Walsh School of Foreign Service
CENTENNIAL HONOREES
Austin Tice, Judith Sherman, Chad Griffin
THE GALA EVENING
Yo-Yo Ma, President Clinton, and more
INFLUENCERS OF THE FUTURE Students, Faculty, Alumni
The School of Foreign Service Celebrates and Reflects on its First Centennial
“Now SFS begins its second century, eyes fixed on a future as strong as its past. We are aware that the world of the 21st century and its global challenges has changed. The school is consequently dedicated to thoughtful evolution that will prepare students to solve new and complex global problems.”
—DEAN JOEL S. HELLMAN
Walsh School of Foreign Service
GEORGETOW N UNIVERSITY • 2019-2020
SFS is published regularly by Georgetown University's WALSH SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE , in conjunction with Washingtonian Media (washingtoniancustommedia.com). We welcome feedback and suggestions for future issues. Please contact Ara Friedman, Director of Communications, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Intercultural Center 301, 37th and O Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. 20057; by phone at 202-687-7949; or by email at ara.friedman@georgetown.edu. Website: sfs.georgetown.edu
SFS 100: A Century of
Cultivating Multilateralism and Foreign Alliances
A conversation with Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca on making the hard choices for democracy
Building Empathy and Cross-Cultural
The power of listening with Father Matthew Carnes
A conversation with Rochelle Davis on wars and displaced peoples
20 Responding to the Risks of Global Security
Keir Lieber: nuclear weapons and international security in a postCold War world
Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault engages students about the future of the liberal order
26 The Lesson of Jan Karski: David Strathairn explores legacy of an SFS human rights icon
SFS CENTENNIAL GALA WEEKEND
28 Centennial Honor Award recognizes SFS graduates: Austin Tice, Judith Sherman and Chad Griffin
34 SFS students expand networks: Students and alumni mingle
36 Plenary and breakout sessions: Distinguished alumni and friends headline
38 The Centennial Gala evening:
President Bill Clinton, Secretary Madeleine Albright, Yo-Yo Ma, and more
40 Faculty influencer profiles: Irfan Noorudin previews Business and Global Affairs degree
Jason Matheny reports on the Center for Security and Emerging Technology
42 Student influencer profiles: Maputi Botlhole’s “full-circle experience”
Alejandro Garcia Escobar Plascencia explores art and reconciliation in post-genocide societies
44 Alumni influencer profiles: Julia Nesheiwat leading an ambitious effort to stem the tide of climate change in the Sunshine State
Zaid Zaid: Obama White House vet and Facebook strategist discusses his career and “huge opportunity for people with SFS degrees to be part of the technology conversation.”
Photograph
facebook.com/georgetownsfs twitter.com/georgetownsfs instagram.com/georgetown_sfs linkedin.com/georgetown-sfs Georgetown SFS
sfs.georgetown.edu
The greatest pleasure of my deanship has been meeting the astonishing community of the Walsh School of Foreign Service. From our brilliant scholars, faculty, staff and students of recent years to our thousands of alumni in service all around the world, I have encountered generations dedicated to a set of common values nurtured at Georgetown—the critical role of diplomacy, the essential nature of cross-cultural understanding and a dedication to service on the global stage.
This academic year, of course, has been punctuated by our centennial celebration of the founding of SFS around these values. The Centennial Gala Weekend in November gathered more than a thousand of you here on the Hilltop, where I was thrilled to embrace this community in a new way. This edition of our magazine tells the story of the weekend, among many other stories, and gives a sense of the celebration, the substance and the restatement of our values in action that characterize the SFS centennial.
“We are aware that the world of the 21st century and its global challenges has changed.”
When Father Edmund A. Walsh established the new “school of foreign service” at Georgetown University, he gave an address in Gaston Hall that set out its purpose. “A training school is needed particularly devoted to preparation for foreign service in public and private interests, where the youth of today may be fitted to cope with and effectively solve the problems of to-morrow.” SFS became the first and best international affairs school in the United States—a position we are proud to hold 100 years later.
The centennial year has been about celebrating our school’s history. We have sought to recognize the ways in which our alumni and professors have made good on Father Walsh’s promise, serving the world in every imaginable field while advancing peace, prosperity and justice. In our recently published book, SFS 100: A Century of Service , and in the historical exhibit of artifacts and documents on display in Lauinger Library this past autumn, we documented this impact through vivid storytelling. I was thrilled to host a dinner honoring my predecessors—Peter Krogh, Robert Gallucci, Carol Lancaster (SFS’64) and
James Reardon-Anderson—and current and emeritus members of the SFS Board of Advisors, as well as notable staff. The play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski celebrated the life of the famous SFS professor and Holocaust witness who became a human rights icon. Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn delivered a bracing and pertinent performance that no one present will ever forget.
But the centennial is not only about the past.
The Centennial Gala Weekend found us again in Gaston Hall and a dozen other spaces, thinking aloud and together about the next century of international affairs. We engaged in conversations about the most important global topics with alumni, professors, students and friends of the school who are experts on climate change, challenges to democracy, emerging technology, women on the world stage, the future of diplomacy and much more. The discussions were illuminating, daring and hopeful. Questions from intensely engaged students and alumni in the packed audiences were insightful.
Our weekend culminated in a dazzling celebration at the National Building Museum with reflections from SFS Professor and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a keynote address by former President Bill Clinton (SFS’68) and a performance by Yo-Yo Ma and his Silkroad Ensemble. Most special was recognizing three relatively unsung heroes among the SFS alumni community with Centennial Honors. These people represent our ideals in action on the global stage: Judith Sherman (SFS’82), for fighting AIDS in various countries across Africa throughout her career; Chad Griffin (SFS’97), for battling to expand human rights; and Austin Tice (SFS’02, L’13), for shedding light on injustice through intrepid reporting.
Now SFS begins its second century, eyes fixed on
a future as strong as its past. We are aware that the world of the 21st century and its global challenges has changed. The school is consequently dedicated to thoughtful evolution that will prepare students to solve new and complex global problems. We have built new centers, like the Center for Security and Emerging Technology; new programs, like our joint Business and Global Affairs undergraduate degree with the McDonough School of Business; and new joint initiatives, like The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, co-sponsored with Georgetown College.
We have also been building innovative new models for education, such as our Centennial Labs—classes that present students with real-world problems or situations and then provide cross-curricular instruction at the intersection of theory and practice. We are funding more students than ever to work with professors around the globe on substantive study and investigation. This work seeks to bring our students to the intersection of international affairs with other disci-
plines critical to modern problems—with business, with science, with cultural studies and performance, with global development and poverty reduction.
I hope that the activities around our centennial, both historical and aspirational, have brought the SFS community together and united us further around the school’s original purpose and enduring values. I know that we have been able to achieve our status as the premier school of international affairs only because of your support.
Please stay involved with Georgetown by visiting campus, attending events outside of Washington, DC, offering advice, mentoring or employment to students or alumni and contributing financially to our vanguard initiatives. I believe these are investments in our future and the future of a world that can be better for all of us.
Thank you for your community!
Joel S. Hellman Dean, Walsh School of Foreign Service
Centennial Events, Both On & Off Campus INCLUDING
4 INTERNATIONAL CELEBRATIONS
Rome, Italy; Thimpu, Bhutan; London, UK; Santa Cruz, Bolivia
STUDENTS HAVE TRAVELED TO
15 CENTENNIAL FELLOWS
CENTENNIAL LABS SINCE FALL 2016
India, Sweden, Cambodia, Jordan, California, Texas, Mexico, Alaska
Global practitioners in residence who participate in events for the Georgetown community, make their expertise available to classes, engage with Georgetown alumni and work with their Junior Fellows.
51 JUNIOR FELLOWS
A small cohort of undergraduate and graduate SFS students who are paired with a Centennial Fellow for mentorship and research experience.
5 LLOYD GEORGE CENTENNIAL LECTURES on the Future of the Global Order
Named for British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, these lectures have brought critical global conversations to Georgetown featuring eminent world leaders and prominent intellectuals.
17 PANELS, 1 PLAY and a CENTENNIAL GALA at the NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM
Two women from the class of 1959, which was the second SFS class to admit women to the day program.
Ranging from the class of 1958 to the class of 2023, a 65-year difference.
Here are a few ideas on how you can make an impact and support SFS:
Here are a few ideas on how you can make an impact and support SFS:
Here are a few ideas on how you can make an impact and support SFS:
Update contact information for yourself and your classmates. Email current biographical and contact information to alumnirecords@georgetown.edu.
Update contact information for yourself and your classmates. Email current biographical and contact information to alumnirecords@georgetown.edu.
Update contact information for yourself and your classmates. Email current biographical and contact information to alumnirecords@georgetown.edu.
S uggest additions to the “Prominent Alumn i List” at sfs.georgetown.edu/ p rominent-alumni/. Ema il Eleanor Jones (e leano r. j ones@georgetown.edu ) with suggestions.
Suggest additions to the “Prominent Alumni List” at sfs.georgetown.edu/ mission/ prominent-alumni. Email Eleanor Jones (e leano r. j ones@georgetown.edu ) with suggestions.
Suggest additions to the “Prominent Alumni List” at sfs.georgetown.edu/ mission/ prominent-alumni. Email Eleanor Jones (e leano r. j ones@georgetown.edu ) with suggestions.
I ntroduce SFS to your n etwork of foundations, corpora ti ons or organizations t hat reflect SF S priorities . Email Becky Pfordreshe r ( beck y.pfordresher@georgetown.edu) i n the Office of Corporate & F oundation Relations.
Introduce SFS to your n etwork of foundations, corporations or organizations that reflect SFS priorities . Email Becky Pfordresher (beck y.pfordresher@georgetown.edu) in the Office of Corporate & Foundation Relations.
Introduce SFS to your n etwork of foundations, corporations or organizations that reflect SFS priorities . Email Becky Pfordresher (beck y.pfordresher@georgetown.edu) in the Office of Corporate & Foundation Relations.
S ponsor an SFS c om m unity e vent such as a dinne r, rec ept ion, or lectu re i n yo ur area. Email Ele a nor Jones (e lean or. j o nes@georgetown.edu ).
Sponsor an SFS c ommunity e vent such as a dinne r, reception or lecture in your area. Email Eleanor Jones (e leano r. j ones@georgetown.edu ).
Sponsor an SFS c ommunity e vent such as a dinne r, reception or lecture in your area. Email Eleanor Jones (e leano r. j ones@georgetown.edu ).
J oin Hoya Gateway to connect with stu dents and have individual conversations ex pl oring their profess ional aspirations . Email h oyagatewa y. georgetown.edu.
Join Hoya Gateway to connect with students and have individual conversations exploring their professional aspirations Learn more at hoyagatewa y. georgetown.edu.
Join Hoya Gateway to connect with students and have individual conversations exploring their professional aspirations . Learn more at hoyagatewa y. georgetown.edu.
J oin the SFS Frien d s p rogram , a netw ork of BSFS alumni based in the D.C. a rea who voluntee r as mentors and career strategi sts f or undergraduates E mail M.D. Murphy ( m ur phymi@ g eorgetown.edu).
Join the SFS Friend s p rogram , a network of BSFS alumni based in the D.C. a rea who volunteer as mentors and career advisors f or undergraduates . Email M.D. Murphy ( m urphymi@ g eorgetown.edu).
Join the SFS Friend s p rogram , a network of BSFS alumni based in the D.C. a rea who volunteer as mentors and career advisors f or undergraduates . Email M.D. Murphy ( m urphymi@ g eorgetown.edu).
Provide career help to students by posting a student internship or job opening—or volunteer to serve as a career resource with resume reviews, mock interviews, site visits, or career panels. Email Anne Steen (sfsgcc@georgetown.edu).
Provide career help to students by posting a student internship or job opening—or volunteer to serve as a career resource with resume reviews, mock interviews, site visits or career panels. Email Anne Steen (sfsgcc@georgetown.edu).
Provide career help to students by posting a student internship or job opening—or volunteer to serve as a career resource with resume reviews, mock interviews, site visits or career panels. Email Anne Steen (sfsgcc@georgetown.edu)
V olunteer for the Alumni Admissions Program to support the i nterview p rocess for applicants to Georgetow n . Email uadmissions.georgetown.edu/ alumni.
Volunteer for the Alumni Admissions Program to support the interview process for applicants to Georgetown . Learn more at uadmissions.georgetown.edu/alumni.
Volunteer for the Alumni Admissions Program to support the interview process for applicants to Georgetown . Learn more at uadmissions.georgetown.edu/alumni.
Join a GUAA Career Services webinar on p rofessional development trends and timely industry topics. Learn about the many webinars o ffered every year a t alumni.georgetown.edu/careers.
J oin a GUAA Career Services webinar on pr ofessional dev elo pment trends and timely industry topics. Learn abo ut the many webinar s o ffered every year a t alumni.georgetow n. edu/careers.
Join a GUAA Career Services webinar on p rofessional development trends and timely industry topics. Learn about the many webinars o ffered every year a t alumni.georgetown.edu/careers.
Apply to join the B oard of G overnors of the Georgetow n U niversi t y A lumni Associ ation. Email guaa@georgetown.edu or go to bog.georgetown.edu to learn mo re
Apply to join the B oard of G overnors of the Georgetown University Alumni Associ ation. Email guaa@georgetown.edu or go to bog.georgetown.edu to learn mo re.
Apply to join the B oard of G overnors of the Georgetown University Alumni Associ ation. Email guaa@georgetown.edu or go to bog.georgetown.edu to learn mo re.
Work with the Advancement Office to develop giving opportunities. Email SFS Senior Director of Development Kristie Cole (kristie.cole@georgetown.edu).
Work with the Advancement Office to develop giving opportunities. Email SFS Senior Director of Development Kristie Cole (kristie.cole@georgetown.edu).
Work with the Advancement Office to develop giving opportunities. Email SFS Senior Director of Development Kristie Cole (kristie.cole@georgetown.edu).
Over the next 20 pages, you will find a combination of book excerpts and faculty insights that correspond to three core themes: multilateralism, empathy and cross-cultural understanding and global security. The book excerpts are taken from SFS 100: A Century of Service, a coffee table book that explores and celebrates the history, people and evolving values that shaped the School of Foreign Service over its first 100 years. Alongside these book excerpts, faculty members provide more current perspectives on the three core themes, diving into subjects such as modernday democracy, displacement and the liberal order.
ON FEBRUARY 11, 1920, AT THE NEW EBBITT HOTEL AT 14TH AND F Streets in downtown Washington, D.C., 15 members of the Delta Phi Epsilon fraternity and their honored guests attend an “Enitiatory Dinner,” the first formal meeting of an organization founded a few weeks earlier in the basement of the Catholic Community Center on E Street, Northwest, for students at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, itself barely a year old.
Wrapped in dark suits and high collars, most were older than the first- and second-year students at today’s School of Foreign Service. Many had fought in the world war that had ended with the signing of the Versailles Treaty in Paris seven months before and were ready to get on with their careers. The new school’s courses were taught in the evening, convenient for men who were hoping to complete an education they had begun in their daytime jobs in U.S. government agencies, most dealing with transportation and trade. Most of all, they were eager to take advantage of their country’s unprecedented business opportunities abroad.
If you’d like to read SFS 100: A CENTURY OF SERVICE in full, you can purchase your own copy of the book at sfs.georgetown.edu/book.
A Conversation with Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis (SFS’76)
by SUSANNE FRANK
As a 27-year veteran of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis has witnessed major shifts in the world’s economies and political alliances. Serving in posts ranging from Security Council Coordinator at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to Chargé d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, he has seen first-hand what’s possible when multiple nations come together to achieve a common goal. He has also witnessed the concept of multilateralism move in and out of popularity. When he joined the Foreign Service in 1991, for example, multilateralism did not feel like a high priority.
“When I entered the Foreign Service, people advised me that multilateralism was not career-enhancing and that I shouldn’t pursue it,” says DeLaurentis. “Much of the work was frozen at the time because of the Cold War. I’m glad I stuck with it because that same year the Soviet Union disappeared, and that changed everything.”
“Diplomacy can be difficult and aggravating, but, in the end, the world is more secure and the interests of the United States are best advanced when we act collectively.”
By 1993, the Clinton administration was embracing multilateralism with enthusiasm. “They saw that the UN could be used in a more effective way now that we were in a different global order,” says DeLaurentis.
The UN launched peacekeeping missions to avert violence in Latin America, the Balkans, Africa and Southeast Asia, for example. DeLaurentis points out that the UN wasn’t exclusively focused on political conflict, either—it was also addressing things like food security and sustainable development. He found the work incredibly stimulating.
By the time Barack Obama was elected president, multilateralism had been mainstreamed. “The world was facing a host of challenges that showed no regard for national borders and thus required a shared response,” says DeLaurentis.
DeLaurentis was Alternate Representative for Special Political Affairs at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations (and later Chargé d’affaires in Cuba) during the Obama administration and recalls with pride that the U.S. and Cuba put their political
LEFT: Ambassador DeLaurentis, in his role as Chargé d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, introduces U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to speak and preside over the flag-raising ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, on August 14, 2015. This was the first time the American flag was raised over the Embassy in 54 years. BOTTOM RIGHT: Professor Bibbins Sedaca speaking at an event featuring former Secretary of State John Kerry and Admiral John Kirby.
differences aside to address a global threat.
“This was just before we made the announcement that we were going to work towards the re-establishment of diplomatic relations,” says DeLaurentis. “The U.S. and Cuba cooperated successfully to slow the spread of Ebola in West Africa. There are obvious benefits to cooperation, even among countries that don’t particularly get along.”
While representing the U.S. at the UN Security Council and General Assembly, DeLaurentis had to find ways of reaching agreements with close to 200 counterpart nations.
“It could be maddening, but we had to make the effort in good faith in the expectation that reasonable differences of opinion could be tolerated.”
The big challenges facing the globe continue to grow in complexity. Digital technology is creating new opportunities for connection—and manipulation. In addition to age-old problems like war, poverty and human rights abuses, today’s international leaders are contending with new kinds of crises, like climate change and digital security.
DeLaurentis believes multilateral diplomacy is every bit as relevant today as it was at the beginning of his career.
“Diplomacy can be difficult and aggravating, but, in the end, the world is more secure and the interests of the United States are best advanced when we act collectively. We can’t address these challenges in isolation. We need the partnership of the global community,” he says.
DeLaurentis is concerned about what he sees as a move away from multilateral partnerships to more transactional interactions focused on narrow interests.
“The world is too interconnected to follow that path. Not every problem requires a multilateral solution, and our global institutions aren’t perfect, but on the big issues, like global warming, it’s in everyone’s best interests to work cooperatively.”
DeLaurentis believes that the values underlying multilateralism—working together to build a safer, more just world for future generations—are universal.
He credits the School of Foreign Service with fostering those values. “Between encouraging public service and teaching the skills needed to be effective, the School of Foreign Service was instrumental in my career and that of many of my colleagues,” he says.
“Throughout my career, I always felt like I was advocating for not just American values but universal values. I was proud of the fact that I represented a country that admitted its faults, thought globally and could be counted on to lead,” says DeLaurentis.
NICOLE BIBBINS SEDACA ON MAKING THE HARD CHOICES by Herb Schaffner
For Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (MSFS’97), democracy may have staggered on its heels, but it’s never been more worth fighting for. “The world’s people are safer and more secure when we address the challenges facing democratic nations,” she says. “Multinational and multilateral organizations must work together to strengthen democratic norms. We need to favor those nations making the hard choices for democracy versus those whose leaders are not trying—or worse.”
Professor Bibbins Sedaca knows what it means to stand on the watchtower for democracy. She has held numerous roles inside and outside of government upholding human freedom, human rights and counter-terrorism. For ten years she served in the U.S. Department of State in positions that included Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs and Special Assistant to the Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism. She has advised human rights and civil society activists and is a public voice promoting global human freedom and human rights as a cornerstone of American foreign policy.
Bibbins Sedaca is Co-Chair for the Global Politics
and Security Concentration in Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program and a professor in the practice of international affairs.
Bibbins Sedaca notes that emerging challenges to democracies in recent years require multinational, multilateral and ad hoc organizations to “formalize how they view and support democratic movements and norms and increase their promotion and support of those values.”
Findings by democracy watchdog Freedom House show that 2018 marked the 13th straight year of decline in democratic practices and norms as measured by a range of indicators. “We are seeing a rise in more countries backsliding in their democratic development by undermining human rights, secure and free elections, migrant rights and the safety of expatriates and emigrants,” observes Bibbins Sedaca. “What doesn’t get talked about is that these changes aren’t just upsetting. They pose an increased risk to global security, stable financial markets and basic human freedoms.”
The cure for shaky democracy is more democracy, Bibbins Sedaca believes. “Democratic nations and advocates should not be pessimistic,” she says. “Interest around the world in democracy remains steady and increasing. On every continent we continue to see courageous activists going to the streets to claim their rights and push for more democratic government.”
Putting muscle behind democracy promotion will result in stronger cooperation on difficult transnational issues, Bibbins Sedaca says. “The issues of human migration, clean water, climate change impacts and the growth of nonstate criminal and terrorist groups all impact a range of states regardless of borders. We lack sufficient international mechanisms to navigate these concerns. They aren’t just one country’s or one leader’s problem, so they tend to span many actors in the international system as it’s currently constituted. This is an area where new coalitions and partnerships can come together to make tremendous strides.”
Professor Bibbins Sedaca points to the fight to reduce human trafficking as an example. “We have seen significant multilateral collaborations among government, NGOs and corporations—many of whom don’t want people who have been trafficked to be part of their supply chain—in fighting human trafficking. Regional coalitions stepped in to coordinate efforts to combat this horrific practice by having each partner leverage their unique capabilities. Companies target their supply chains. Nations coordinate law enforcement and intelligence across borders. NGOs advocate for change and support victims. “These kinds of policies aren’t nice-to-dos. They are squarely in the interest of American citizens and their government.”
IN 1929, ON THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING of the School of Foreign Service, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg came to Georgetown to congratulate Father Walsh and his faculty on the high quality of foreign-service candidates the school was turning out. “The experience of the whole world has shown us the advisability and the necessity of trained personnel,” said Kellogg. The experience Kellogg was referring to was the conflict known as the Great War. Almost as soon as the war had begun in 1914, British diplomats and academics, joined by feminists in Europe and America, began agitating for a standing, multilateral diplomatic organization dedicated to peacemaking. By the end of the war, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had put forward his own plan for such a body, which would take shape in 1920 as the League of Nations. Though Wilson could not convince the Congress to support the United States’ participation in the League, the
ideal of a peaceful world and the president’s faith in international dialogue was widely shared in the country. Kellogg, a former U.S. senator from Minnesota and ambassador to Great Britain, would be awarded a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for his part in the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a proposal issued with the foreign minister of France to outlaw war altogether as a solution to international disagreements.
Reforming the U.S. Diplomatic Corps
Kellogg’s wishful pacifism—Adolf Hitler would be elected chancellor of Germany within three years—is often taken as a sign of the impotence of American diplomacy between the world wars. But as idealistic as the post-world war mood seems today, there was a determined, practical side to their hopes. Kellogg and others in Washington recognized that the U.S. diplomatic corps needed serious reform before it could serve as the vanguard for American ideals. At the time, statecraft was largely entrusted to business leaders and dyed-in-the-wool members of the elite. The practice of diplomacy likewise was regarded as an extension of the well-to-do social circles of Newport and Manhattan. At the State Department, then housed beside the White House in what is now known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, memorandums to staff drew distinctions between ordinary civil service clerks and those addressed as “gentlemen.” In his 10th anniversary speech at Georgetown, Kellogg found it necessary to debunk the notion that “the principal duties of our secretaries and counselors ... were to attend social events.”
To rebut these misconceptions, Kellogg pointed to the graduates in front of him and those who had preceded them. The young men who moved from Georgetown into the State Department were predominantly assigned to Latin America and the Far East, hardship posts, short on social niceties, that were considered suitable for unmarried young officers.
Willard Beaulac (SFS’21), often referred to as the very first graduate because his name put him at the front of the Class of 1921’s line to receive diplomas, quickly found himself serving as vice consul in Tampico, Mexico, then a bustling oil port. Before he was 30 years old, “Bo” Beaulac had filled consular posts in Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti and Chile. He eventually became ambassador to Paraguay, Argentina and Colombia, and served as one of the last U.S. ambassadors to Cuba.
SFS and the Cold War
How to advocate for democratic principles and human rights through foreign policy was often clearer with our communist adversaries than with our allies.
The 1975 Helsinki Accords, an agreement signed by some 35 Western European and Eastern bloc countries, included affirmations of respect for human rights and equality before the law and became a tool for urging the Soviets and their satellites to improve their treatment of dissidents.
SFS and the Helsinki Accords
Georgetown was at the center of the debate in the academy and no less so as it took shape on the ground in Europe, Africa and Latin America. “The Helsinki Accords really laid the groundwork for American diplomats to pay more attention to human rights as yet another avenue of influence,” says Stephen Mull (SFS’80), who attended the School of Foreign Service in the late 1970s before going to Poland as a junior Foreign Service officer in 1982. That year, Mull says, the leader of the dissident group Confederation for an Independent Poland, Leszek Moczulski, was put on trial for plotting to overthrow the country’s Communist government. “I was instructed by Washington to try to get into the courtroom clutching a copy of the Helsinki Accords and declare the proceedings a violation of its principles.” (The effort failed. “The guards essentially told me, ‘Get out of here, kid,’” Mull recalls.)
by SARI HARRAR
Is empathy dead? Headlines blare that this deeply human capacity—hard-wired into our DNA and brain circuitry, science says—is in short supply in American politics and international relationships. Yet as news outlets decry the “empathy deficit,” Fr. Matthew Carnes, S.J., an associate professor in the Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, sees this core SFS value hard at work around the globe.
“In spite of challenges, I see lots of people willing to open their lives and their hearts to those who are suffering,” says Carnes. “I see deep wells of empathy in so many places—in the classroom, in conversations with returning SFS students and throughout the world. I’m struck by powerful acts, often on a personal level, as people, including Georgetown and SFS students, go to the U.S.-Mexico border to understand and help migrants who are being deported.
In Germany, I see empathy as the government and nation receive so many Syrian refugees and in Colombia as people step up to help two million refugees from Venezuela. The Colombians are feeling the strain from this massive effort, but they say, ‘How could we do otherwise? The Venezuelans took us in during our civil war.’ ”
Carnes finds himself discussing empathy frequently these days. It crops up in the classes he teaches, such as Citizenship in a Globalized World. He writes about it in his columns for Georgetown’s campus newspaper, The Hoya. Recent examples include one called “Walking with the Excluded,” which asks us “to turn our community inside-out: aspiring to be not with the successful and the strong of the world, but with those whose courage in facing adversity, evil and injustice has the most to teach us,” he writes.
Empathy, he says, is about “understanding the experiences of others. Not trying to change or control or pity but to walk with them—or, to use a Jesuit term, to accompany them.” He notes that the concept is a cornerstone of the vision of “foreign service” that
dates to the founding of SFS a century ago. “There was some discussion of calling this the school of foreign trade, but the idea of foreign service won out,” he says. “If we want to engage with others—and that’s what foreign service is all about—if we want to build a common future and not just act out of self-interest, we need empathy in order to find that shared purpose.”
Carnes gently but firmly deflects the notion that the world’s “empathy meter” has plummeted to a new low. Instead, Carnes found more examples of empathy in action:
If we want to engage with others ... if we want to build a common future ... we need empathy in order to find that shared purpose.
“I saw empathy this past week in the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who described his concern for the welfare of Ukrainians at the prospect of U.S. aid being held up,” he says. “There are examples throughout history of empathy creating relationships, partnerships and breakthroughs in diplomacy because two people on opposite sides got to know each other on a human level.”
Empathy’s power, he says, can come at a price. “For people in foreign service—whether they’re in the State Department, an NGO or in direct service as volunteers—burnout is a fairly big element of their work,” Carnes says. “One thing I talk a lot about is the need for resilience, groundedness. You can’t pour yourself out without tending to the place of depth within yourself. You can do that through faith or meditation or even through a sense of long-term goals. When you work on big problems you may not see short-term improvements, but important goals are worth a long-term commitment. That can be sustaining. That’s why long-term diplomacy, the building of relationships and common goals, is such a worthwhile investment of time and effort. Remembering that is helpful.”
Meanwhile, nurturing the capacity for empathy needn’t wait for an overseas posting.
“I talk with the seniors in the Citizenship in a Globalized World course about the choices they face that can help them connect with others or leave them in a bubble with people just like themselves,” he says. “You can practice empathy by moving into a community or joining a faith community of people who are not like you. And by seeking to understand family, friends and neighbors whose views and ways of life are different from your own. That’s where it begins. Just listen.”
“A
In the 21st century, the world is currently experiencing the largest number of forced migrants since World War II. How should nations, citizens and observers respond in the context of this transnational migration shock?
This is the work of SFS Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Rochelle Davis: “As an anthropologist, I have been primarily concerned for the last 15 years about the effects of war and conflict on the Middle East. Almost every research project I’ve undertaken and much of my teaching has been about either war and conflict or what happens to people in situations of war and conflict, which is displacement.”
For Davis, the costs of conflict are not only in the suffering seen on the faces of refugees in the news and the many tragedies of lives lost in transit. Instability brings generational losses.
“Displaced people lose their means of taking care of themselves, even if their host nation’s government is stable,” Davis says. “They’ve lost housing, and it puts a huge strain on the host communities that take them in. It puts a huge strain on governments that are trying to take care of them, if they are at all. In a place like Yemen, where the government doesn’t exist, it’s essentially the rest of the population that tries to take care of the displaced population because people do care about other people.”
Davis continues, “This can be hard for Americans to understand because we are a stable country. How do you trade? How do you get your kids to school? How do you even know if there’s a school? Without stability, it’s hard to have economic growth or educational awareness. Many aren’t aware the Arab countries achieved nearly universal education between the 1940s and the present. With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the war in Yemen, the war in Syria, what’s gone on in Libya, for the first time in modern history, children there are going to be less educated than their parents. This is what conflict and war does in the long term.”
“If we want to understand why people move and leave their countries, the major reason is because they can’t guarantee
a future for their children. Yes, they are fleeing because of bombs or because of armed gunmen. But when they actually decide to leave, it’s usually because they want a better life for their children than the one they’re living right now.”
The consequences of media and observers framing refugees themselves as the crisis shifts accountability from the actions of political actors, Davis argues. “Refugees aren’t the crisis; they are an alarm bell,” she says. “They’re a symptom. The crisis is actually the war, conflict, instability or oppression where they come from. So much of the international community doesn’t want to deal with that or see that. Refugees are coming to these places to find safety from existing conditions they didn’t create.”
Isn’t the crisis, Davis asks, that countries like Germany and the United States find it so difficult to deal with a “tiny portion of people who are coming for safety and who will contribute to society?”
In her years working in Arab countries like Syria, she has seen that most refugees are young, able, driven and highly aspirational.
Another major concern for Davis is how the “international development regime” can find new approaches to make positive interventions for permanently displaced people. Emergency aid, she says, is making sure that people have food, shelter and access to hygiene and sanitation. “When conflicts become prolonged or people cannot return home,” she says, we need “development aid that helps people find work in the countries where they are and build lives for themselves.”
Davis sees an opportunity for Georgetown students and faculty to play a major role in understanding how this work is framed and the system can be reformed. “So many of our graduates work in these fields,” she observes. “If we know this framing and we know the constraints of the framing, how can we rethink how to do this, and how can we do it better for everyone?”
TO THE DEGREE THAT MOST ORDINARY CITIZENS
remember the Kosovo War at all, it is as the last in a series of complicated and bloody fights that marked the breakup of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and 1990s. But to a generation of young internationalists, Kosovo is a touchstone. NATO, after taking little action during nearly a decade of violence in neighboring Bosnia, launched a risky bombing campaign to force Yugoslavia to accept a deal affirming Kosovo’s autonomy, using its military power for the first time in a non-member state. The West’s willingness to act impressed young humanitarian workers like Jeremy Konyndyk (MSFS’03), who had arrived in Kosovo in 1999 from Calvin College in Michigan as a new program director for International Aid, an American faith-based, nongovernmental organization. “Kosovo was an outlier,” says Konyndyk. “We thought, ‘Wow, the world will stand up for self-determination.’”
Konyndyk spent three years in Kosovo, earning praise for his cleanup efforts in the wake of the war. While earning his master’s at the School of Foreign Service, he interned at the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, then spent a decade at refugee-focused NGOs. He returned to government in 2013 as chief of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Sarah Margon (MSFS’05) didn’t have the Kosovars on her agenda when she went to Eastern Europe as the war was coming to a close. Growing up in Brooklyn, she had a longstanding invitation to work for a graduate-school friend of her father’s, a government minister in his home country of Sierra Leone. But when she graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1999, she says, “Sierra Leone was engulfed in conflict. There was no way I could go.” Instead, she took a sojourn to Hungary to teach English, where the Kosovo crisis came to her. “I ended up doing double duty in a refugee camp,” she says. “It whetted my appetite for humanitarian work.”
Margon was named director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch, the revered international civil liberties advocacy group. In the nonprofit world, she has also worked on policy for George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Center for National Security Studies, the Center for American Progress and Oxfam America. Her most discernible impact on world affairs came, however, from her time as a senior foreign policy advisor to Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, where she shaped the plan that became the U.S. troop surge in Iraq in 2007 and ’08. “The job demanded that I meld the policy with the politics,” she says. “It’s the most challenging thing I’ve done to date.”
After the fighting in Kosovo ended, NATO deployed an international force to enforce the peace deal. Among the German contingent was Gunther von Billerbeck (MSFS’05), the scion of an East Prussian noble family that had fled to West Germany after the Second World War. “My people come from a place that was but is no longer ours,” he says. He had already served in Sarajevo as part of his required military service; now, with a front seat at the Kosovo crisis, he began to think of peacekeeping operations as a possible career.
Unfortunately, von Billerbeck says, “there was not much to do in Germany with those interests.” He went back to school at Heidelberg University for a master’s in history and political science but chose not to pursue a Ph.D. “I found that I was interested in being a practitioner,” he says. “I didn’t want to
read for the rest of my life.” He considered joining the German foreign service, but that path too would have meant more school.
“I was at a loss,” he says. “I thought about working for the United Nations, but that seemed very farfetched. I didn’t have the first idea about how to even get close to that place.”
As unlikely as it seemed then, after finishing his degree at the School of Foreign Service and briefly working for the World Bank, von Billerbeck spent three years as a political affairs officer for the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His Africa experience in turn brought offers from strategic consulting companies, and since 2009 von Billerbeck has advised corporations investing in projects in the developing world. Today he is director of operations for the Risk Advisory Group, a business intelligence consultancy based in London.
What these three humanitarian professionals have in common—besides Kosovo, of course—are their Georgetown degrees, which helped them shape their raw experiences on the ground into careers.
SFS and the NGO Boom
The NGO boom has also greatly expanded opportunities for working for good. “There are so many options for someone with a natural enthusiasm for humanitarian work now,” says Mark Yarnell (MSFS’09). “You can get your overseas experience sitting at a desk in Nairobi writing grants, or intern at home office and get your experience that way. There is still the Peace Corps, where you can get out into a rural area and learn about yourself, and there are these NGOs with budgets of millions of dollars.”
Like Konyndyk, von Billerbeck, and Margon, Yarnell stresses the importance of pragmatic training combined with real-world experience to produce professionals who are capable of being both effective and empathetic.
It was a chance meeting with von Billerbeck in the fall of 2006 that led to Yarnell’s Georgetown degree. Two years before, Yarnell had been so intent on working in Africa that he’d flown to Kinshasa without a job and knocked on doors until he found one. While working for a small British philanthropy implementing USAID projects in Congo—or, as Yarnell puts it, “figuring out how to get cement from A to B”—he was having a beer at a rooftop bar one evening when he fell into conversation with a German who turned out to be the UN’s local political director.
Yarnell told von Billerbeck that he liked the hands-on work and the opportunity he had to get
off the beaten track into remote areas. “But I didn’t feel suited to the logistics,” he says. “I was so much more interested in the broader policy side. I wanted to know how decisions made in D.C. or at the UN affected what happened in the field.”
Von Billerbeck told Yarnell about his time at Georgetown, explaining that he too had wanted to avoid academics for their own sake. “I was interested to hear that most of the professors were practitioners,” says Yarnell. “I wanted those practical skills to be more employable.” When he began his MSFS coursework the following autumn, he vowed to himself that he’d be back in the field within three years.
Yarnell successfully avoided academia, but he never made it back to Africa in a development role. After graduating from SFS in 2009, he took a two-year Henry Stimson Center fellowship on Capitol Hill, working on aid policy with Senator Richard Lugar, a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Since leaving the Stimson Center, he has been working for the nonprofit Refugees International, where he helps develop policy and frequently visits stricken areas in the Middle East and Asia to see how policy impacts refugee response on the ground.
Given the flood of funding into nonprofits, and the number of new recruits, the skill most urgently needed for today’s NGOs may be business administration. “NGOs often suffer from poor management,” says an executive at an NGO headquartered near Washington, D.C. “Those people whom we make managers often have no training in management. They have been promoted because they have served and excelled in the field.”
by HERB SCHAFFNER
For SFS Associate Professor Keir Lieber, the Georgetown campus has always been a second home. His father, Robert L. Lieber, professor of Government and Foreign Service, started teaching at Georgetown in 1982. In addition, Keir Lieber took a course at Georgetown in high school as part of a special program for D.C. public school students. Lieber blazed his own path to SFS as a prominent expert on nuclear weapons, arms control and conflict among the great powers. He is now director of the Center for Security Studies and the Security Studies Program at SFS.
Lieber notes that a critical pivot is taking place in international relations and security that has implications for how we think about the role of nuclear weapons and arms control. “It seems just yesterday that the international security environment was defined primarily by terrorism and counterterrorism, but more
recently we’ve seen a renewed focus on great power conflict and security tensions among nation-states—including trouble between the United States and North Korea, Russia, China and Iran.” In the case of nuclear-armed nations including North Korea, Pakistan and, potentially, Iran, their conventional forces are far inferior to those of the United States and NATO allies. According to conventional understanding, these imbalances in power keep the world a more peaceful place. However, Lieber cautions that it depends on the perspective. Despite arms-control treaties and advances in non-proliferation, he says, the threat of nuclear war remains.
“What people miss about the Cold War and what we increasingly recognize today is the true difficulty of creating stable deterrence.”
“Many analysts of nuclear weapons cut their teeth on these issues in studying the Cold War. The conventional wisdom then and now is that nuclear deterrence worked because the two great superpowers had massive nuclear arsenals that could survive a first strike and deal a catastrophic retaliatory blow to the other. The superpower arsenals were highly survivable because they were deployed via a triad of submarines, hardened silos and bomber aircraft. The result was called a balance of terror—the condition of mutual assured destruction—that we have heard so much about,” Lieber explains.
“What people miss about the Cold War and what we increasingly recognize today is the true difficulty of creating stable deterrence. In fact, we have good reasons to be concerned about the vulnerability of nuclear arsenals around the world, which exacerbate the incentives for an attack—turning a conventional military confrontation into a nuclear conflict.”
Lieber and his frequent collaborator and co-author, Daryl Press,
Associate Professor Keir
and his frequent collaborator and co-author Daryl
of Dartmouth share a break during a consulting trip to the U.S. Pacific Command to discuss nuclear security policy. Right: Associate Teaching Professor Elizabeth Arsenault discussed her book How the Gloves Came Off: Lawyers, Policy Makers, and Norms in the Debate on Torture at a talk in March 2017.
argue that advances in two areas of technology—remote sensing capabilities and weapons accuracy against hardened targets—are ushering in “a new era of nuclear vulnerability.” Lieber explains: “We now have precision munitions that can destroy hardened underground or silo-based nuclear missiles, and we have the satellite capability to peer into the backyards of our adversaries, and vice versa. It is getting much, much harder to hide these weapons.”
Aggrieved nonaligned states such as North Korea are intensely aware of their vulnerabilities. Their real or potential nuclear weapons are their equalizer not only in geopolitical psyops but also in the unlikely event of a conventional war, in which their third-tier conventional military would be mopped up by major power forces from the U.S., Europe, China or even Russia. The paranoia of authoritarian leaders combined with the potential for devastating defeat and capture in an outright conflict has troubling implications.
To illustrate the potential for mutual destruction, Lieber lays out a hypothetical scenario. “Let’s say North Korea, for some combination of reasons, launches a conventional military attack against U.S. and South Korean forces. North Korea’s leaders are well aware of the consequences if they lose such a war. As the conflict deteriorates, they will have nowhere to hide. They could either surrender and be killed or imprisoned for life, or they could be emboldened to use their nuclear weapons as a gambit to save themselves from destruction, say by exploding a weapon over the Sea of Japan to convince the United States that it must halt the war before it or its allies suffer a direct nuclear attack.”
Ultimately, Lieber concludes, without sufficient deterrence, states will continue to seek out nuclear capabilities. “There are a number of incentives for otherwise weaker nuclear states to use them against their more powerful foes. Unfortunately, nuclear capability is relatively cheap to build and relatively easy to hide,” he says. Nuclear weapons remain an extremely tempting option for regional power players with either paranoid tendencies or legitimate security concerns. “Nuclear weapons use on the battlefield doesn’t seem so unthinkable when you are facing imminent defeat and likely death.”
For Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault, director of teaching for the Security Studies Program and associate teaching professor at SFS, a special one-credit class called The Changing Nature of International Law provided many opportunities for her favorite aspect of teaching at Georgetown: engaging with students. “One of the reasons I found it such a compelling class is that we had a handful of firstyear students, handful of sophomores, handful of juniors and seniors. It was the rare class at Georgetown in which you get insight into these different populations. They are not homogeneous at all.”
Grimm Arsenault explains how well SFS students are prepared to analyze issues from a variety of different perspectives and ask difficult questions about what the implications of certain policies will be. “Those abilities of writing clearly and concisely, problem-solving, critical thinking and collaboration are not going to diminish. I don’t foresee those skills changing at all over the next, let’s say, 100 years.”
Her students brought their skills to bear on a variety of global security and warfare issues, such as how existing models of transnational relations and conflict will be useful in dealing with emerging threats facing the community of nations.
“The jumping-off point for the class was this quote from a scholar a hundred years ago who said the violations of international law are so numerous that it’s now a thing of the past. International law has been superseded. It no longer is relevant.”
She explains: “The question we are asking now is not whether these certain areas of international relations are still relevant, but how are they relevant? What are the tools that we need to assess them? Are we going to see an integration of the liberal order, or fragmentation? To what extent is U.S. participation still necessary to uphold this liberal order? What do we need to think about in terms of protecting human rights, and will states remain committed to that?”
Questions of climate change are critical to any consideration of global security. “The subject my students had
the most animated discussions about was climate change and whether or not to consider the application of new laws or the application of existing laws to mitigate the harms of climate change. It was an unbelievably robust dynamic. People’s voices got really heated.
“You don’t have to convince these students about the real implications of climate change. They’re living those implications.”
Grimm Arsenault writes about terrorism, torture and the rules and norms around the use of force in the post-9/11 era, when deadly conflicts heavily involve non-state fighters such as terrorists and insurgents.
“We discussed to what extent it is problematic that there is an asymmetry of rights in asymmetric conflicts like we have between states and non-state actors. As more functions of combat become automated, to what extent does that automation challenge our understanding of warfare? No matter what side soldiers fight for, they have equal moral standing essentially to invoke special rights. They have an
equal right to kill. But the rise of non-combatants in war that we saw beginning with the attacks of 9/11 and the U.S. operation in Iraq and Afghanistan caused policymakers and legal scholars to question what the war rights of the noncombatants were.
“Even with the course corrections that happened midway through the Bush administration and early in the years of the Obama administration, we are still left with many of these questions unresolved about detainee rights. Are they entitled to the bare minimum of rights? Should we expand those rights? The reality is that non-state actors in warfare are only going to increase in importance and increase in population and not decrease. For many of my students, this is an area that is the hardest for them to grapple with.”
These and many other related issues must be embedded in how we think about the future of the global liberal order for the next 100 years, Grimm Arsenault says. Clearly, many powerful topics remain for classes to come.
SFS AND THE COLD WAR
FOR NEARLY HALF OF THE SCHOOL OF FOREIGN Service’s hundred years of existence, the United States was engaged in the Cold War struggle against communism. If one counts Father Walsh’s visceral antipathy toward the Soviet Union, which was spurred by his visit to Russia in 1923, anti-communism was a theme at the School of Foreign Service for more than 60 years. For the graduates who entered the Foreign Service, the Cold War was never an abstract conflict of ideologies. In a war of influence, embassies in Europe, Latin America and Africa were often the front line, and Georgetown students were trained to serve as ground troops.
The concerns that sent the first graduates of the School of Foreign Service to Tampico, Mexico and Venezuela as vice consuls to secure oil concessions were the same that gave birth to the Cold War. In the 1920s, oil was already the world’s key strategic commodity. Oil had fueled the tanks and fighter planes that had won the recent world war—“The Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil,” as the British minister Lord Curzon intoned in 1918—and as World War II began, controlling the globe’s oil fields was the first order of business for the Western powers.
Five years later, at the dawn of the Cold War, oil was at the center of the first, bloodless skirmish between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was won through the ingenuity of a 27-year-old SFS graduate named Robert Rossow (SFS’39).
After Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, Stalin joined with his newfound allies Britain and the United States in occupying Iran, with the object of keeping the country’s oil supply out of Nazi hands. After the war, it was agreed, the three countries would withdraw and in the meantime no oil concessions would be granted to any of the occupying powers.
Months after V-J Day, however, Russian troops were still lingering in northern Iran, claiming to be protecting a fledgling democratic republic in Azerbaijan. As the March 1946 deadline for withdrawal neared and Iran and its Western allies cried foul, it became clear that Stalin was maneuvering “for the privilege of exploiting oil,” as The New York Times
put it in a front-page article on the crisis. It was feared that Stalin intended to take Tehran. The closest American observer, the longtime consul in Tabriz, tried to allay Washington’s fears, sending cables reassuring his bosses that “peace and tranquility reign.”
President Truman and Secretary of State Edward Stettinius were unconvinced, and, frustrated by the vague reports coming out of Tabriz, the small Iranian city in the middle of the Soviet sector, sent Robert Rossow to take a look. Though not of the Great War generation, Rossow was very much in the pre-World War II Georgetown mold.
Rossow had grown up on the grounds of Culver Academy, a military preparatory school in northern Indiana, where his father was an instructor and director of the Black Horse Troop, a locally famous cavalry unit. According to Rossow’s son, Robert Rossow III, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Rossow initially enrolled at Columbia University, but after being jilted by a fellow student decided to transfer to Georgetown and pursue a career in foreign service, a notion he’d gotten after meeting Father Walsh at the University of Notre Dame some years earlier. He did well at Georgetown, where he edited the Foreign Service Log and won the Casey Medal and the Jean Labat Medal for excellence in French. Graduating in June of 1939 at the age of 20, he took the Foreign Service exam and, while he waited to be called up, belatedly accepted a commission in the U.S. Army that had come with his diploma from Culver Academy. The Army sent him to Fort Knox, where as a cavalry officer he was trained in tank warfare.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Rossow was a vice consul in Panama. Reading The Washing-
President Ford signs the Helsinki Accords, aimed at reducing Cold War tensions, in Finlandia Hall in August 1975.
ton Post, which was included in the diplomatic pouch, Rossow was incensed by a story accusing Foreign Service officers of sitting out the war in embassies far from the combat zone. In fact, due to the State Department’s increased wartime needs, Foreign Service officers were rarely permitted to leave in order to join the armed forces, but Rossow successfully resigned and asked to be reunited with his tank division, deployed in North Africa. He was told to report instead in a plain Army uniform without insignia to an office in Washington, where he was inducted in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. His training took place in Washington and in “a mansion up the Hudson River,” his son recounts, “where he was instructed in, among other things, picking locks by an expert faculty from nearby Sing Sing who were doing their patriotic duty.”
When the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, told Izumi Nakamitsu (MSFS’89) in March of 2017 that he planned to name the career UN staffer Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Nakamitsu’s immediate response was that she was no expert on disarmament or arms control.
Then again, Nakamitsu quickly points out, she can’t claim any particular expertise. “I’m one of a few, very rare UN officials who have done so many things,” she says—which is precisely what Guterres was looking for. “I don’t want an expert,” the Secretary-General told Nakamitsu. “I want someone who understands everything else.”
The work of nuclear nonproliferation and other forms of arms control—in her post, Nakamitsu handles everything from the Iran nuclear deal to the regulation of handguns—demands a generalist. As the Iran nuclear deal has shown, technical knowledge, though essential when negotiating the fine points of uranium refinement or missile systems, is often not as crucial in nonproliferation and arms control issues as familiarity with politics, geopolitical power struggles and peacemaking. “Disarmament is actually closely related to war and to security issues,” says Nakamitsu, now the highest-ranking Japanese official in the UN’s history.
Seen in that light, there is an undeniable logic to Nakamitsu’s involvement in disarmament. Her first job with the UN, as a junior program officer after earning her MSFS, took her to Turkey during the first Gulf War, where she aided refugees fleeing the conflict. Since then she has directed peacekeeping operations for the UN’s Asia and Middle East divi-
sion and served as Assistant Secretary-General for Crisis Response at the UN Development Program. In the 2000s, she took a nearly 10-year hiatus from the UN after marrying her husband, a Swedish diplomat, during which she worked for a democracy assistance organization based in Stockholm and taught international relations at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.
War and security concerns also paved the way for Joseph Cirincione (MSFS’83) to lead the Ploughshares Fund, the world’s largest nuclear security foundation. First, though, the onetime Vietnam War protester took a decade-long tour as a community organizer in Boston, where his primary concern was fighting evictions in the city’s depressed neighborhoods. His focus returned to the international scene in the first summer of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when American jets shot down two Libyan jets over the Mediterranean. “I thought the world was going to war,” Cirincione recalls. “This superseded the concerns about community development. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to stop that conflict.”
His first step was to enroll in the MSFS program at the School of Foreign Service to shore up his knowledge of international affairs. “The goal was to be a generalist, someone who knew a lot about foreign policy,” he says.
His second was to infiltrate the conservative foreign-affairs establishment itself. “In my second semester, I answered an index card on a bulletin board to be a teaching assistant for an SFS professor, the late W. Scott Thompson.” When Thompson, who had served as an assistant secretary of defense under President Ford, joined the Reagan administration as assistant director of the U.S. Information Agency in 1982, Cirincione went along. “I wanted to learn how these guys thought,” he says. He ended up on an interagency working group on Central America, serving with a charismatic Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North.
He left government to join a think-tank-sponsored project that brought journalists into Central America to promote understanding between Americans and the countries where the United States had become actively engaged in local civil wars—Nicaragua and Honduras. When the project ended, he was hired as a national security analyst on Capitol Hill, developing missile defense policy for the House Armed Services Committee as Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—“Star Wars”—got underway. In 1993, he joined the Henry Stimson Center as a nuclear nonproliferation expert, later jumping to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and the Center for American Progress, where he was vice president for international security and policy. Cirincione was named president of the Ploughshares Fund in 2008.
by SARI HARRAR
Unshaven and disguised in tattered clothing with a Star of David armband, Jan Karski (PHD’52), a daring young courier for the Polish underground, was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. “Remember this, remember this,” his guide whispered as Karski witnessed Nazi atrocities of “degradation, starvation and death.” Days later, he went undercover as a guard in a transit camp as thousands were herded into boxcars bound for the death camps.
Karski delivered the first, horrific eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the West. But when Allied leaders, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, largely refused to believe his accounts and didn’t act, the anguished hero of the Polish resistance felt he had failed. He remained in the U.S., earning a Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1952 and teaching generations of students as an SFS professor. His legacy is anything but failure.
“Karski’s courage, heroism and morality can never be questioned. They are unassailable,” says Academy Award-nominated actor David Strathairn, who portrayed the beloved professor in a virtuoso solo performance of Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, during SFS’s Centennial Gala Weekend in November 2019. Co-authored and directed by Derek Goldman, Ph.D., co-director of the SFS-affiliated Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, the play explores the enduring lessons of Karski’s extraordinary life—especially his belief in humanity even in the darkest of times.
Strathairn, 70, bears a striking resemblance to Karski. But it wasn’t physical similarities—a narrow face, high forehead and cheekbones, expressive eyebrows and dignified bearing—that drew the busy stage-and-screen actor to Karski. “There are two reasons,” Strathairn said in an interview in late October. “The mission and vision of The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics to humanize the often distant, confusing and polarizing complexities of global politics is important to me. At its best, I feel theater can bring a diversity of people together in a safe, compassionate place, where people can reckon with, recognize and hopefully accept the differences that make us who we are.
“And, of course, there’s Jan Karski himself—a man who dedicated his entire life to this same goal,” he says. “I hope that the many of us who, like Karski, feel we are ‘insignificant, little [people]’ will be awakened to our own potential as messengers and proponents of our common humanity by hearing about him.”
Among Strathairn’s more than 130 movie and TV roles are significant historical figures such as CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck (2005), Secretary of State William H. Seward in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) and physicist Robert Oppenheimer in a PBS documentary. “These men were all participants in, witnesses and messengers for some of the most significant, dramatic and pivotal moments in the history of our world. No less Jan Karski,” he notes.
David Strathairn has starred in the play throughout its various iterations since 2014: “I’ve always felt that one of the vital roles, even a responsibility, of the artist/citizen, is to provide palpable, emotive and relevant insight into the most pressing issues concerning our common humanity. By dramatizing the legacy of Jan Karski, we are striving to do just that.”
Goldman and Strathairn first collaborated on a play for The Lab about historian Studs Terkel. They reunited for the first performances of Remember This in 2014, the 100th anniversary of Karski’s birth. (He died in 2002.) “David is just an amazing artist who lives and thinks deeply about anything he’s engaged with,” says Goldman, who with Strathairn took the play beyond Georgetown’s campus to Washington, D.C., New York and to Poland in 2014. It was recast as a solo work for the SFS Centennial. Tickets for a November 15 performance sold out so quickly that a second show was added for the 14th, Goldman says. “This is not a period piece that dusts off a historical period. It’s not a tribute to a beautiful life. Karski was a whistleblower, a refugee who couldn’t go home, a witness to atrocious hate. Remember This addresses timeless issues that resonate today,” he says.
“Karski’s courage, heroism and morality can never be questioned. They are unassailable,” says Academy Awardnominated actor David Strathairn.
a Secret State about his experiences (it became a Book of the Month Club selection), he recounted his Holocaust memories despite considerable anguish. In a remarkable, 40-minute interview in the 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah, Karski breaks down and begs director Claude Lanzmann not to make him talk about it. “The word ‘hero’ is tossed around carelessly today, but Karski was the real deal. He put his life on the line and took enormous risks,” says Robert Lieber, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Government and at SFS and a colleague of Karski’s. “He lectured to my students several times. It was spell-binding.”
A life-size statue of Karski, seated on a bench playing chess (his favorite game), is located on Georgetown’s Copley Lawn. Dressed in an elegant suit, Strathairn sits cross-legged on a similar bench in the play, portraying the courageous man who struggled with himself to continue speaking about what he had seen in World War II. In 1944, after writing the book Story of
A Roman Catholic, Karski was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, in 1982. In 1994 he became an honorary Israeli citizen. In 2012, he was posthumously granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. “The fact that he did bear and share witness ultimately speaks volumes about what he believed was his ‘duty,’ his ‘moral obligation,’ his ‘responsibility as a teacher/citizen’—indeed, what he had been called upon to do,” Strathairn says. “He continues to deliver a profound, timeless and universally significant message.”
SFS Centennial Honors were presented to three individuals, nominated by members of the SFS community, who have exemplified Georgetown’s Jesuit values over the course of their lives.
A young man’s quest to reveal the truth behind the headlines in Syria. by SUSANNE FRANK
When Georgetown Law student and Marine Corps veteran Austin Tice (SFS’02, L’13) decided to spend his summer break reporting from the front lines of Syria’s civil war, it was an audacious move, especially for a non-Arabic speaker with little journalistic experience. And yet no one who knew him well was at all surprised.
“He was born ambitious,” says his mother, Debra Tice. “At the end of third grade, Austin was frustrated that he hadn’t had time during the school year to read the encyclopedia, so he mapped out a detailed plan for reading the entire World Book Encyclopedia over the summer. He did it. He got through the whole thing.”
Austin’s drive for success never abated.
A National Merit Scholar finalist and an Eagle Scout, Austin was admitted to the University of Houston Honors College when he was 16. At 18, he was certain he wanted to attend the School of Foreign Service.
“He calculated how many days it would take for his application to arrive, and then called the admissions office that day,” says his father, Marc Tice. “After waiting a couple of weeks, calling every day, he finally told them, ‘This is the only place I want to go, so if you don’t admit me this semester, I’m going to keep applying until I get in.’”
Austin was right: the School of Foreign Service was the perfect fit. He was elated to be among people who cared as much about public service and international affairs as he did.
Austin went on to enroll at Georgetown Law. Unlike most of his peers, he took time out to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps and was eventually deployed to Iraq. He returned to school in 2008 and heeding the call of duty once again, went back to the Marine Corps for more training and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011.
Austin returned to Georgetown Law later that year, but there was something else on his mind: Syria. He had been reading about the escalating conflict and was deeply disturbed by what was—and was not—being reported. As the situation intensified, the government banned foreign news organizations and denied journalists’ visas, making it hard for them to move independently and report accurately.
“Austin had seen the same kind of thing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he knew the situation was probably worse than what was being reported. He decided that he needed to go document what was really happening,” says Debra.
She recalls the day Austin announced his plan: “There was no talking him out of it. So we just let the butterflies fly and asked, ‘How can we support you?’ ”
Austin planned his trip to Syria meticulously. He introduced himself to people who were familiar with the situation there. He bought photography and recording equipment and started teaching himself Arabic. He audited an introduction to photography course at Georgetown.
On May 8, Austin boarded a plane to southern Turkey. Several flights and bus rides later, he arrived in the Turkish city of Antakya, his entry point to the Syrian border. In Antakya, he met someone who would be crucial to his quest: a lawyer from Damascus who invited him to stay in his apartment with other journalists. Austin spent two weeks there, making contacts, honing his Arabic and waiting for the right moment.
Austin was determined to make it to the Syrian capital of Damascus; no other Western journalists had made that journey.
Austin soon met the man who would act as his translator and fixer in Syria. His new friend was worried about Austin’s lack of journalistic experience and told him not to mention his service in the Marines. It would make him even more of a target.
Back in Houston, Texas, Austin’s parents were worried but optimistic. Austin stayed in touch but didn’t always let on about the danger he was in.
“He was more likely to give me the nitty-gritty,” says Marc, “and tell his mom that that sound in the background was popcorn popping, not gunfire.”
On May 23, Austin and his fixer slid under a barbed wire fence and into Syria. Austin soon made his way to Khan Shaykhun, 160
miles from Damascus. Within a week of crossing into Syria, Austin sold his first photos to the McClatchy News Service. Before long, he was also writing articles.
Austin began pitching stories to the major news outlets. It didn’t take long for his reporting to get noticed. He knew he had made it when three of his articles made the front page of The Washington Post.
As he got closer to Damascus, Austin was not only reporting for the traditional media but also recording his impressions on Twitter. His short dispatches were fascinating—and often heartbreaking.
June 21:“Sitting here in Syria ... hearing the bombs fall on Homs, and watching Smurfs. This is beyond surreal.”
June 28: “Another mortar attack this morning. Another trip to the same graveyard. Another body laid to rest in the same trench.”
July 24, Al Tal: “Civilians streaming out, fighters manning positions, donating blood. Rumors in every direction. Everyone expecting a fight today.”
On July 30, Austin finally entered Damascus. Once there, he spent two weeks taking photographs and filing stories.
August 9: “Jadaydat Artouz: paranoia here btwn Sunni and Alawite is palpable. Pervasive fear of spies. Unlike any other place I’ve visited. Creepy.”
By the time Austin celebrated his 31st birthday, he had spent nearly three months in Syria, and he was finally ready to go home. He made plans to leave Damascus, meet a friend in Lebanon and return to Georgetown for his final year of law school.
He never arrived.
His social media posts stopped. No one could reach him on the phone. Austin was last seen on August 14, departing Darayya, a Damascus suburb. His parents later learned that he had been detained at a checkpoint.
It has now been more than seven years since Austin disappeared in Syria. His parents, and the United States government, are confident that Austin is alive. Just like Austin, Marc and Debra Tice are also persistent. They have devoted their lives to advocating for his release and have won over many important allies.
In April of 2018, the FBI offered a one million dollar reward for information leading to Austin’s return. The Trump Administration’s new national security advisor, Robert C. O’Brien—who for the previous 18 months had been the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs—is already well familiar with the case and has promised to continue to work hard in his new role to bring Austin home.
When asked how they have managed to stay hopeful all of these years, the Tices don’t hesitate.
“Our family is strong, and that’s an incredible blessing,” says Debra.
Judith Sherman (SFS‘82), was recognized for her dedication to improving healthcare and fighting HIV and AIDS in various African countries. Malawian children watching one of the drones used for high-speed testing of infant blood for HIV. One of three Centennial Honors went to Austin Tice (SFS’02, L’13), a former U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer who was abducted in August of 2012 in Syria while reporting on the intensification of the civil war as a freelance journalist. Austin’s parents, who have been advocating for his release through the #FreeAustinTice Campaign, accepted the award on his behalf.
As a teenager, Judith B. Sherman (SFS’82) knew she wanted to work in international affairs, possibly in politics. When she came to SFS as an undergraduate, she was drawn to courses and activities that tapped into her desire to do work she found meaningful—helping people in regions affected by health, economic and social challenges.
She began working outside the U.S. in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s, a time when HIV infection was rapidly spreading across Africa. Sherman conducted research with adolescents and created an HIV/AIDS prevention program for teachers to use in secondary schools. After that, her work often centered on HIV and AIDS.
“I was living in Zimbabwe at a time when the epidemic was exploding and so many people were dying every day. I saw many of my colleagues and friends pass away,” she says. “That really propelled the next 27 years of what I did.”
Sherman designed and managed programs for humanitarian and health organizations, including Adventist Development and Relief Agency, JSI Europe and UNICEF. She directed projects on HIV and AIDS, sexual and reproductive health, maternal and infant health and nutrition. In addition to speaking fluent French and some Spanish, she speaks basic levels of two Bantu languag-
es, Shona (from Zimbabwe) and Chichewa (Malawi).
Most recently, she was chief of HIV and Manager of Maternal and Newborn Health for UNICEF Malawi. The largely rural, impoverished country has low education levels, a fragile health system and high teen-pregnancy rate. HIV is a significant challenge. In 1999, 16.7 percent of Malawi adults were living with HIV. By 2018, that had fallen to 9.6 percent of adults but, as Sherman notes, the incidence of new HIV infections in young women remained the same. She describes adolescent mothers living with HIV as “the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.”
Reflecting UNICEF’s focus on improving health outcomes for children, her team, together with governmental and other organizations, helped develop approaches to keep girls in school longer and identify economic opportunities for them and worked to change societal expectations that girls should marry young and have children quickly.
Under Sherman’s leadership, her group increased adolescent women’s access to quality maternal care and support, created a peer-support program for adolescent homosexual males, expanded HIV point-of-care diagnostics and began a program using drones to speed transport of infants’ blood samples for HIV testing.
Before the drone program began, those samples went from remote health facilities by motorbike to district hospitals and then on to testing laboratories. Rain often disrupted travel on Malawi’s poor roads, lengthening the time for identifying HIV-positive infants and starting them on essential antiretroviral treatment. The median time from collecting infants’ samples to receiving results back at far-flung facilities was 21 days. “Every day treatment is delayed significantly reduces the chances of survival,” says Sherman.
The idea to use drones to get results faster arose from an “aha!” moment she had in 2014 while reading an article about drones delivering packages and pizzas. That led to a study and then a pilot program. Drones can fly over the difficult terrain from where samples are drawn to district hospitals in an hour. The drones now operate in two Malawian districts, carrying emergency medicines and supplies as well as HIV test samples and results.
Sherman’s drone work also helped the Malawian government write drone regulations and use drones in disaster relief and to aid crop surveys. “What’s exciting—in addition to the health program—is they are now being routinely used for humanitarian and development purposes,” she says.
Last fall, Sherman left her position with UNICEF and moved back to the U.S. to work as a consultant on issues related to HIV, adolescent health, sexual and reproductive health and, possibly, drones.
Reflecting on her SFS experiences, she cites how they influenced her career. She studied with Professor Jan Karski, a Polish underground member during World War II whose commitment to taking meaningful action resonated deeply with her. She also learned about beliefs that inspire social justice efforts beyond one’s own culture. Those lessons “had a big impact on me,” she says.
“For me, it’s about respecting that people know what’s best for themselves and their communities and providing the mechanisms that are needed [for them] to realize those needs,” says Sherman.
She was one of three SFS alumni named as Centennial Honorees for their international service. “It’s quite a singular honor, and I’m really overwhelmed by it,” she says.
by PAUL O’DONNELL
Before he sat for his first class at Georgetown, Chad Griffin (SFS’97) had worked in the White House, flown on Air Force One and helped make a Hollywood comedy about the presidency. At the age of 21, fulfilling a promise to his boss, Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, Griffin finally quit politics to finish his college degree, graduating from the School of Foreign Service in 1997.
A native of Bill Clinton’s hometown of Hope, Arkansas, Griffin had left his freshman studies at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia to join Clinton’s 1992 run for the Democratic nomination. On Inauguration Day, as the youngest West Wing staffer in history, he watched the Resolute presidential desk replace the C&O desk used by George H. W. Bush.
Equipped with his Georgetown degree, Griffin went to California and reengaged with his political roots. He had gotten to know Rob Reiner, the former All in the Family star and film director, while working as the White House liaison to Reiner’s The American President. Reiner, who was becoming increasingly active in politics in Los Angeles, hired Griffin to help him push through Proposition 10, a ballot initiative that would raise funds for education and child welfare services by adding a 50 cent tax on every pack of cigarettes sold in the state.
Over the next eight years they followed up, with varying degrees of success, with Proposition 71, supporting stem cell research, and Proposition 87, aimed at funding alternative energy with taxes on oil.
But it was his efforts against Prop 8, a 2008 ballot initiative, sponsored by a group called Project Marriage, mandating that marriage be defined as a partnership between a man and a woman, that established Griffin on the national scene.
While working with Reiner, Griffin had also formed a communications firm with a friend, Kristina Schake, that advertised itself as serving the juncture where Hollywood and politics mixed, representing political Californians like Maria Shriver as well as stars such as Brad Pitt. The firm had been minimally involved in the fight to stop Prop 8, but after the initiative passed in November 2008, Reiner and Griffin decided to wage a legal battle to defeat the measure in the courts. As a vehicle for their campaign, they created the American Foundation for Equal Rights, or AFER.
More important, perhaps, was the legal team Griffin put together in 2010 for the case that would take the Prop 8 question to the Supreme Court. Griffin had heard that Ted Olson,
who served as Solicitor General under George W. Bush and had been an avowed opponent of Griffin’s former boss, Bill Clinton, supported same-sex marriage. Griffin went to see Olson in Washington and signed him on. Olson in turn brought in liberal superlawyer David Boies. The duo won the case in 2013, laying the foundation for the court’s 2015 decision that made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.
The day that Prop 8 was defeated, Griffin was still several months shy of turning 40. He was one of the most deeply connected insiders in two of the country’s power centers, with his college roommate, Dan Pfeiffer, serving as communications director for then-President Barack Obama, and his former business partner, Schake, in the same role for the First Lady. Griffin himself was one of the Obama fundraising team’s most productive bundlers and had helped lead the charge on liberal causes, from addressing climate change to ending tobacco use.
Yet one year before, Griffin had assumed the presidency of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the country’s oldest LGBTQ advocacy groups and the largest. In his first week at HRC, Griffin publicly criticized Obama for his position on marriage equality, which was to let the states determine their marriage policies individually. Months later, at a gathering at the home of a Hollywood gay couple, he challenged Vice President Joe Biden to speak his mind on same-sex marriage, opening the way for George Stephanopoulos to ask Biden to admit he had
Chad Griffin (SFS’97), founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights and former president of the Human Rights Campaign, received a Centennial Honor award for his advocacy for equality and LGBTQ rights.
no problem with it on This Week. Biden obliged by saying he was for it. Days later, Obama said he agreed.
In his seven years leading HRC, Griffin has worked on building grassroots support in places in the United States and abroad where LGBTQ equality is at its lowest. But Griffin, who left the HRC in 2018, played a singular role in the promotion of Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. The success of the midterms for Democrat candidates was driven by what Griffin called “the single largest grass-roots expansion in the history of our movement.”
AS PART OF THE CENTENNIAL WEEKEND, SFS BROUGHT TOGETHER students and alumni for a series of career-related programming hosted by the SFS Graduate Career Center. In the words of Vikram Venkatram (SFS’21), who attended the Centennial Networking Session: “What’s been really helpful for me is realizing how many options there are in terms of things I can pursue, and I feel like it’s a really good first step to know first what are all the opportunities out there so I can start making decisions later on.”
Students participated in informational interviews, an afternoon of career programming with alumni and attended the many speeches and panels throughout the weekend.
04
SFS students participated in lively question and answer sessions throughout the panels held during the
The Centennial Gala Weekend included a prized opportunity for SFS students to interview and forge new professional relationships with SFS alumni. 01
Christian Allen (MSFS’20), is a teaching assistant for SFS Professor Madeleine Albright’s class America’s National Security Toolbox. In his introduction for Albright during the gala, Allen thanked Albright for the support and guidance she provides to students in her class.
Students also enjoyed a networking reception with alumni.
05-07
ON NOVEMBER 15-17, 2019, THE SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE
Centennial Gala Weekend brought together more than a thousand alumni, students, parents and friends for a celebration of the School’s first 100 years of service. A series of panel discussions, lectures and performances commemorated the School’s legacy and examined the key issues that will define the next century of international affairs.
On Saturday, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi opened the full-day program by recognizing SFS as “an icon of public service and intellectual achievement in the world.” The opening plenary explored women’s leadership in international affairs and featured SFS alumnae who are leaders in Con-
gress, media and diplomacy. Ambassador Melanne Verveer (I’66, G’69), Executive Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, led the conversation with Karen Courington (MSFS’10), Director of Product Support Operations at Facebook, Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy (MSFS’04), Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Shéhérazade Semsar-de-Boisséson (SFS’90, MSFS’90, P’20, P’23), CEO of POLITICO Europe, HRH Princess Ghida Talal (SFS’86, MSFS’86), Chairperson of the King Hussein Cancer Foundation and Center and Uzra Zeya (SFS’89), President and CEO of Alliance for Peacebuilding.
Saturday’s daytime events concluded with a closing plenary featuring former U.S. Secretary of State and SFS professor Madeleine Albright (P’87, P’94, H’99), General George Casey, Jr. (SFS’70), 36th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army and George Tenet (SFS’76, H’03, P’10), former Director of the CIA. The discussion focused on the diplomatic toolbox, a set of methods and practices for diplomatic leadership in the modern world that Albright has been teaching SFS students for decades. She reflected on the enduring ability of these tools to meet new challenges in international affairs. “The tools are the same—except for cyber—but they’re operating in new circumstances,” she said.
On Friday, David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group, delivered a Lloyd George Centennial Lecture on the Future of the Global Order on the theme “Greater Transparency for BroadBased Growth.” Malpass discussed how the World Bank is focused on reducing inequality and assisting fragile states. “We have major development challenges today, but I’m hopeful that we can make progress using the shared knowledge from decades of better experiences,” he said. Malpass explained that one of the ways the organization was supporting struggling economies around the world was to develop distinct solutions for individual economies. “In my first seven months as World Bank president, I have stressed the importance of building country programs tailored to the unique circumstances of each economy,” he said.
01 In a conversation led by Spokesperson for the United Nations Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric (SFS’88, P’23), Lulu Garcia-Navarro (SFS’94), host of NPR’s Sunday Weekend Edition, Dorothée Kellou (MAAS’12), freelance journalist and filmmaker and Alexander Marquardt (SFS’04), CNN Senior National Correspondent, discussed the challenges of report
ing on war zones, foreign governments and more.
02 Kara Swisher (SFS’84), host of the Recode Decode podcast and editor-at-large at Recode, interviewed Ambassador Susan E. Rice, National Security Advisor (2013-2017) and U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations (2009-2017).
03 Kathleen R. McNamara, Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University, moderated a discussion on dealing with the global rise of authoritarianism. Ambassador Ivo Daalder (MA’82), former U.S. Permanent Representative on the Council to NATO, Margaret Huang (SFS’91), Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, Denis McDonough (MSFS’96), former White House Chief of Staff for President Obama, and Ambassador Nancy Soderberg (MSFS’84), former U.S. Alternate Representative to the United Nations, explored the prospects for democracy in the 21st century.
04 Former President of Poland (1995-2005) and former Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of Global Leadership at Georgetown University Aleksander Kwasniewski participated in a discussion on how to approach a resurgent Russia with Jill Dougherty (S’13), Centennial Fellow at SFS, Julia Smith Gurganus (RASP’94), former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia, and Angela Stent, Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies and Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
On Saturday evening, distinguished guests, SFS alumni, faculty and students came together at the National Building Museum for the Centennial Gala. Beloved SFS professor Secretary Madeleine Albright introduced the keynote speaker, President Bill Clinton. She described Clinton as “a leader who truly grasped the depth of American responsibility” and expressed her gratitude for the opportunity he had given her, “an immigrant and refugee,” to represent the United States.
Attendees were treated to a performance by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silkroad Ensemble. Afterward, in conversation with Lulu Garcia-Navarro (SFS’94), host of NPR’s Sunday Weekend Edition, Ma stressed the importance of sharing cultural traditions across borders. “[Culture] is service. Why are we doing this? We’re doing this for one another, for meaning, for purpose, for our survival.”
“We’re here to do something that’s bigger than ourselves. This is what culture is, and culture turns ‘the other’ into ‘us.’ ”
—YO-YO MA
by PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON
President Bill Clinton (SFS’68) delivered the keynote Centennial Address and discussed how SFS values have shaped his political philosophy. He described a 1991 speech he gave at Georgetown University where he underscored the responsibility of the United States to find common ground with communities and governments around the world through diplomacy. “I came to Georgetown and tried to lay out my philosophy about what we should do in America and around the world in the post-Cold War era,” he said.
The commitment to shared global values underscored in that speech is still applicable today, he continued. He emphasized that, in a world where many people still feel left behind, divisive rhetoric can gain popular support and it was important that the SFS continue to produce leaders in international affairs who embody the School’s values and commitment to service: “If you want SFS to have a 200th anniversary, and you want America to be here as a democracy after another 100 years, we better spend more time thinking about what’s entailed in the 99.5 percent of our humanity that we share.
“You will never have a better place to teach how to make a world with more ‘us’ and fewer ‘them,’ less bloodshed and more hope, but you still have to do all the work.”
MSB and SFS Faculty Co-Teaching Integrated Business and Global Affairs Degree
by HERB SCHAFFNER
This spring, Georgetown University students attended the first course in a new joint-degree program, the Bachelor of Science in Business and Global Affairs, designed to prepare graduates to thrive at the intersection of business, geopolitics and global policy. A collaboration between the Walsh School of Foreign Service and the McDonough School of Business, the Bachelor of Science in Business and Global Affairs combines core concepts from each of these successful programs with fresh curricula and an emphasis on experiential learning. The jointly designed and delivered signature courses extend throughout the program, first year through senior year, and include multiple for-credit, on-location experiential units.
SFS Professor Irfan Nooruddin cochaired the academic task force that conceived the degree and is team-teaching the first course with business professors J. Bradford Jensen and Pietra Rivoli. Nooruddin explains the objectives of the new program.
“The Provost asked the task force to
find opportunities for Georgetown to be a pioneer in international business education, combining the strengths of the business school and what is the premier school of international affairs in the country,” says Nooruddin.
“We knew we wanted a program that leveraged the successful aspects of each school—there was no need to reinvent the wheel. We created a program that forced faculty in both schools to come together and ask, ‘What do our business students need to know about global affairs to make good decisions? And what do our foreign service students need to know about busi-
SFS Professor Irfan Nooruddin co-chaired the academic task force that conceived the degree and is team-teaching the first course with business professors J. Bradford Jensen and Pietra Rivoli.
ness to be effective?’
“Imagine you’re working for General Motors,” continues Nooruddin. “You’re trying to think about where to set up your next plant. Arriving at the best answer involves business school training that helps you think about supply chains, financing and the business environment. But an international affairs orientation is also essential. That allows you to think about the political risks not only in terms of global dynamics, but also the domestic politics wherever you locate the plant.
“Or let’s say you are a development professional working for the World Bank and you’re trying to set up a program to support entrepreneurs in Senegal. You will only be successful if you can answer questions about international development and global finance.”
What makes this program unique?
The program revolves around a central theme—understanding the causes and consequences of globalization for societies and economies around the world. Put another way, the program is preparing graduates to address some of the most urgent and complex issues facing the globe.
With this in mind, faculty from both schools came together to create a new set of courses, combining knowledge from both business and international affairs into each course. Faculty from the two schools will collaborate in delivering the curriculum, also in an innovative format.
The program revolves around a central theme— understanding the causes and consequences of globalization for societies and economies around the world.
Finally, the program incorporates a variety of experience-based learning protocols involving projects with enterprises in and outside the U.S. These, led by Georgetown faculty, will be intensive exposures to the application of the theories learned in traditional classroom work.
“The program will deliver a unique intellectual experience in the classroom, but also an incredibly rich set of extracurricular activities that take advantage of Georgetown’s location in Washington, D.C., and also the school’s global footprint,” says Nooruddin.
Georgetown’s New Center for Security and Emerging Technology by ANTOINETTE
Jason Matheny says he was in an “unusual” position in 2018 after leaving key leadership roles with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. Matheny came up with an idea for what he wanted to do next—create a research organization to study the security implications of emerging technologies—and quickly snared a $55-million grant to do just that.
“When I was in government, I often needed high-quality, nonpartisan analysis of global developments in technology,” he says. “Among those developments are
ligence, or AI, that present new risks and opportunities for national and international security.” AI is an interdisciplinary science that makes it possible for machines to learn from experience and perform tasks that usually require human intelligence.
Many institutions showed avid interest in providing a
home for Matheny’s research center after the Open Philanthropy Project funded it, he says. But he swiftly decided on Georgetown and the Walsh School of Foreign Service. “I picked Georgetown because of its unique combination of qualities,” says Matheny. “Its academic strengths, its physical location in the nation’s
We are trying to get the facts right and use data to inform wise technology policy.”
—JASON MATHENY
national security expertise, specialists in international relations from the university, linguists, economists, survey researchers and other experts.”
Among the first to join CSET’s high-powered roster of around 50 researchers was Dewey Murdick, CSET’s director of data science, and previously the chief analytics officer for the Department of Homeland Security. Helen Toner, an expert on China and AI, became CSET’s director of strategy. Georgetown Assistant Teaching Professor Ben Buchanan, who studies AI and cybersecurity, became a Senior Faculty Fellow.
Georgetown students who work at CSET as fellows and research analysts are trained in how to present information and testimony to policymakers. They are encouraged to enroll in university classes that train professional staff for government roles.
were very important to me.”
By spring 2019, the Center
office within walking distance schedule of briefings for Congress, the White House and various government agencies involved in national security.
“CSET started hiring immediately, and we’ll continue to hire,” says Matheny. “We’re bringing in people from the top ranks of government and -
town professors and students working as data specialists, policy analysts, technology and security researchers. We hire people with
Matheny says one of CSET’s focus areas is understanding how AI can be used and misused by other countries. Russia’s continuing campaigns to disrupt U.S. elections by spreading false “facts” and stirring up animosities have thus far not involved use of AI, as best as experts can determine—but Matheny says Russia could try to “go there” for cost-efficiency and replace phalanxes of paid disinformation agents with a computer program. “By the same token,” he observes, “AI can potentially be used to detect disinformation and identify cases of malicious text and fake multimedia.”
Because CSET is not a government agency or restricted by government needs for secrecy, Matheny notes, it can pursue analytic questions with academic rigor and peer-review: “We are trying to get the facts right and use data to inform wise technology policy.”
The future of social entrepreneurship will surely be shaped by global, motivated and tech-savvy young people such as Global Human Development graduate student Maputi Botlhole (GHD’20)—adept at finding solutions to human needs at the intersection of technology, education and human health.
Growing up in New Brighton, a South African Township still experiencing the effects of the underdevelopment and racial oppression of black residential areas under apartheid, Botlhole brings truly unique perspective to the challenges of human development. Maputi is a graduate of the nonprofit Ubuntu Pathways, the Port Elizabeth nonprofit that provides an integrated support system of health, education and social support in the townships.
Maputi credits Ubuntu Pathways for bringing services to a deprived community and connecting young girls to go to school and to economic vitality. “What I see at Ubuntu Pathways is the kind of thinking that the School of Foreign Service wants to cultivate, creating platforms that enable people to elevate themselves—without the savior mentality. It’s about giving a lifeline to me and thousands of others so we can make something of ourselves.”
Botlhole says, “It is a full-circle experience for me to think that the chief strategy officer at Ubuntu, Jana Zindell, was a Georgetown graduate. She was instrumental in transforming Ubuntu’s amazing energy and people into a proven, sustainable model of intervention.
“One of the things I appreciate about my experience in the GHD master’s program,” Maputi notes, “is the chance to become this kind of leader, gaining cross-texture fluency in technology, human development and the business marketplace. Understanding that effective solutions such as Ubuntu Pathways do not operate in silos—that’s key
to creating equitable opportunity.”
Working with Professor Holly Wise, Maputi’s internship in Thailand in the summer of 2019 underscored her skills in social enterprise and technology. Maputi was familiar with the health-care challenges in Thailand through her work at USAID as a program officer on the DELIVER project , where she oversaw the shipments of malaria medicines and other commodities to 24 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
She arrived in Bangkok for the internship shortly after Thailand had passed a new law, the Social Enterprise Promotion Act, which provided financial support for social enterprises to invest profits back into their sustainability and social missions.
“My role was to help identify new revenue-generating models to further the delivery of HIV services,” Botlhole says. “We explored other opportunities available for the software tool that was already helping with data collection and tracking of clients across the continuum of HIV services.”
Both in Bangkok and on a trip to Chi ang Mai in northern Thailand, Maputi presented successful social enterprise models with guidance on developing in fluencers and funders.
The networking was also on point. “Con necting with the Georgetown alumni chap
ter in Bangkok opened up the city for me,” she says. “I made a number of friends and contacts. This is a testament to how students at Georgetown can expand their network across the globe. I came from a township in South Africa, so that is pretty cool.”
Upon returning to campus, Botlhole kept up the momentum. She organized three panels at the 2019 Africa Business Conference, including one on disruptive technologies where new connections led to a second iteration of the mobile app she’d developed years earlier, this time with in-app purchases.
She is also co-president of NetImpact on campus. “I am a big supporter,” Maputi says. “NetImpact is about creating the next generation of leaders committed to equity, inclusion and an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving. Profitable interventions to empower people for better lives isn’t a contradiction.
“With my graduate degree, I will continue to be a global citizen, to go to different parts of the world and use any and all resources to build bridges among communities around the world.
“Look at my case,” Maputi says. “If not for the Internet, even for myself as a young woman from New Brighton township, I could not have connected with opportunities and education, with people from different corners of the world.”
“With my graduate degree, I will continue to be a global citizen, to go to different parts of the world and use any and all resources to build bridges among communities around the world.”
SFS
one of them being art.”
Students in SFS’s year-long course Politics and Performance: Confronting the Past, Shaping the Future, taught by Professor Derek Goldman and Ambassador Cynthia Schneider (Co-Directors of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at SFS) spent the week of spring break last year attending dynamic performances and workshops with leading Cambodian artists in traditional and contemporary theater, music, dance, drumming and more. In a short time, it left a deep impression. “I really hope that the students come away from the course with a deep and really nuanced understanding of the role that arts and culture can play in different societies, particularly in a post-conflict situation,” Schneider has said of the program.
dead and aided the rise of the Khmer Rouge, architects of the genocide that killed one-third of Cambodia’s population.
“The earrings were part of her larger narrative of her parents and the carnage of war,” Garcia Escobar Plascencia says. “It speaks to the permanence of what we do in terms of our foreign policy, how what we did 30, 40 years ago still affects people, even if they’re a generation removed from those that have actually experienced it. What does that permanence of memory do in terms of our ability to have future relationships?”
Student Alejandro Garcia Escobar Plascencia Explores the Dynamics of Healing in a Post-Conflict Society by
Growing up in Libertyville, IL, Alejandro Garcia Escobar Plascencia (SFS’21) visited the Holocaust Museum in nearby Skokie and had the “privilege of listening to survivors of the Holocaust share their experiences with us.” In the spring of 2019, those voices echoed and resonated as he and his classmates in SFS’s Centennial Lab on politics and performance spent a week in Cambodia, learning how the arts are helping rebuild a society fractured by genocide.
“We would process and articulate how we felt, or just check in with each other as we rode in open-sided tuktuks from place to place,” says Garcia Escobar Plascencia, a junior majoring in Culture and Politics at SFS. His experience has inspired him to spend the 2020 spring semester studying post-genocide restoration and peacebuilding
SARI HARRAR
in Rwanda—and to consider a future working on international crisis management issues, perhaps as a lawyer. “The whole purpose of this Centennial Lab was to look at how art intersects with reconciliation. It was transformative. You can’t just focus on a narrative of death.
You have to look beyond—at resilience and at the beauty of a country able to come together through different channels,
It’s one of several SFS Centennial Labs, a program begun in 2017, built around an emerging and significant issue, idea, problem or challenge in a real community. Other labs focus on subjects such as development innovation in India, refugees and migrant children, national security and social media and development and displacement in the Arab world, among others.
During a theater workshop, a Cambodian participant gave Garcia Escobar Plascencia earrings made of metal from the barrage of U.S. bombs dropped secretly on the country in the 1960s and 1970s. The massive bombings left tens of thousands
“The whole purpose of this Centennial Lab was to look at how art intersects with reconciliation. It was transformative. You can’t just focus on a narrative of death. You have to look beyond—at resilience and at the beauty of a country able to come together through different channels, one of them being art.”
Before viewing a memorial in a former Khmer Rouge prison, a guide at the Documentation Center of Cambodia told the group about another layer of nuance. “We learned that some perpetrators of the genocide were also its victims,” Garcia Escobar Plascencia recalls. “So when you have questions and conversations about reconciliation, what does that mean when you have people occupying both positions?”
For Garcia Escobar Plascencia, the trip changed fundamental ideas about what it means to hear firsthand accounts of the survivors of violence—that these are narratives that deserve to be heard just as they are. “We went to the killing fields outside Phnom Penh and heard from the mother of one of our guides, who survived the genocide, about the sacrifices and losses she experienced,” he says. “It was a humbling experience, just listening to people.” He’ll take that into his semester in Rwanda as he studies a local language, takes classes focused on the nation’s recent genocide and prepares to write a research paper. “These are scars, literal scars that people still keep with them,” he says. “I want to be able to listen and have a conversation without thinking about what I’m going to get out of it. It’s not for personal intellectual profit. I think that’s something I’ll constantly remember.”
With a career spent at the forefront of national security and energy policy, Julia Nesheiwat is leading an ambitious effort to stem the tide of climate change in the Sunshine State.
BY MEGHAN LEWIT
Throughout her career, Julia Nesheiwat (SSP’08) has been at the crux of global events shaping environmental and energy policy. As an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army serving in Iraq and Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, she witnessed the challenges of building a security strategy in places struggling with access to the basic resources of electricity and clean water.
In 2011, while conducting research with the Japanese government, she experienced the magnitude 9 earthquake that launched a massive tsunami, the impacts of which were felt throughout the world. It later inspired her Ph.D. work on post-natural disaster reconstruction at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
And last September— serving as Florida’s newly appointed chief resilience officer—Nesheiwat was embedded in the state’s emergency operations center as Hurricane Dorian approached Florida’s vulnerable coastline.
“I wonder sometimes that trouble seems to find me,” Nesheiwat says. “But seeing the resiliency of a community and how they bounce forward from a disaster, it focused my interest in how nations, states and cities can respond and build back stronger.”
As Florida’s first chief
resilience officer—and the first person in the country to fill such a role—Nesheiwat is focused squarely on the future. She is leading the development of a comprehensive strategy to mitigate the effects of climate change in a state that is ground zero for sea level rise in the U.S.
“The state has over 1,300 miles of low-lying coastline, and the last four hurricanes that have hit Florida have all been at Category 5. There is no doubt that we are experiencing the impacts of climate change
sector to drive infrastructure investments and innovation.
The future of climate and energy policy will be about resilience—developing coordinated, strategic responses at the community, state and national levels, she says. And while there are clearly profound challenges, there are also tremendous opportunities. Florida, Nesheiwat notes, is poised to become a technology hub for solutions to the flooding caused by sea level rise.
As Florida’s first chief resilience officer—and the first person in the country to fill such a role—Nesheiwat is focused squarely on the future.
with stronger storms and higher seas, and we must respond proactively rather than reactively,” Nesheiwat says.
Building the roadmap to respond to these pressing challenges is a massive coordination effort—bringing together the state’s departments of transportation, environmental protection, economic opportunity, health, emergency management and fish and wildlife conservation, as well as state legislators and the private
She came to SFS to pursue a master’s degree in national energy security after completing back-to-back tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“My time overseas opened my eyes to the challenges and scarcity of natural resources,” she says. “Being on the ground in Baghdad with constant power outages and no running water raised these issues of how do you plan ahead when you don’t have access to basic resources? When I returned back to the U.S., I was inspired to dig deeper into these issues, with the understanding that national security goes beyond other traditional topics such as counterterrorism.”
At the same time, she transitioned from a military career to a government role, working in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on climate resilience issues.
Her time at SFS enabled Nesheiwat to apply an academic perspective to her day-to-day work in government. Her research focused on how disparate countries were responding to climate challenges, creating a platform for her future work.
“It’s not all gloom and doom. Addressing these issues opens avenues for public-private partnerships, technology innovation and sharing best practices. It’s a chance to build a stronger economic policy around resilience—one that’s also closely tied to our foreign policy.”
Nesheiwat credits her time at SFS with providing critical insight into how energy and climate sits at the nexus of domestic and foreign policy.
“This sense of interconnectedness has only become stronger as the urgency has intensified globally,” she says. “We’re seeing the impacts now, and today other countries are experiencing the same issues—whether it’s an island country like Japan confronting natural disasters and rising sea levels or the Netherlands developing innovative approaches to flood prevention.”
As future leaders in shaping global affairs, SFS students will grapple with the challenges and opportunities that climate policy presents, she notes.
“Whether you’re interested in the business world or national security or foreign policy, your careers will be impacted in some inherent way,” Nesheiwat says. “How do you move from a mindset of vulnerability to one of resilience? This is a question that confronts all of us.”
The Ebola outbreak. Anti-LGBTQ LAWS in Africa. The Flint water crisis. Hillary Clinton’s emails. The Benghazi investigation. Public policy at Facebook.
Zaid A. Zaid’s career has intersected with some of the decade’s most hot-button issues. Zaid credits the SFS for training him to look at controversial issues from multiple angles and to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. “The SFS produces well-rounded students who can look at issues from a variety of points of view—the political, economic, social, technical. It gives us the ability to operate anywhere,” says Zaid.
“When I studied abroad in Cairo as an undergraduate, my American privilege hit me in the face for the first time. Seeing the extreme poverty was difficult to deal with. And I was in school with kids who lived in mansions with servants. I was in the uncomfortable middle, and I was pretty miserable. I called home to my dean at the SFS to see if I could leave early, and he gave me excellent advice. ‘You want to be a diplomat? You are going to have to deal with being uncomfortable.’ I stayed in Cairo and ended up making life-long friends,” says Zaid.
Zaid graduated from the School of Foreign Service in 1997 and went on to receive a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He started his career in the Foreign Service as a political officer in Cairo, Egypt. In 2004, he volunteered to serve in Baghdad, Iraq, where he was the liaison between the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council. He also served in New York at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
After his time in the Foreign Service, Zaid went on to pursue a law degree at Columbia Law School, where he graduated in 2007, and then spent time in investigations and criminal litigation.
Zaid returned to the public sector when he joined the U.S. Agency for Internation-
al Development in the Obama administration. During his time at USAID, Zaid was part of the team handling the legal aspects of the response to the Ebola crisis.
“I was helping to figure out what we could and could not do to help,” he says. “There were no easy answers.”
He was also on the team charged with deciding whether to withdraw USAID funding from countries like Uganda that were proposing harsh anti-LGBTQ laws. “It was ugly stuff,” says Zaid. “We had to balance our commitment to human rights with the fact that many people would go hungry and without basic services if we withdrew aid,” says Zaid.
When Zaid was offered a job in the Obama White House, he was thrilled—and conflicted. He had always wanted to work at the White House, and was especially excited about the Obama Administration, but he also wanted to ensure that he was present for his six-month-old son. After talking it over with his husband, he de-
Today, Zaid is part of the Strategic Response Policy team at Facebook, where he deals with high-profile incidents that affect the business and reputational risk of the platform.
cided to accept. His position as special assistant to the President and associate White House counsel put him squarely in the middle of several new controversies.
“My first big assignment had to do with Hillary Clinton’s emails. Our role was to review them and flag anything that might be of concern to the Obama administration,” says Zaid.
“And then there was the Flint water crisis. The Department of Health and Human Services was the lead agency, but the White House felt strongly that we should try to do everything we could behind the scenes to help. It was my job to marshal all the federal resources we could. ”
Today, Zaid is part of the Strategic Response Policy team at Facebook, where he deals with high-profile incidents that affect the business and reputational risk of the platform.
“People ask me why I decided to go into the tech sector after being at the White House,” says Zaid. “I say, I knew that when I was working in the Foreign Service, for USAID and the White House, we were all focused on a mission rather than a client. I wanted to stay mission-focused—it’s more satisfying. My job now is to keep the Facebook platform safe, and that’s a big mission.”
He notes that SFS graduates will always be in demand where there’s a need for thoughtful responses to complex situations, including the tech sector.
“There’s a huge opportunity for people with SFS degrees to be part of the technology conversation,” Zaid observes. “For a long time, the tech sector was the sole domain of engineers. Now we are recruiting people for their cultural understanding, in recognition that the technical, cultural and geopolitical are wrapped up together.”
01
Tamara Sonn, Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the History of Islam, became the new director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) in July 2019. She succeeds Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown, who focused on building a program of academic conferences and colloquia for the Center. Sonn aims to bring an interdisciplinary, empathetic approach to the ACMCU. “Understanding differences and commonalities so that we can work together to resolve political conflicts and other challenges facing the global community is the goal of the ACMCU,” she says.
02 Carol Benedict, Sun Yat-Sen Professor of China Studies, was elected chair of the SFS Faculty Council, becoming the first woman to hold the position. She succeeds Irfan Noorudin and hopes to “emulate the efforts of past SFS faculty chairs by continuing to foster diversity in faculty hiring and to maintain a culture of inclusion” where people from diverse backgrounds can thrive. “I may be the first woman to serve in this role, but I am certain I will not be the last,” she adds.
03 Joanna Lewis, Associate Professor of Energy and Environment, was named the new director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA), starting in July 2019, succeeding Professor Mark Giordano. Her research focuses on low-carbon development and sustainable energy options in developing countries, with a particular focus on China’s energy policy. Lewis hopes to continue expanding the program to “strategically position STIA and SFS as a hub for engagement with policymakers and other key stakeholders on the crucial science and technology challenges of our time.” STIA will strive to meet students’ growing demand for an interdisciplinary major that spans the natural and social sciences.
Jonathan A.C. Brown, Associate Professor and Chair of Islamic Civilization for the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, published Slavery and Islam, exploring the moral and theological tension between slavery's universal vilification today and the fact that it was once condoned by all major religions.
Daniel Byman, Professor in the Security Studies Program and Vice Dean of Undergraduate Affairs, released Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad. The book traces the origin and development of jihadi volunteerism, the practice of traveling to war zones to join violent Islamist organizations, and connects contemporary instances in Iraq and Syria to past occurrences in Chechnya, Bosnia and Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Abraham Newman, SFS Professor and Director of the Mortara Center for International Studies, co-wrote a book, Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle Over Freedom and Security, analyzing how international terrorism, e-commerce and transnational data networks have shaped how the United States and the European Union navigate privacy and security regulation.
Ken Opalo, SFS Assistant Professor, celebrated the release of his first book, Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies. It follows the autocratic origins of democratic institutions in Africa, pushing back on the popular notion that African legislatures are ineffectual and instead asserting that they continue to play pivotal roles in the era of decolonization.
Katharine Donato, Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration and Director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM), and Elizabeth Ferris, Research Professor in the ISIM, co-wrote Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts, a roadmap for navigating the 2018 Global Compact for Migration. The Compact, Donato and Ferris explain, is the “first-ever effort to develop a comprehensive framework on migration.”
Ambassador Dennis Ross, Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy, co-authored Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel’s Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny, which details the founding generation of Israeli leadership: David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. The book aims to profile Israel’s first leaders in all their moral, religious and political commitments, as well as their shortcomings.
Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government and chair of the College’s Government Department, marked the release of Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century. He traces the origins of cultural anthropology at the beginning of the 20th century by profiling its founder, Franz Boas, and his acolytes and tells the story of radical anthropologists whose egalitarian methods challenged eugenics.
George Shambaugh, Associate Professor of International Affairs and Government, published Oracles, Heroes or Villains: Economic Policymakers, National Politicians and the Power to Shape Markets, an analysis of the changing relationship between economic technocrats, politicians and the global economy through the lens of recent economic crises.
Oriana Skylar Mastro, Assistant Professor of Security Studies, has written a book examining how and why combatants decide to negotiate with their enemies. The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace in Wartime identifies two key factors that leaders in conflict consider: if the enemy will interpret overtures to negotiation as a sign of weakness and how the enemy will alter their strategy after moves toward compromise are made.
Elizabeth Stanley, Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program, wrote Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma, an exploration of the neurobiology of stress, trauma and resilience. Stanley, who served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer, draws on these experiences to study how recovery and resilience can be learned.
John R. McNeill, University Professor, co-edited a comparative history of environmentalism during the Cold War titled Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945–1990. Ranging from Chernobyl to environmental activism in East Germany, the collection brings together archival material from both Europe and the United States.
Angela Stent, Professor of Government and Foreign Service and director of the Center of Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, released Putin’s World: Russia Against the West, in which she examines Russia’s rise under Vladimir Putin from the ruins of the immediate post-Soviet era to a resurgence of its role on the world stage.
Emily Mendenhall, Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Science, Technology and International Affairs program, released Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty and HIV, a groundbreaking publication exploring how political, economic, social and ecological factors exacerbate disease interactions among the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations.
Elizabeth Hervey Stephen, Associate Professor of Demography and winner of the Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award, authored a book describing the social and demographic outcomes of South Korea’s economic miracle. South Korea’s Demographic Dividend: Echoes of the Past or Prologue to the Future? examines how low fertility and mortality rates have led to a large working-age population.
Amb. Todd Robinson (SFS’85) Addresses the Problem of Corruption in Central America
NOVEMBER 29, 2018
The SFS welcomed Ambassador Todd Robinson (SFS’85) back to campus to share his perspective on the problem of corruption in Central America with a small group of students and to answer questions about his career in the Foreign Service. The conversation, hosted by the Center for Latin American Studies, featured a discussion about the U.S. Department of State’s efforts to help Central American countries root out corruption. Amb. Robinson is the senior advisor for Central America in the State Department Bureau
of Western Hemisphere Affairs, and he has previously served as chargé d’affaires in Venezuela and as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Guatemala.
“We Need You More Than Ever”: Hillary Clinton Stresses the Importance of Diplomacy at SFS and GU Politics Symposium
FEBRUARY 6, 2019
The SFS welcomed foreign service officers and career diplomats to Georgetown for "The Future of Diplomacy," a half-day symposium, as part of the Lloyd George Centennial Lectures on the Future of the Global Order. The Honorable Hillary Clinton delivered the keynote, speaking in conversation with Ambassador Bill Burns. Clinton encouraged the students gathered in Gaston Hall to pursue careers in foreign policy, diplomacy and development. “We need you more than ever,” she said. “There’s a lot of hard work
JANUARY 2019 The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace & Security, in collaboration with Women Ambassadors Serving America, hosted 60 current and former U.S. women ambassadors to celebrate female leadership in diplomacy. The gathering, which included many SFS alumni, reflected on a history of global engagement by these women and those who paved the way for the current generation of women in leadership.
that has to be done, but there’s also a lot of room for imagination.” The symposium, sponsored by the SFS and the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, also featured two breakout panels: “The Essential Diplomat” and “U.S. Values in Foreign Policy.”
Susan Rice, Stephen Hadley Debate the Future of National Security
FEBRUARY 27, 2019
The SFS hosted Ambassador Susan Rice and The Honorable Stephen Hadley at the Lloyd George Centennial Lecture on the Future of National Security, the fourth lecture in a series. Rice, who served as National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017, emphasized the need for the U.S. to share responsibility on the world stage. “We cannot do everything,” she said. “We do need to bring others along with us to share the costs” of ensuring global security and enforcing the rule of law. Hadley, National Security Advisor from 2005 to 2009, questioned the possibility of continuity in foreign policy under the Trump administration. “This president was elected to be a disruptor and to call into question a lot of those premises. One of the things you do is you try to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”
Lloyd George Centennial Lecture Considers the Future of the Global Economy
MARCH 13, 2019
In another installment of the Lloyd George Centennial Lecture Series, the SFS welcomed Adam Tooze, professor of history at Co-
lumbia University, director of the European Institute and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, to talk about the future of the global economy. Tooze discussed the drivers of global economic stability, as well as the origins of modern challenges to governance. After his keynote lecture, Tooze joined Gita Gopinath, economic counselor and research director at the International Monetary Fund, and Robert Zoellick, former president of the World Bank, for a panel discussion moderated by Caroline Atkinson, former head of global policy at Google. The panel addressed issues of international cooperation and the rise of China as a global economic power.
APRIL 10-12, 2019
Activist, songwriter and artist Somi took part in a three-day residency at SFS, sharing songs from her critically acclaimed albums, The Lagos Music Salon and Petite Afrique, and engaging students in conversations about storytelling, the creative process and the nature of cultural memory. Somi’s residency was part of the inaugural CrossCurrents festival, hosted by the Georgetown Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. During her stay, the African Studies Program hosted Somi for a sit-down chat with a small group of students, where she described the pressure she faced from record companies to sound a certain way instead of being herself, and the ways in which her experience as the child of immigrants has shaped her career. Following her performance in Gaston Hall, Somi reflected on her latest album, which she calls “a meditation, a song cycle about the dignity of immigrants, the dignity specifically of the Harlem community, and the humanity of all immigrants and how their stories have to be told and honored.”
APRIL 25, 2019
The School of Foreign Service and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs welcomed Ben Rhodes, former Depu-
SEPTEMBER 20, 2019 Georgetown students helped the SFS celebrate its centennial with a birthday party in the Healey Family Student Center. The celebration included SFS trivia raffles, student performances, SFS t-shirts and, of course, birthday cake.
ty National Security Advisor in the Obama administration, for a discussion of his career and recently published memoir, The World As It Is. Prior to the larger discussion, a small group of students had the chance to meet with Rhodes for a conversation moderated by Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis (SFS’76), former chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. During a discussion moderated by Berkley Center Director Shaun Casey, Rhodes shared his experience leading the negotiation process for the restoration of U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2014. In a powerful moment for everyone present, Rhodes described the final reading of the agreement in Vatican City, whose government helped mediate the negotiations. “You got the sense of the moral component of the Vatican involvement,” he said. “The principle that adversaries can reconcile through dialogue and that there’s a common humanity on different sides of borders, that was very present in the room when we were there.”
SEPTEMBER 21, 2019
In collaboration with Georgetown College and the Georgetown University Alumni Association, the SFS hosted its second SFS Centennial Alumni College, this time in New York City. Alumni had the chance to return to class—without the exams—by attending lectures by Georgetown faculty. The afternoon began with a discussion between Professor Angela Stent and SFS Dean Joel Hellman about Stent’s new book, Putin’s World From there, alumni chose among courses like Economic Espionage, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Torture: How the Gloves Came Off. The day concluded with a conversation with Mo Elleithee (SFS’94), executive director of
the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, about the 2020 presidential election, followed by a cocktail reception.
Sirleaf
SEPTEMBER 30, 2019
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and former president of Liberia (2006–2018), returned to Georgetown in September 2019 for a week of roundtables, panels and visits to SFS classes, as well as an interview with the student-run Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. While on campus, she visited Professor Lise Howard’s peacekeeping seminar and Professor Scott Taylor’s seminar on African Politics and Government. Sirleaf also joined a series of on-campus roundtables, discussing topics like peacekeeping and the role of small and fragile states in international relations. She joined U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Bintou Keita for a conversation about youth in conflict. Finally, former President Sirleaf and Keita participated in a panel titled “Women, Peace and Security,” which was moderated by Carla Koppell, a Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace & Security distinguished fellow.
In celebration of 100 years of the Walsh School of Foreign Service, SFS brought together alumni, parents and friends for festivities, conversations and performances to celebrate the century of service behind us and look forward to meet the challenges that lie ahead.
Commencement
Centennial Birthday Bash
Centennial Alumni College
Centennial Gala Weekend
SFS 100 Day at Georgetown Hoyas Men's Basketball Game
Ultimate Diplomatic Ball
John Carroll Weekend, Bermuda Reunion
Additional Centennial Celebrations: Rome, Italy London, UK San Francisco, CA New York City, NY Santa Cruz, Bolivia
SFS 100: A CENTURY OF SERVICE
Purchase a copy of SFS 100: A Century of Service, a coffee table book that commemorates the history, people and values that have formed SFS’s identity over the past 100 years.
Books are available for purchase at sfs.georgetown.edu/book. LOOK BACK WITH PRIDE
Thank you for celebrating the SFS Centennial with us throughout the 2019-2020 academic year.
With your support, our second century will be even more impactful, influential, and consequential than our first.
Please consider making a gift to the SFS Centennial Fund, which will help us to maintain and strengthen our legacy as the world's leading school in international affairs.
Thank you for your ongoing support!
Make a gift at sfs.georgetown.edu/give