to offer India in terms of policy analysis and education.”

The school has also recently started a Trade Lab course, where In addition to highlighting a part of the world that called for students work with the Office of the United States Trade Represendeeper engagement, it was important for the class to focus on tative to explore legal cases about possible trade violations. The new an issue that crossed disciplines.

Centennial Labs model opens up many possibilities for students to “[Drought] has to do with science, agriculture, finance, gender. address a wide range of global issues, such as climate change and There are so many different issues, and we knew there would be the refugee crisis. These kinds of courses also highlight the service multiple entry points to the problem,” says teaching assistant Mullaji. component of the School of Foreign Service, Byman says.

Students worked in teams to better understand the science beDuring their ten days in India, students spent about half their hind droughts, their economic and social dimensions, and the intri- time in Mumbai, meeting with policymakers and convening in cacies of the Indian political system. Even before arriving in India, so-called “war rooms” participating in high-level discussions. the students were able to regularly communicate and meet with They also traveled to rural parts of the region where farmers and U.S.- and Indian-based stakeholders—including the U.S. ambassador residents live with the realities of drought every day. Having the to India and leaders from the World Bank, the U.S. State Department opportunity to travel to villages throughout Maharashtra, and and the Environmental Defense Fund. speak with those most affected, truly brought “Our goal was never for the students to the reality of the crisis home. come up with a single idea or solution,” says “They were able to see that this was not Giordano. “The concept was that if we could just a classroom exercise,” Mullaji says. “This get students to think about problems differwas determining whether these farmers Maharashtra ently, and present those ideas, it would genwould have crops, whether they would be Known as the gateway erate discussion that would break through of India, Maharashtra able to sell to market, whether they would is one of India’s largest some deadlocks and change the debate.” starve, whether they would be able to pay off commercial and industrial So what did the students come up with? their loans. That was very humbling.” centers. Located in the One group developed a new loan system A quarter of the students were so inspired western region of India, that would support maintenance of irrigation that they remained in India after the course it’s the nation’s second systems that had fallen into disrepair. Another ended. Three continued to study water issues, most populous state. created a plan for farmer collectives to build working with the International Water ManagePOPULATION self-financed greenhouses to test crops and ment Institute and publishing a comprehenMore than 112 million experiment with water-friendly techniques. A sive report on the Maharashtra drought stratpeople live in Maharashtra. third group proposed leveraging remote sensegy. One student partnered with a local NGO to Mumbai, the capital, is ing technology to link data on farmers’ water develop a workshop helping farmers learn waalso the most populous usage to loan forgiveness policies. city in India. However, ter conservation techniques. Another student more than half the state’s “While the students who participated returned to the Maharashtra chief minister’s population lives in rural came from many different areas of interest, war room as an intern, researching legislative villages, and 64 percent the result was truly a team effort,” says Japrecedents related to drought policies. of the state’s population clyn Lee (SFS‘19), a junior majoring in SciNooruddin and Giordano are leading the depends on agriculture. ence, Technology and International Affairs. class for a second year, this time focusing on “I’ve been in several classes where workpublic sanitation in Mumbai, which brings LAND AREA ing individually is much more efficient and The state covers 118,800 together a cross section of issues such as ursquare miles—an productive than being in a group, but in this ban planning, public health and behavioral area larger than the class I had the opposite experience,” she change. Meanwhile, a cohort of students United Kingdom, Italy says. “I got to be part of a five-person team from the previous year are continuing to or New Zealand. where each individual contributed their meet, with a goal of putting into action the DROUGHT CHALLENGES own expertise and perspective to some key drought solutions they developed.

Maharashtra faced a aspect of our plan. This was the first class I “Our plan is to make the class even more crippling drought in 2016, took at Georgetown where you could actualfluid than last time,” Giordano says. “We and continues to grapple ly design a feasible, implementable solution saw that [this approach] really changed the with extreme weather to a real world problem.” way students thought about the world and conditions. About 330 “With the Centennial Labs, SFS is at the problem solving. Many may stay engaged in million people across forefront of a university-wide focus on expeIndia, about a quarter of India for the rest of their lives.” the country’s population, riential learning that empowers students to Even students who have since graduated, have been affected by work with stakeholders to confront pressing like Mullaji, are continuing their involvement. the drought. Maharashtra real-world issues,” says Daniel Byman, senior “We’ve seen the impact we can have,” has developed Jalyukt associate dean for undergraduate affairs. she says. “Given our education and talent, I Shivar Abhiyaan, a water “It’s not enough to just have the right anthink we have a responsibility to do so.” conservation program swer in a seven page paper,” he says. “This is aiming to make the state why students come to D.C. and to the School of drought-free by 2019.

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Walsh School of Foreign Service

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILY PARAGAMIAN

LOCAL EXPERTISE. Professor Mark Giordano poses in front of a water balance table in Kumbharwadi village; Jaclyn Lee (SFS‘19) by the WOTR (Watershed Organization Trust) bus; The India Innovation Studio with farmers in a temple in Kumbharwadi village, Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra.

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SFS

EXPOSING THE TRUTH

Dorothée Myriam Kellou. She started by asking questions. by PEG ROSEN

F DOCUMENTARIAN Kellou’s commitment to document wrongdoing won her the TRACE prize for investigative reporting in 2017.

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reelance journalist and documentarian Dorothée Myriam Kellou (MAAS ‘12) was at work in her Paris apartment one February evening in 2014, when a compelling Facebook message popped up on her smartphone.

It came from a former human resources manager for the Syrian subsidiary of Lafarge, the French multinational cement company. The man explained he’d been abducted in August 2012, had to pay his own ransom for liberation and had never been compensated by his employer. He needed an Arabic-speaking French journalist who could tell his story.

Through a network of Syrian refugees in the U.S., Rochelle Davis—director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies—had provided Kellou’s name.

“I remember thinking, ‘He must be a trustworthy source if he’s been sent by Davis,’” says French-born Kellou, who came to SFS as a Fulbright scholar and earned her Master of Arts in Arab Studies in 2012.

“I started asking questions.”

Walsh School of Foreign Service

Thus began an 18-month investigative odyssey that ultimately exposed far more than Lafarge’s negligence toward its employees in war-torn countries.

In a three-part expose that splashed the front pages of Le Monde and aired also on the international news channel France 24, the young journalist outed the cement giant for paying off terrorist groups—including ISIS—in order to keep its Syrian plant running.

Kellou’s work earned her the 2017 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting, which recognizes journalism that uncovers bribery in the business world. It also sparked a French judicial inquiry into Lafarge’s possible dealings with Syrian armed terrorist groups.

Kellou says she didn’t focus on where her investigation might lead when she initially dove in. Nor did she worry about personal risk.

“When you think too much about all the consequences of what you might do, you don’t do anything,” she says. “Being trained as a historian at Georgetown, I felt a responsibility to document wrongdoing. I want to expose the truth because I know how destructive silence can be at a personal and societal level.”

This deep-seated commitment drives yet another—more personal—­project for Kellou: a documentary about the forced resettlement of her father’s family during the Algerian war for independence from France. It is an outgrowth of her master’s thesis at SFS. “When I got to Georgetown, my professor, Osama Abi Mershed, told me, ‘Look at your own history and your forgotten side,’” says Kellou, whose French mother and Algerian father met in the 1970s in Algiers. “My father never talked about his experience growing up in a village surrounded by barbed wire.

His experience was shared by almost three million other Algerians. Yet very little has been written about it. So that’s what I decided to do.”

To fund her documentary—called El-Rihla, Arabic for “voyage”—Kellou has pursued an independent course, applying for and winning financial awards from filmmaking agencies and running her own crowdfunding campaign.

The money has helped pay for various aspects of film production and, most importantly, for Kellou and her crew to travel with her father to his village of Mansourah—which he left behind 50 years ago. She is seeking more funding to complete the project by spring.

In the meantime, Kellou does what she can to make ends meet, freelancing for various media outlets and working a few days each week at France 24.

“It’s a struggle to live while doing this work,” says Kellou. “But being able to express what is important and dear to me is what makes me happy. It’s a wonderful process.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY TRACE INTERNATIONAL

Showcasing Alumni

FIGHTING DISINFORMATION Jamie Fly. His assignment is to track the Kremlin’s interference with American politics and culture. by SARI H ARR AR

W

hen 200 NFL players knelt, sat or raised a fist during the national anthem in late September, Jamie Fly (MAGES ’02) wasn’t surprised by the burst of social media traffic about the controversy from an unlikely source: hundreds of Kremlin-associated Twitter accounts.

“Vladimir Putin and the Russian government are engaged in a widespread disinformation and influence campaign in the U.S.—and around the world— that goes beyond spreading propaganda and interfering with elections and political campaigns,” says Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Future of Geopolitics and Asia programs at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). “Putin’s aim is to sow division and promote chaos by using one of our greatest strengths—our openness—against us.”

Fly, who has a master’s in German and European Studies from SFS, is co-director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan project launched this year to publicly monitor Russia’s efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions in the US and Europe—and to help craft strategies to deter them, hopefully in time for the 2018 and 2020 elections. The Alliance is currently tracking 600 Twitter

accounts linked to the Kremlin’s ongoing disinformation and influence campaign—a project that’s gaining national attention through media mentions in The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere.

The tracking tool is called the Hamilton68 Dashboard (http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/). The name refers to this founding father’s prescient writing. “In the Federalist Papers No. 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote of protecting America’s electoral process from foreign meddling,” the Alliance website notes. “Today, we face foreign interference of a type Hamilton could scarcely have imagined.”

Hamilton68’s online dashboard charts and analyzes in real time the volume and content of tweets, including hashtags, links and subjects from human users and bots, including Kremlin influence agents, pro-Kremlin individuals, and others influenced—knowingly or unknowingly—by Russia.

“The common misperception is that Russia is pushing obvious propaganda with a pro-Russian message,” says Fly. “The reality is Putin is promoting all sorts of existing messages and stories already appearing in the media here that sow division, including racial and religious division, and inciting chaos. Many are not about politics or politicians

at all. And they’re not always manufacturing fake news. Often they just grab onto controversies already happening here, then amplify and push it by promoting both sides.” Hamilton68 has documented waves of Twitter activity around a wide variety of issues—from Charlottesville to Chelsea Clinton to #ResignPaulRyan. After the NFL incident, for example, the tweets pushed both sides of the debate via hashtags, including #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee.

The Alliance’s bipartisanship is key to its hoped-for success in understanding and repelling Russian information attacks

“Putin’s aim is to sow division.”

before the 2018 and 2020 elections. Daily operations are run

by Fly, former national security counselor to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Laura Rosenberger, a senior fellow at GMF and director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy who was a senior State Department official in the Obama administration.

An impressive list of former senior national security officials, from both parties and other nations, has endorsed the effort by joining the Alliance’s advisory council.

“The whole conversation about Russia’s influence on the 2016 Presidential election is very polarized along party lines, but there’s nothing partisan about what Russia is doing,” Fly says. “In that sense, their efforts are working by preventing elected officials from working well together in a bipartisan way. And we’re getting closer and closer to midterm elections and to the 2020 presidential election.”

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SFS

The History of Women at SFS

WOMEN AT THE GATE

B

arbara Berky was just 17 when her parents noticed a short note typed onto the bottom of the Georgetown University fall 1954 brochure announcing that women could apply for entry to the School of Foreign Service and told her to do so. Though Berky had other ideas, she acceded to her parents’ wishes.

“I thought it would be interesting,” she recalled in a recent phone interview, “so I was happy to be accepted. I didn’t grasp that it was some kind of big honor—and I definitely didn’t know how hard it would be for us girls.”

Berky—now Berky Evans—became part of the initial group of about 25 women accepted to SFS. She went on to be one of about a dozen who graduated four years later and remembers proudly that she ranked 15th among the total 150 members of the overwhelmingly male class of 1958.

She also remembers that two years later women took first, second, and fourth place in the class of ‘60. “We outshined the men,” says Berky Evans, now an 80-year-old grandmother liv-

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ing in Saratoga, CA. “I remember that the only way I gained the men’s respect was I’d do better than they did. The priests—the ‘Jezzies’—were very nice. The military guys, those who were there because of the G.I. bill, those were our friends. They had seen a little of the world, and they were not so privileged. But a lot of the men were just ... ugh.”

To explain, she describes a famous tree with a bench just inside the front gate of campus. “College boys congregated there. Women were not welcome to stand anywhere near the tree. The boys were not interested in socializing with us. The young men, they mostly wanted to date the women from the nursing program—not us.

“But the women got stronger and stronger. We gathered together and set up the School of Foreign Service Women’s Association. I was the first president—and by the time of my senior year, we had a tea at the Alumni House for incoming women. Can you imagine? A tea at Georgetown? This was unheard of, but we did it.”

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JULIA BIRTOLO

Years before most elite colleges became coeducational, the Walsh School of Foreign Service brought women into its student body. They paved new pathways for future generations. This is their story. by ANTOINETTE MARTIN

IN THE LEAD Barbara Hammes Sharood, summa cum laude, Class of 1958. Her diploma referred to a “he,” rather than “she.”

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Walsh School of Foreign Service

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF GEORGETOWN ARCHIVES

As SFS prepares to celebrate its centennial excel at these skills and came to George“It was a pretty in 2019–2020, Georgetown scholars have town to ask the school to train them. This radical act in begun working to unearth the history of the was before the wave of coeducation of the the late Forties institution, and one of the things they have Sixties and Seventies. The program opened to open up discovered is the extraordinary role SFS has to women in order to meet a need—not out the School of played in bringing women into internationof desire to promote women’s advancement.”

Foreign Service al affairs. That part really gets rolling with With the power of understatement, he adds, to women.” the founding of the Institute of Languages “There was a great deal of reluctance on campus.”

—DEAN HELLMAN and Linguistics in 1949. “Ling-Lang,” as SFS founder Father Edmund Walsh and the institute was known, became the entry linguist Leon Dostert (SFS ’28) established point for female foreign service students the institute. Dostert returned post-war to after the end of World War II—but only if they were willing his Georgetown alma mater as a star, having created a simulto attend night classes. Day classes were exclusively for men. taneous language interpretation system for the 1945 Nurem“It was a pretty radical act in the late Forties to open up the berg Trials (later used extensively by the United Nations). He School of Foreign Service to women,” reflects today’s dean, Joel and Walsh began setting up a lab to train students in that art, Hellman. “The U.S. had become a global power after World War wherein a translator hears information in one language through II, foreign policy required vast amounts of information from an ear bud and speaks another language into a headset microoverseas. The leaders of the State Department, the Pentagon phone. The program attracted top-notch female foreign lanand CIA were desperate for people who could work with that guage speakers from the first—but until 1954, they could only information,” says Hellman. “They believed that women would go to the night classes and then had to go home.

make comments, because the boys are here to learn.’” When she graduated, it was summa cum laude. “I was thrilled, but the certificate . . . called me a ‘he.’ I guess they couldn’t afford the extra letter!”

“LING-LANG” After World War II, the U.S. State Department, Pentagon, and CIA needed vast amounts of information translated, interpreted and monitored from overseas. They asked Georgetown to train women for the job. In 1949, the university responded by founding the Institute of Languages and Linguistics. “Ling Lang” was the first opened door for women at SFS.

Those interviewed for this article about their pioneer days at SFS agreed on this: They received a spectacular education—one they would not have been able to access anywhere else at the time. “I’ve got a master’s, I’ve taught college, done this and that, and nothing ever challenged me like Georgetown,” says Helene Gettler Mallett, SFS class of ’59.

On the other hand, the women who spoke for this piece were also nearly unanimous in naming three things they found exceedingly difficult to tolerate: the housing situation, the traditionally male culture at the university, and the challenge of finding a job in the field of foreign service after graduation.

Paula Wiegerd Tosini, who graduated in 1960, took the foreign service officer exam and passed, then won a Fulbright scholarship for foreign travel at graduation. Tosini says that nonetheless she was able to accept “reality.” If she got married, she would never be posted overseas.

“I worked at AID (the U.S. Agency for International Development) for a while and earned a master’s degree from SFS at night,” Tosini says. She joined the foreign service and began training for a post in New Delhi, but her plans came to an end when she got married in 1964 and had children the following year.

After her kids were established, Tosini went to the University of Maryland for a Ph.D. in economics. She worked for a financial regulatory agency for more than a decade, and after that a nonprofit “futures” organization. Today, she is a proud docent at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. because she “always loved art.”

Her adaptability is typical of early graduates, but her equanimity contrasts sharply with the attitudes of others who lived through those early years at SFS.

When women were finally allowed in the daytime program, “I passed the oral exam—at least I think I did. When I finished, there were no female restrooms, and no housing for them un- they patted me on the head, and—I heard this from other girls, til the following year when they were allowed in the upstairs too—they said something like: ‘Well, it’s probably going to be wing of the nursing school dormitory. “Finally,” Berky Evans a long time before an opening occurs, and looking at you, you recalls, “I got to stop racing across campus in a sweat to use the look like you might be married by then.’ I kept waiting for the bathroom at the rooming house.” call from the State Department, but it never came.” — H E L E N E According to Barbara Hammes Sharood, who had transferred G E T T L E R M A L L E T T, R E M E M B E R I N G H E R E X P E R I E N C E I N 1957 into SFS as a sophomore, “Living in the nurses’ dorm didn’t work out so well for us either though.” Sharood had to take a required Instead, Mallett became a teacher. She first taught fifth grade, class at night, getting her back to the dorm at 10 p.m.—evidently then high school, high school equivalency and college at two not a typical hour for nursing students. The doors were always universities on Long Island. “I regret not being able to go into locked. “I had to ring the bell to get in. The nun would come down the foreign service, but life has many paths.” Now in her eighties, in a dressing gown and robe and be very angry. ‘This is not appro- long retired and a widow, she says, “If you find a rock in the way priate!’ she would say stiffly and just turn on her heels and leave.” and find a way around it, I think you’ll be happier in the long run.”

The following year, Sharood and several female students deShe admires the approach taken by Melissa Foelsch Wells, cided they’d do better living in an apartment off campus. the first female to graduate from SFS. In a 1984 interview, Wells Other kinds of discrimination were more direct. In an accounting described her “ploy” to disarm the interlocutors at her foreign class, Sharood and one other woman were the only female students service exam and slide by the disqualifying marriage question. in the class. “The professor pulled us aside and said, ‘I want you CONTINUED • both to sit in the last row and I do not want you to ask questions or

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Outstanding Women

Women from SFS became stellar achievers in international affairs and other important fields. Here are a few examples of the legendary women of SFS, past and present.

Melissa Wells 19 5 6 Wells, the daughter of a physicist and an Estonian opera singer and film star, grew up traveling the world and spoke three languages by age nine.

She worked in Las Vegas as a dancer and synchronized swimmer, then performed in a water ballet tour of Europe, after which she went to SFS, starting with night classes. Wells became the first female graduate

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Walsh School of Foreign Service

of the school and went on to serve as ambassador to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau 1976– 77, Mozambique 1987–90, The Democratic Republic of Congo 1991–93 and Estonia 1998– 2001. In a series of interviews published a few years ago by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Wells described managing two embassy evacuations, working amidst wars in Africa, leading efforts to bring food to starving people, and working to get child soldiers out of war to safety.

Carol Lancaster 19 6 4 Lancaster spent more than three decades as a revered faculty member at the school from which she graduated in 1964. In 2010, she became the SFS dean. Lancaster passed

away in 2013, at the age of 72.

At her funeral, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia said, “Her extraordinary passion for this place, for her students and their growth, for the School of Foreign Service, and for our role both in Washington and around the world was inspiring and pushed us all to be better versions of ourselves.” Lancaster hopscotched back and forth between public service and academia. From 1980 to 1981 she was the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, and later directed the African Studies program at SFS. From 1993–1996, she served as deputy administrator of USAID, before returning to the university. In 2013, under Lancaster’s leadership, Georgetown founded its groundbreaking Institute for Women, Peace and Security.

PHOTOGRAPH OF BARBARA COURTESY OF BARBARA SHAROOD; CAROL BY ANDREW PROPP; CARMEN

BY TANYA ROSEN-JONES; STEPHANIE BY THOMAS MCKINLESS/GETTY

Wells, who grew up around theater people and performed as a the hospital until Easter. Ten years later, I started at SFS, and synchronized swimmer, understood the value of rehearsing for on the day of my first exam in Development of Civilization, the a performance. She prepared herself for the inevitable scene, revolution broke out in Hungary. I was praying, fearing for my which occurred five minutes into the exam. grandmother and relatives still back there—and I flunked by a Q: “Miss Foelsch, may I ask, what are your marriage plans?” few points.” — E R I K A PA P P FA B E R , C L A S S O F ‘60 A: “I’m nearly six feet tall and I weigh two pounds more than Sugar Ray Robinson and I just can’t find the right guy.’”

Faber, now 79 and a resident of senior housing in Connecticut, reThe examining board members laughed and moved on. Wells members pleading for a chance to retake the test. “You know,” the became a diplomat and four-time American ambassador (See professor told her, “you have to put yourself above those things.” sidebar on Melissa Foelsch Wells.)

Faber was a scholarship student who held down a job as an But the question for women would not evaporate with assistant proctor at a freshman residence. When the head proca snappy answer; far from it. As late as 1965, four years be- tor came down the staircase tipsy and half-dressed at a coed fore Georgetown became fully coeducational, the question of soiree, Faber found herself in charge when she was supposed whether women should pursue careers was still debated quite to be getting ready for oral comps covering seven semesters of openly. That year, an edition of the now-defunct SFS Courier material. “My diploma depended on it,” she recalls. “Wouldn’t ran a sarcastic column by a male student (under the pseudonym you know, one of the three professors on the board was the King Sparrow) who argued that “Women who do continue in same one who flunked me on that first test?” the traditionally masculine pursuits of ... professional life often The professor tested her with his nasty tone once again. Faber surrender a good part of their female essence.” In rebuttal, Fa- cried when she walked out—but she passed. “I was 23rd out of ther Joseph Sebes, then dean of the School of Business Admin- 122 graduates,” she recalls. “Not too bad for an immigrant girl.” istration, said he believed in increasing the number of women In fact, she was too recent an immigrant to be eligible for the at SFS “because education has a value in itself.” foreign service, so Faber took a job with an insurance bank, writing fire protection literature for three years. After that, she had a 14-year run as editor of a Catholic magazine. Today, with her “My family left Hungary when the bombs were falling. I started husband now gone from Alzheimer’s disease, Papp has reinventschool in January, 1946, age eight, in Germany. I remember ed herself once again, editing a monthly web page on Hungarian wearing winter coats, copying down the multiplication table. I social and cultural issues (available at www.Magyar.org). got pneumonia and this was before penicillin. I didn’t get out of If every dream conjured by the young women of the Fifties

Years later, when I went to law school at another university, I realized the instructors and professors we’d had as undergrads were at the top of their game.”

Sharood, from the SFS class of ’58, has a daughter who earned a master’s degree from SFS in 1986. And her granddaughter intends to apply to SFS for early admission next year.

Berky Evans’ daughter graduated from Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business in 1983. She lived at Copley Hall, which had been “a male bastion” back in the days when her mother was running across campus to pee.

“She works for the government, as I “The professor... wanted to do,” says Berky Evans who stayed said, ‘I want you home with the kids for 16 years until her both to sit in the husband died at age 49. “That’s when my last row and I do degree from Georgetown came in handy. I not want you to was hired by a West Coast real estate broker, ask questions or who had taken some classes at Georgetown make comments, and knew its reputation. I worked in that and Sixties could not be fulfilled, some of because the boys business for 22 years. It had nothing to do those dreams came true for their daughters. are here to learn.’” with international affairs, but…”

Sue Palmieri Keevers (SFS ’59), attended —BARBARA HAMMES SHAROOD At the 50th class reunion in 2008, Berky her 50th class reunion the same weekend Evans attended with her daughter, the that her daughter attended her 25th reunion Georgetown grad. “We went back to look at Georgetown. “Our experiences were entirely different,” says for the tree where I had been unwelcome to stand. The tree was Keevers, age 79, a retired medical malpractice defense attorney. gone, but the bench was still there. I had my daughter take a “The infrastructure just wasn’t there yet for women when I was picture of me sitting on it—and I was smiling.” at Georgetown. Ultimately, it was worth it because we were admitted to an academic program that was like nothing else.

Kelly Coffey

Carmen Twillie Ambar

19 8 9

19 9 0

After a bachelor’s at Lafayette College and a Master of Science in Foreign Service at SFS, Kelly Coffey took a job at J.P. Morgan’s Investment Bank.

She has spent the last 28 years at J.P. Morgan, which has provided a varied career, including a six-year stint in Argentina where she worked in Merger’s and Acquisitions and learned Spanish on the job. After that, she returned to the U.S. and held many leadership positions. She also led the bank’s women’s network. Today, she is CEO of J.P. Morgan U.S. Private Bank, overseeing more than $650 billion in client assets. In 2017, American Banker magazine named her the 14th most powerful woman in finance.

In March of 2017, Ambar became Oberlin College’s 15th president, and the first African-American leader in the institution’s 184-year history.

Ambar came from Cedar Crest College, where she’d been president, and, before that, Douglass College at Rutgers University, where she’d been president and dean. Earlier in

her career, Ambar served as an assistant dean at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.

In addition to her bachelor’s from SFS, she also earned a master’s of public affairs at Princeton and attended Columbia Law School. She is married to another SFS graduate, political science professor Saladin Ambar, and they are the parents of 10-year-old triplets.

Stephanie Murphy 2004 Born in Ho Chi Minh City, Stephanie Murphy and her parents fled Vietnam by boat, lived in refugee camps and eventually settled in Virginia, where Murphy’s parents worked multiple jobs to support the family. After a bachelor’s degree in economics from the College of William

and Mary, Murphy attended SFS where she earned a Master of Science in Foreign Service. She worked as a national security specialist for the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and later for the private sector.

In 2016, Murphy made history when she was elected to the House of Representatives, representing Florida’s 7th district. She is the first Vietnamese-American woman to ever serve in the U.S. Congress.

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SFS

Global Business

The First Class of Global Business Majors Graduate and Move Into the World by JUDI HASSON

WHERE BUSINESS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS COME TOGETHER

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PHOTOGRAPH BY C.J. BURTON/GETTY

J

ohn Ruxton (SFS ’17) had a job offer in his pocket from Facebook by the time he graduated last May. In fact, every one of his 13 classmates who were part of the inaugural graduating class of Global Business majors at the School of Foreign Service had job offers, too.

At Facebook, Ruxton is now part of the company’s Global Marketing Solutions team in Austin, Texas where he helps government agencies and political campaigns leverage Facebook to reach their constituents and audiences.

“I attribute a significant portion of my complex problem-solving skills and business frameworks to my Global Business coursework,” says Ruxton.

The new Global Business degree at SFS—launched in 2015 with a cohort of sophomores—is designed to do precisely this: equip undergraduates to understand business entities in the context of today’s changing global social and cultural forces. In addition to the political, economic, research and cross-cultural skills that have always been central to an SFS degree, students in the Global Business major take five courses from the McDonough Business School (MSB). As part of the core SFS curriculum, proficiency in a foreign language is required.

As a result, SFS undergraduates can focus on such topics as multinational corporations and their behavior; international investments and corporate finance; the interactions of businesses and governments in public sector policymaking, and other issues such as corporate ethics and environmental impacts.

Global Business students develop communication skills through discussion and debate, oral presentations and advanced level writing. They must grasp the complexities of critical international business issues, providing written reviews of the literature, analyzing data and ultimately acquiring the ability to define central questions.

“Trade has always been a major destination for SFS students.

But the private sector now plays a more critical role than ever before in nearly every aspect of international affairs, including economic development, global poverty reduction, immigration, cross border flows and even in war,” says SFS Dean Joel Hellman. “We need to be training business leaders with a global perspective and we also need to be thinking about how the private sector can be used in international affairs.”

Theodore Moran, director of the Landegger Program in International Business Diplomacy and the field chair for the SFS undergraduate Global Business major, says the students in the inaugural class were “eager to learn about international trade and investment within the context of real multinational corporations.”

Moran says the focus has been on finance, logistics, business-investment negotiations and multinational corporate strategy, with some classes built around the use of case studies on the winners and losers from global trade, investment and technology.

“The students have to be prepared to discuss the cases verbally and to express themselves succinctly on the exams,” Moran says. “I hope to prepare students for careers in the public or private sectors.”

The program certainly worked for Michael Li, born in China and raised in Nashville. Last summer, Li was selected for a 10-week summer internship at PJT Partners, an investment bank in New York. When the internship ended, the firm ofCONTINUED

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The same driving factors that Developing led to the development of the Strong Global Business major also led the School of Foreign Interdisciplinary Service and McDonough School of Business to come Tools

together and create the Global Business Fellows program.

This joint initiative is a highly selective program available to both SFS and MSB students, who must apply through their respective schools.

“Many of the big issues of our time such as globalization, trade and cyber security are solved at the intersection of business, policy and inter-

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national relations,” says Paul Almeida, dean of MSB. “Joint programs like our Global Business Fellows provide our students interdisciplinary tools with which to make a difference in the world.”

In addition to the rigorous coursework, fellows access unique on-the-ground experience evaluating companies.

During their junior or senior year, the fellows participate in a semester-long Global Business Experience course in which they conduct a substantive consulting project under faculty super-

vision for senior members of an international business or organization. The project includes travel to the client country for one week, where the fellows present their findings to senior management.

Fellows in the 2017 inaugural class went to Barcelona, where they were placed in teams and assigned different companies to study.

“It is important to have firsthand exposure to international business, including traveling to meet with executives abroad to present recommendations,” notes Dean Almeida.

PHOTOGRAPH OF GROUP COURTESY OF KURT MUHLBAUER; EMILY BY JENNA CHEN

INNOVATING MINDS In a Global Innovation Strategy course, Emily Ma (SFS’19), evaluated a unique partnership between PepsiCo, Uber and the nonprofit organization Mother’s Against Drunk Driving.

fered Li a job as a financial analyst. He started work in July He says the program exposed students to many opportunities, 2017 advising clients on mergers and acquisitions. with companies coming on campus to actively recruit.

Li recently reflected that many of his professors in the GlobThe mix of business and international relations classes has al Business major had worked in the real world, and this added turned out to be a perfect complement for Emily Ma, 20, a ju“a depth of nuance and insight that students cannot get from nior who will graduate from SFS in 2019. “What I appreciate academic textbooks.” about the major is getting education from both worlds, theoHe believes the courses in the major also taught him the retical and practical,” says Ma who is from Bridgewater, N.J. business theory that he needed. “I got enough of the technical One great experience for Ma involved a Global Innovation language of business and developed the necessary tools that help Strategy course where she picked PepsiCo as her case study. convert that thinking into action.”

Each week, Ma wrote a one-page analysis of Many of the courses provided a a different element for the company. This inmuch more tangible experience than cluded PepsiCo’s organizational and technical The major offered me what one typically expects in college. resources and its competition in the food and the chance to continue Business Strategy and Policy, beverage industry. She also studied and evaltaking the economics WTO Dispute Settlements, Busiuated PepsiCo’s partnership with Uber and and international ness Strategy and Operations, and the nonprofit organization Mothers Against affairs classes I was Philosophical Foundations of a Drunk Driving. The three organizations interested in while also Market Society were the courses teamed up to create a unique campaign built taking advantage of the that had the most impact on Li. “It around a highly innovative packaging concept, business school’s more was a really good interdisciplinary intended to discourage drinking and driving. practical classes.” experience, more about figuring out PepsiCo, which owns the Frito Lay Compa- C A R S O N YAT E S the role of business in international ny, created a promotional bag of chips that had affairs,” says Li. “The core curricua special detector sprayed on it. When someone lum really helped me develop reasoning and critical thinking.” who has ingested alcohol breathes on it, a red light flashes with the Global Business student Carson Yates took six courses at message “Don’t drink and drive.” The bag gave users $10 off an Uber MSB, including accounting and finance. He says, “The major ride. Distributed only at a recent Super Bowl, the bags “demonstratoffered me the chance to continue taking the economics and ed a unique technological innovation of PepsiCo,” she says. international affairs classes I was interested in while also taking Ma isn’t certain what she wants to do after graduation, but advantage of the business school’s more practical classes.” she has plenty of options. “At the end of the day it’s ideal to be Yates describes his classmates as some of the most interesting able to draw from both a business and humanities education and most driven people he’s ever met. His professors were ex- and to find employment in international business consulting, cellent as well, he says, “offering extremely challenging classes marketing or human resources,” says Ma. paired with close attention to each student.”

Whatever direction SFS’s Global Business majors decide to take, He singles out SFS Assistant Dean Samuel Aronson, who they will be prepared with the tools and technology they need to “built close relationships with each one of the students and tackle the new world of 21st century international business. went well beyond his basic duties to make sure we received the advice and support we needed.”

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SFS

Meet Our Faculty

that our graduates can use to address complex problems, craft creative solutions and forge cohesive teams with people completely different than themselves.”

McEldowney entered the Foreign Service in the late 1980s, inspired by the commitment of people she met during a summer internship in the State Department Office of Soviet Affairs. “It was at the end of Cold War, when we thought Nancy McEldowney brings new leadership to the we’d have a new world order of stability,” Master of Science in Foreign Service program. she says. “Of course, that did not happen,

by SARI HARRAR and now the only thing that’s certain is constant change. In the U.S. and around the world, Ambassador Nanc y McEldowney ’s many people are questhree-decade career in Foreign Service has tioning the fundamentals had its share of dramatic moments. “I’ve of how nations and govbeen in embassies during bomb threats ernments work—they’re and in countries during coup d’états. As challenging basic norms Acting Ambassador in Turkey, I was tarand institutions. There’s a geted by Al-Qaeda,” she notes. “When you compelling need for ethideal with issues like that, you think less cal leaders committed to about your own safety and more about international cooperation, keeping others safe while accomplishing for people who will dedithe mission. As a senior leader in these cate their lives to searchkinds of circumstances, you must build a ing for solutions that are high level of trust throughout your team.” inclusive and sustainable.”

Her leadership roles extend beyond To prepare those leaders, diplomatic postings in Turkey, Bulgaria McEldowney says students and Azerbaijan. As the senior vice presineed a broad perspective dent of the National Defense University and sk ills in networkand then as the director of the Foreign Sering with a wide variety of vice Institute (FSI), McEldowney educated groups beyond government and mentored many thousands of military officials and other traditionand civilian officials—which explains why al partners. “We’re looking The New York Times recently referred to to revamp the curriculum her as “the dean” of the Foreign Service. to include science and “There’s a compelling need At the White House, she served as fortechnology, such as climate for ethical leaders committed to mer President Clinton’s director of Euchange and global health international cooperation . . . “ ropean Affairs on the National Security issues, while also featuring Council. “Walking into the Oval Office emerging global trends such to brief the president and attending NSC as artificial intelligence,” meetings where senior cabinet members she says. “And we want our are making agonizing choices gives you Hilltop as director of the Master of Sci- pedagogy to be as innovative as we expect an invaluable perspective,” McEldowney ence in Foreign Service (MSFS) program. our students to be in the world.” notes. “I came away with critical insights Her goal? “The MSFS program is ranked Since taking the position in July 2017, about the importance of having a global one of the best in the world. I want it to McEldowney has experienced how highmindset—recognizing that what you do also be the best for the world. I want our ly graduates value the program. While in one part of the world has a cascading graduates to be ready to grapple with all hosting an alumni reception on campus effect in many other places. I also saw the the dramatic changes coming at them— in September, she notes that, “More than nexus between foreign and domestic poli- whether they’re considering a future in 200 people came—including some who cy. No democratically-elected leader can diplomacy; international development; graduated 30 or more years ago. I saw sustain a foreign policy that is contrary to science and technology; or business and how greatly they cherish the values that the norms or priorities of their citizens.” finance. A master’s degree in foreign ser- underpin this program—ethical service, Now, McEldowney brings her ex- vice from Georgetown should offer an inclusion, serving the collective good. It pertise and principled conviction to the indispensable set of knowledge and skills was truly inspirational.”

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PHOTOGRAPH OF NANCY BY RAFAEL SUANES; CHARLES BY MATTHEW ELLISON

PRINCIPLED CONVICTION

in President Clinton’s first administration—informs his academic approach at SFS whether he’s outlining the historical roots of big-picture foreign policy in his Foundations of Grand Strategy class or encouraging lively discussion in the Debates in International Security seminar.

“Spending time in government is a leavening experience,” he says. “The core of the courses I teach remains the same. But I am able to offer a perspective on policymaking and strategy that comes only with time in the public sector.”

Now, Kupchan is also overseeing SFS’s upcoming Lloyd George Lecture and Study Series in collaboration with the descendants of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1843–1945). The series honors Lloyd George’s pivotal role in bringing about the Treaty of Versailles (1919) that ended World War I and led to the establishment of the League of Nations—the first forum of its kind for resolving international disputes and a forerunner to the United Nations. “Today is a moment of import similar to 1919 due to changes in international order and in the global distribution After years in the Obama Administration, of power,” he says. “We can go back and Charles Kupchan brings a vision of “grand learn lessons from how this ‘Big Think’ strategy” back to Georgetown. by SARI HARRAR was done in 1919 and at other key points in history. We want to create at Georgetown the premiere platform for a searching debate about where the world is headed and Brexit. Ebola. Russia’s invasion of the er-ISIL campaign. Yet Kupchan found how it can best be led and ordered going Ukraine. And the war in Syria and the ac- opportunities to advocate for the long forward.” The series’ inaugural activities companying refugee crisis. As a National view—in line with his longstanding in- will take place during the 2017–18 academic Security Council (NSC) advisor to former terest in grand strategy. “Even when the year, with events continuing through the President Obama from 2014 to 2017, Charles conversation was very fine-grained, grand school’s centennial in 2019–2020.

Kupchan had the rare chance to “help bend strategy was hovering in the background,” Kupchan has not left the foreign policy the arc of history at times, if only in very he says. “You have to intentionally carve arena; he’s a senior fellow at the Council small steps”—amid an avalanche of head- out time and space to think about strategy on Foreign Relations and writes op-eds line-grabbing foreign policy challenges. from a more holistic perspective.” for publications including Foreign Policy “The average day involved thinking Kupchan’s first-hand experience— magazine and The New York Times. Acin 10-second increments because you’re which also includes a previous NSC stint ademia allows him to “make a difference jumping from one urgent task to the next,” in another way—by educating the people he says. Kupchan served as Special Assiswho will go out in the public and private tant to the President and Senior Director sectors and change the world.” It has also for European Affairs on the NSC before given him more time to enjoy his family— returning to his post as professor of interhe and his wife have a newborn son and national relations at the Walsh School of “We want to create two daughters, ages two and five. “There’s Foreign Service in early 2017. at Georgetown the time to change diapers or walk around the His government job took him beyond premiere platform block,” he says. Meanwhile, his children the White House Situation Room to meetfor a searching debate are enjoying one perk from his White ings in the Oval Office and briefings in the about where the world House days. “I have some M&Ms and Herpresident’s limousine on issues including is headed and how it shey’s Kisses with the president’s name the separatist conflict in Ukraine, the rise can best be led and on them in my home office, but my kids of populism in Europe and the countordered going forward.” are making their way through them.”

FOREIGN POLICY EXPERT RETURNS

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Faculty Updates Rochelle Davis began serving as director of the Center for 01 Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) in July 2017. Davis, a

12-year veteran of CCAS and associate professor of anthropology, looks forward to challenges ahead. “Ultimately, our priorities are to continue to graduate excellent students, to provide faculty with the support they need to be top-notch scholars and teachers, to serve our non-GU communities with programming that helps them do their work, and for all of these things to be interconnected and to build on one another,” she says.

Daniel Neep was awarded a Public Scholar grant from 02 the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) for his 01

book "The Nation Belongs to All: The Making of Modern Syria."

Neep, assistant professor of Arab politics in CCAS, challenges traditional and popular narratives of Syria, offering a more nuanced, dynamic look at the forces and people that have shaped the country. This highly competitive NEH program is designed to help well-researched humanities projects to reach broader audiences.

Keir Lieber will succeed Bruce Hoffman as director of 03 the Center for Security Studies and the Security Studies

01

Program on January 1, 2018. Lieber's research focus​e​s on the causes of war, nuclear weapons, deterrence and strategy. He has been a mainstay of the Security Studies Program since arriving in 2009 and has received much recognition for his scholarship.

In 2015, he was named to the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program.

Emily Mendenhall, assistant professor of global 04 Dr. health in the Science, Technology and International

Affairs (STIA) Program, published a series of papers in The Lancet on syndemics. “The concept of syndemics stresses the importance of looking beyond medical factors to see how diseases come together through macro-social forces,” Mendenhall says, “offering a different framework for thinking about—and reacting to—health and healthcare inequities.”

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McNeill was elected president of the American 05 John Historical Association, the largest professional organi-

BOOKS Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault

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authored “How the Gloves Came Off: Lawyers, Policy Makers, and Norms in the Debate on Torture,” which explores the decisions and actions that came to threaten U.S. norms on torture policy, and the potential implications this can have for future decision makers of US policy.

David M. Edelstein published “Over the Horizon: Time, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Great Powers,” as an analysis of how rising powers have cooperated with declining powers throughout history, and the impact this can have as current powers try to maintain control.

zation serving historians in all fields and professions. McNeill’s term will run from 2019 to 2020, with significant responsibilities as president-elect in the leadup. “I am pleased by the trust AHA voters placed in me and look forward to doing my best for historians across the country,” he says.

Sarah Johnson traveled to Antarctica to conduct research 06 on the possibility of life having existed on Mars. The ex-

pedition, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, sequenced DNA from intact cells in ancient Antarctic biofilms to answer questions about the nature of life in extreme adverse conditions. The trip included Georgetown Provost Robert Groves as well as undergraduate and graduate researchers.

05

Michael David-Fox, professor of history at George07 town, won a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship. His project,

“Smolensk under Nazi and Soviet Rule,” studies the exercise of power in the Russian region under German occupation during WWII, seeking to join regional history with a grand narrative.

Past fellows have included Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, Turing Award winners, poets laureates and winners of other internationally recognized honors.

Katharine Donato published research on Mexican 08 children crossing the U.S. border in the July 2017 RSF

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07

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09

Journal of the Social Sciences. Titled “Crossing the Mexico-U.S. Border: Illegality and Children’s Migration to the United States,” the work examines the conditions that drive child migration. Vanderbilt University graduate student Samantha Perez co-authored the research.

Steven Radelet was invested as Knight Officer of the 09 Most Venerable Order of the Pioneers by Liberian Pres-

ident Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in recognition of his work as an economic advisor to the president and the government since 2005. The president noted Radelet's support and advice on a successful four-year effort in which creditors wrote off more than 97 percent of Liberia’s external debt.

Ori Soltes published “God and the Goalposts: A Brief History of Sports, Religion, Politics, War, and Art,” analyzing how these elements have interwoven throughout history, and demonstrating that the strong link between sports and religion has been in existence since the origin of both.

Michael Green authored “By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783,” looking at the concerns, decisions and rationale that drove U.S. foreign policy in East Asia from the eighteenth century to today.

Anna von der Goltz wrote "Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United States: Conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s," an examination of the unprecedented mobilization and transformation of conservative movements on both sides of the Atlantic during a pivotal period in postwar history.

Jacques Berlinerblau's "Campus Confidential" was published in June 2017. It is an explanation and expose of the inner workings of college campuses and how they work (and don't work) for students, parents, and professors, calling for a return to engaged teaching.

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Events An impressive array of political and thought leaders visited SFS in 2017.

MAY 4, 2017

Clinton 25 Symposium Looks Back on an Administration NOVEMBER 6, 2017

Former President William J. Clinton (SFS’68) spoke as part of a three-day university symposium, examining the vision that drove his campaign and presidency 25 years after he was elected.

“There’s nothing like coming back to Georgetown,” Clinton said before the symposium began.

“I’ve often said that I don’t think I could have become President if I hadn’t studied there. I’m grateful for the opportunity to return and continue our discussion on what it means to live a life of public service – I believe it’s more important than ever.”

SFS Professor Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, President Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico, and Strobe Talbott, former Deputy Secretary of State, reflected on the administration’s foreign policy at the “Vision for the World” panel.

“What he did, that I think was kind of brilliant, was to link domestic and foreign policy.

He was the first one to use the term ‘indispensable nation.’ He said it in order for the American people to understand that we had to be engaged abroad; that if we weren’t, nothing would happen. It was a message that our leadership was needed to

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protect the American interest and way of life, but he understood that that took place in an international setting. One needed to engage,” said Albright.

The symposium was hosted by the Institute of Politics and Public Service (GU Politics) with SFS among other University partners.

Secretary Of Defense James Mattis Visits Proseminar NOVEMBER 2, 2017

SFS students in Professor Mark Jacobson’s proseminar “American Experience of Modern War Through Literature” had a special visit from Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

The proseminar examines the human dimensions of modern combat through nonfiction and fiction written by American authors. A key component of the course involves analyzing war’s impact on both individuals and generations of Americans.

Jeff Cirillo (SFS’20) described the conversation: “I am in awe of Secretary Mattis’s wisdom and insight. It was a privilege to share such an intimate space with one of the most important figures of our current era of international affairs, and one of the most thoughtful and distinguished public servants in the United States today.”

General Electric (GE) Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt spoke on globalization and the role of private and public leaders in ensuring the ability of the United States to compete in global markets. His talk was part of a lecture hosted by SFS, the McDonough School of Business Stanton Distinguished Leaders Series, and the Landegger International Business Diplomacy Program. Immelt commented on the economic positioning of the United States with respect to the world, emphasizing the importance of export-led growth and cautioning against the problems of protectionism.

“We believe that the will to compete is the purest American value,” Immelt said. “Instead of moving backward, let’s compete for the world. Let’s try harder. This is true for both the private and public sectors.”

Immelt highlighted GE’s own practices as a way forward, arguing that companies will increasingly need to recognize the value of local capabilities. He noted the role of the government in providing a suitable environment for those capabilities, through appropriate tax laws and trade deals and urged students to get to know the world and develop their own, independent opinions on global competition.

CJC Hosts NAACP President for Discussion on Social Justice MAY 1, 2017

NAACP President Cornell William Brooks spoke on equality, social justice and the relationship between Jewish-Americans and African-Americans at an event hosted

MSFS CyberProject Hosts Conference on Cyber Engagement APRIL 24, 2017

The Seventh Annual International Conference on Cyber Engagement, titled “Global Issues that Demand Global Solutions,” brought together the perspectives of a globally diverse group of public and private sector experts to consider the critical issues and potential solutions facing the increasingly important world of cybersecurity.

Government leaders from the United States, the European Parliament and the United Kingdom provided insight on

PHOTOGRAPH OF MADELEINE ALBRIGHT BY JACOB BILICH; JEFF IMMELT, HILLARY CLINTON, AND BILL MORNEAU COURTESY OF GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPHER; CORNELL BROOKS COURTESY OF THE CENTER FOR JEWISH CIVILIZATION

GE Chairman Jeff Immelt Shares Experience, Perspective on Global Economic Competition

by the Center for Jewish Civilization.

Titled “Blacks and Jews in The Age of Trump,” the evening included a performance from jazz band MBowie and the Blast, a group that examines social issues through music, and evoked the connections between the historic fights for justice of the Jewish-American and African-American communities.

“The NAACP has doubled down on building, deepening, expanding the relationships between African-Americans and Jews. Why? Because we understand that that relationship is not predicated on a transitory sharing of interests in any way that is transactional. It is based upon a canon of social justice, on a shared experience of suffering and exclusion,” Brooks said.

“We understand that the relationship between AfricanAmericans and Jews must be deep, must be profound, must be historically informed, must be theologically inspired, and must be maintained and held as sacred and valuable. The relationship between blacks and Jews cannot be a matter of nostalgia—it must be a matter of a priority.”

the abilities and gaps of current government cybersecurity efforts, emphasizing growing requirements for cooperation across governments and sectors.

“A zero-sum articulation of narrow self interest needs to be replaced with a new appreciation for an articulation of the interdependence of our globally connected world,” European MP Marietje Schaake said. “Change will require an injection of values and stronger governance in the public interest. It will also involve a much more active engagement of the general public in this discussion.”

The conference also included a variety of panels discussing national cybersecurity strategies, the roles of the military and business in cybersecurity, and the use of cyber in war and peace.

Hillary Rodham Clinton Presents Awards to Colombian Peace Agreement Leaders MARCH 31, 2017

Hillary Rodham Clinton presented awards to leaders of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement at the annual Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards for Advancing Women in Peace and Security ceremony, hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS). Clinton extolled the importance of women’s participation for stable peace and security in Colombia and around the world. Awards were presented to three negotiators and a journalist who played key roles in the peace process. Clinton also delivered remarks reflecting on

previous work at Georgetown, including the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, and looked to the future.

“In Colombia…we’ve seen women organize, agitate and negotiate to help bring to a close more than 50 years of bloodshed,” Clinton said. “While conflict raged and efforts to stop the violence failed, women not only took their places at the table, they opened up the peace process to women across Colombia and urged over and over again that all parties not walk away until they reached an agreement.”

CERES Conference Brings Together Madeleine Albright and Former Foreign Minister of Russia Igor Ivanov MARCH 24, 2017

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke with her Russian counterpart, former Foreign Minister of Russia Igor Ivanov, at the conference “25 Years of US-Russia Relations: From Cold War to New Cold War?” hosted by the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. The keynote panel between the two foreign policy leaders touched on the diplomatic relationship they formed and the power of that relationship, which included addressing the Balkan Crisis— particularly the Kosovo War—and a famous trip to the opera.

Albright and Ivanov also spoke on contemporary issues facing Russia and the United States.

Albright called NATO “the most important alliance in the history

of the world,” as it survived the Cold War and became the organizing principle for a new world order. Ivanov extended the themes of trust and respect to the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, calling for consciously and carefully built dialogues.

ISD Honors United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein FEBRUARY 16, 2017

The Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) honored United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein as the 2017 recipient of the Raymond ‘Jit’ Trainor Award for Excellence in the Conduct of Diplomacy. Zeid, a career Jordanian diplomat who has held his current position since 2014, gave a lecture on “The Impossible Diplomacy of Human Rights,” detailing the challenges and opportunities facing progress and prosperity in a human rights-respecting, stable international system.

“A new era is unfolding before us,” Zeid said. “We find ourselves in a political earthquake zone. To many of us it appears the international system could become dangerously unstable. Fresh shocks are opening up unsuspected fault-lines; weight-bearing pillars are in danger of collapse.”

In the face of these pressures, Zeid reaffirmed the power of the international system.

“We need—all of us—to defend international law: international refugee law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law,” he said.

“For they—and the institutions that uphold them—are the very distillation and sum of human experience.”

Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau Discusses U.S.-Canada Trade Alliance FEBRUARY 9, 2017

Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau visited SFS to speak about the economic partnership between Canada and the United States as part of his trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with economic advisers from the White House and Congress. In his remarks,

Minister Morneau discussed the enduring political, economic and social relationship between the United States and Canada.

“We’ve always had, in Canada, the privilege of watching up close what happens in the United States, and, as you know, we’ve built what is probably the most productive and enduring relationship that the world has ever seen.

From our perspective, it’s really because we share much more than a border,” Morneau said.

SFS Alumnus Presents Screening of Documentary on Mental Health in the U.S. Military JANUARY 26, 2017

SFS hosted a screening of “Thank You For Your Service,” a documentary produced by Ilan Arboleda (SFS ’97) and directed by Tom Donahue, that calls attention to the failed mental health policies in the U.S. military and the consequences of those failures. The event included a panel discussion following the film featuring General George W. Casey, Jr. (SFS ’70), chief of staff of the U.S. Army from April 2007 to 2011, Dr. Megan McCarthy, deputy director of the National Office of Suicide Prevention at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and Dr. Elizabeth Stanley, associate professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Joel Kupersmith, director of Georgetown University Veterans Initiatives and professor of medicine.

“We have to institutionalize what we have learned in the past fifteen years—and we’ve been off to a very slow start,” Casey said. “But we’ve learned so much that if we do what we’ve done after every war and forget, then we’ve really lost.”

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Alumnus Spotlight

THE FOREIGN MINISTER OF JAPAN

shocked (and disappointed) to notice that Japan was seldom mentioned in the American news, despite the importance of the American-Japanese relationship. He was also not used to being among such serious students. When he asked his classmates for advice about which were the easy classes, he was met with disapproval.

He fondly remembers Dr. Madeleine Albright.

In August 2017, SFS Alumnus Taro Kono After his first day in her American Foreign Policy was appointed to lead Japan’s foreign policy Process seminar, she confronted him about not conand foreign affairs. by CINDY C. A.PEREIR A tributing to the class discussion. She said that if he was not up to participating, he need not return.

When Kono explained that he’d held back because his English wasn’t very good, Dr. Albright replied, “Well that’s your problem.” hen Taro Kono (SFS’85) was a After that he spoke during each class and credyoung man in Japan, he told his fa- its Albright with helping him learn a life skill: to ther he wanted to be educated in be prepared for every meeting and speech. For the the United States. When his father last class she invited the students to her home and asked why, Kono replied that he cooked for them. needed to learn English so that when he became Prime After graduating from SFS in 1985, Kono returned Minister of Japan he would be able to speak to the U.S. to Japan where he worked in international business, President—who most likely wouldn’t speak Japanese. first for Fuji Xerox, and later, Nippon Tanshi, which Kono arrived in the States at age 19. His first stop supplied electric components to carmakers. At age was a Connecticut boarding school so he could build his 33, he entered politics when he was elected to the English language skills, after which he began as an un- Japanese House of Representatives. Over the next dergraduate at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. 18 years, he was re-elected six more times.

He recalls some surprises. For example, he was In August of 2017, Kono was appointed Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs.

When asked about the most challenging part of his new job, Kono didn’t hesitate. “We are in the middle of the North Korean crisis,” he says. “I really need to work hard to protect our country and to protect our international society because North Korean missiles “We are in the can reach not only Japan, but Washington as well.” middle of the Kono says his current focus is working with the North Korean U.S., Russia and China to keep the Korean Peninsula crisis...I really nuclear free. “We cannot have dialogue for the sake need to work of dialogue,” he says, alluding to prior policies he behard to protect lieves allowed North Korea to attain nuclear capacity. our country and Kono believes that all nations should enforce the U.N. to protect our Security Council Resolutions on North Korea, which international include severe sanctions for nuclear missile tests. society.”

Kono says, “If North Korea did something to South Korea or to Japan, the United States would retaliate with all the power they have and they never changed that position. So we are very thankful…” He adds, “I think the U.S. administration is doing a great job.”

And his future aspirations? Taro Kono remains as ambitious as ever, noting that one day he hopes to come back to Georgetown for a visit—when he is prime minister.

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SFS

Scholarship & Fellowship Awardees of 2016-17 Winners of postgraduate funding for a job or graduate school 01 James Pavur (SFS’17)

Rhodes Scholarship 02 Devika Ranjan (SFS’17)

20 Andrea Welsh (GHD’17) Fulbright Public

04 Daniel Wassim (SFS’18)

Luke Snyder (SFS’18)

05 Neil Noronha (SFS’14, SSP’16) Luce

Scholars Program 06 Joseph Goodman (SFS’15) Yenching Scholarship 07 Jacob Gladysz (SFS’17)

Yenching Scholarship 08 Lynn Lee (SFS’17)

Yenching Scholarship 09 Patrick Drown (SFS’17)

Princeton in Asia, Nepal 10 Hiromi Oka (SFS’15)

Princeton in Asia, Philippines 11 Ibilola Owoyele (SFS’17)

Princeton in Africa, Benin 12 Isabella Todaro (SFS’17)

Teaching Assistant Fellow, Jordan; Boren Fellowship 16 Amy Guillotte (SFS’12)

Boren Fellowship; Critical Language Scholarship

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Mary Breen (SFS’19) Boren Fellowship

Joy Farrington (SFS’18) Gilman International Scholarship

Katherine De Araujo (SFS’18) Gilman

International Scholarship

Nena Beecham (SFS’18)

Gilman International Scholarship

Vincent DeLaurentis (SFS’17) Critical Language Scholarship

Jessica Schieder (SFS’12, MSFS’18) Critical

Language Scholarship

Jordan Cohen (SFS’17, SSP’19) Critical Language Scholarship

17 Eamon Johnston (SFS’17)

Afras Sial (SFS’19) Critical

Critical Language Scholarship Language Scholarship

Piyusha Mittal (SFS’18)

18 Nicolette Moore (SFS’17) Fulbright

Critical Language Scholarship

Academic Fellow, Mexico

Yasmeen El-Hasan (SFS’20)

Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow, Russia

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Udall Scholarship

Zoya Waliany (MAAS’17)

19 Crystal Walker (SFS’16)

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Aaron Silberman (SFS’18)

Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow, Jordan Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow, Colombia

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Peter Johnston (SFS’19)

Carmen Mata (SFS’20)

15 Yasmin Faruki (SFS’16, SSP’17) Fulbright English

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(SFS’19) Boren Fellowship

13 Annie Austin (SFS’15)

Fellow, South Africa

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Jonah Langan-Marmur

Princeton in Africa, Rwanda

14 Michel Djandji (SFS’12, L’17) Fulbright Academic

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Boren Fellowship

Gilman International Scholarship

Princeton in Latin America Senior Fellow, Mexico

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Fulbright Academic Fellow, Oman

03 Cristine Pedersen (SFS’18) Truman Scholarship

Truman Scholarship

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21 Jason Cardinali (SFS’17)

Winners of funding for study abroad, summer internships or summer research projects

Marshall Scholarship

01

Policy Fellow, Burma

Critical Language Scholarship

David Lysenko (SFS’20) Critical Language Scholarship

S F S . G E O R G E TO W N . E D U • I S S U E 0 4 • 2 0 1 7 — 2 0 1 8

33