G EOR G ETOW N UNIVERSITY • 2021-2022
POLICY AND DIPLOMACY
ENTER A NEW FRONTIER
Interdisciplinary initiatives at SFS
ESCAPING AFGHANISTAN
Students, faculty and alumni collaborate during crisis
INCLUSION IN ACTION
DEI at work in SFS programs
The SFS community honors the memory of Professor Albright
“[We
are reminded of] the very mission for which SFS was created over a century ago – to provide new generations of students with the tools to both analyze the complexities of the current geopolitical moment and to develop innovative solutions to secure a sustainable peace. SFS has never been more relevant.”
—DEAN
Walsh School of Foreign Service
GEORGETOW N UNIVERSITY • 2021-2022
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
02 Dean Hellman’s Welcome
Joel Hellman reflects on Madeleine Albright’s impact and how her legacy continues at SFS.
04 In Remembrance
Students and alumni remember Madeleine Albright as their professor and mentor.
06 Science, Technology and Business at SFS
Interdisciplinary initiatives shaping future leaders.
12 Escaping Afghanistan
The international SFS community came together in a time of crisis.
20 Inclusion in Action
Offering college credit and opening doors for high school students.
26 Showcasing Alumni Writer, chef and television host Pati Jinich (CLAS’05)
Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Foreign Intelligence Programs
Maher Bitar (SFS’06, L’12)
30 Faculty Profiles
Professor Emily Mendenhall, medical anthropologist
Assistant Professor Rajesh Veeraraghavan, author of Patching Development
34 Meet Our Students
Brian Britt (SFS’21, SSP’22)
Mohammad Lotfi (SFS’23)
Shirin Vetry (GHD’22)
36 Faculty Updates
38 Remember This: The Lesson of Jan
The acclaimed play began its national tour last fall.
40 Events
University
facebook.com/georgetownsfs twitter.com/georgetownsfs instagram.com/georgetown_sfs linkedin.com/school/ georgetownsfs Georgetown SFS
sfs.georgetown.edu
Honoring Madeleine Albright’s legacy by meeting the challenges of a new era.
Just a week before the start of our spring semester, I received a call from Madeleine Albright. She told me with a heavy heart that she would not be able to teach her planned course — America’s National Security Toolkit — in the face of serious health challenges. She left the call to the very last moment before the semester because, as she said, “the one thing I tried hardest not to give up was my teaching.” Ever the optimist, she told me not to worry as she would be back in the fall. Sadly, we lost her just a couple months later.
“In the 20th and 21st century, freedom had no greater champion than Madeleine Korbel Albright.”
Madeleine Albright was an American icon — a woman whose life story and life-long service embodied the very best ideals of the American story. At her memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral, she was honored by three American presidents, four secretaries of state, bipartisan Congressional leaders and delegations from nations around the world. In his eulogy, President Biden said, “In the 20th and 21st century, freedom had no greater champion than Madeleine Korbel Albright.”
—President Biden
SFS students knew her as Professor Albright, more formally the Michael and Virginia Mortara endowed distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy. For 40 years, she inspired generations of SFS students to understand the world and to serve the world. She joins the pantheon of SFS professors who shaped this school — like Professors Carol Quigley and Jan Karski — not only by the quality of their teaching but by the values they championed in their own lives. SFS will continue to find ways to honor her in the months and years ahead. As we do so, we will let her example guide us to be better global citizens committed to freedom everywhere.
Of course, the post-Cold War global order that Secretary Albright played such a major role in shaping is now facing unprecedented challenges. We are
barreling forward into a new era of great power competition that threatens so many of the hard-won gains that followed the end of the Cold War. It reminds us of the very mission for which SFS was created over a century ago — to provide new generations of students with the tools to both analyze the complexities of the current geopolitical moment and to develop innovative solutions to secure a sustainable peace. SFS has never been more relevant.
I am pleased to report that we have responded vigorously to the challenge. Our community rallied together in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion to support our Ukrainian students and hear
analysis from our best professors. Our faculty has been all over the airwaves helping the world understand the depth of the tragedy and the pathways ahead of us. We have brought the key decision-makers together to engage with our community including Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg; U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan; and USAID Administrator Samantha Power, among so many others. And I am particularly proud to report that our alumni stepped up to provide immediate scholarships for students impacted by the crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan, allowing us to provide safe haven for many whose lives have been disrupted. This is the spirit of SFS in action!
Madeleine Albright was our last in-person commencement speaker prior to COVID, and, as we usher in the next century of SFS, we are excited that Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to usher in our next century as our 2022 commencement speaker. The world’s leaders are drawn to SFS because they know our graduates are our best hope for meeting the world’s most pressing challenges. I hope that this issue of the SFS Magazine gives you some sense of what an exciting and consequential moment this is at SFS.
Joel Hellman Dean, Walsh School of Foreign Service
By Rosemary Lane and Ara Friedman
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY AND THE SFS community mourn the loss of Madeleine Albright, the first woman U.S. secretary of state, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and beloved professor who taught for almost 40 years at SFS.
Albright, a diplomat, author, business leader and human rights champion, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama in 2012. At Georgetown, she served as the Michael and Virginia Mortara endowed distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy at SFS — and was a frequent winner of the school’s outstanding professor award.
Since 1982, Albright, who rarely missed a class despite her global
commitments, inspired the more than 2,000 students she taught to live the values we seek to instill — a legacy that is almost incalculable in its reach.
“She inspired her students to share her spirit of urgency and action,” said former Secretary of State and Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security Honorary Founding Chair Hillary Clinton at Albright’s funeral, held at the Washington National Cathedral. “‘Silence may be golden,’ she told them. But it won’t win many arguments. You have to interrupt.”
Albright has been sharing her expertise with students since she first joined the Georgetown faculty in 1982. On the Hilltop, she was known for her rigorous coursework, Socratic teaching method, weekly
lunches with groups of students and unyielding support for students’ personal and professional growth in and out of the classroom.
Her America’s National Security ToolBox class — a rite of passage for generations of SFS students — explored the tools available to foreign policy practitioners. At the end of every semester, she hosted an all-day simulation in which students developed a U.S. response to a foreign policy crisis, often inviting them to her home afterward. Albright taught her last cohort of students in the fall semester of 2021.
Her deep knowledge of the underlying forces that shape international affairs remained relevant until the very last days of her life, when she raised her voice in a widely read New York Times op-ed to warn of the tragedy now before us in this brutal war on the European continent.
We are forever indebted to Madeleine Albright, and we will miss her deeply.
“Her class was the masterclass in global diplomacy. It was extraordinary to hear her candid examples of employing different diplomatic tools to influence global agendas. Her energy and wit were infectious — I remember the twinkle in her eye recounting the snake broach she wore when negotiating with Saddam Hussein. Secretary Albright’s incredible leadership to advance women and girls globally massively influenced the U.S.’s gender equality agendas and, personally, helped inspire my own career.”
—Elspeth Williams (SFS’08), Senior program officer for global gender equality and women’s health advocacy for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“One [memory] that stands out was at the end of a private dinner I had with her and a few other Czech students off campus. There was heavy rain that evening, and when she saw us waiting for a bus, she offered to drive us home. She spent the late evening getting us to where we needed to go to avoid the storm. Sitting in her car, I could not help but remember that first interaction I had with her as a high schooler and how things ended up coming full circle. I realized that something like that would probably not happen with any other secretary of state (or foreign minister of another country).”
—Jakub Hlávka (MAGES’14), Research assistant professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who has worked on projects funded by the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, NASA and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“My father became the foreign minister [of Japan] again. So, he was Dr. Albright’s counterpart. When they met for the first time, the newspaper said the next morning, ‘Foreign Minister
and the Secretary of State Talked About the Most Important Bilateral Issue.’ So I asked him, ‘Foreign Minister, what was the most important bilateral issue that you talked about with the secretary of state?’ And he said, ‘Well, we talked about your grade on her term paper.’ I said, ‘Dad, I got an A on that paper!’”
— Kono Taro (SFS’86), Nineterm member of the House of Representatives in Japan; foreign minister and defense minister of Japan and oversaw the country’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
“Professor Albright reached the highest echelons of power and still kept her style, her wit and her dedication to her students. She was always kind and accessible while being a brilliant negotiator who believed fiercely in democracy and in this country. That combination of values is what made me want to emulate her most.”
—Liz Alarcón (MSFS’15), Founder and executive director of Pulso, a digital media start-up that serves more than 1 million Latinos across the U.S, and a political commentator on U.S.-Latin American relations and Latin American politics.
“I have been admiring Secretary Albright’s work since I was in high school in Croatia. I will never forget walking into her office for the first time and her speaking to me in Croatian. To say the least, I was surprised. Secretary Albright was an incredible force through her dedication to defending democratic values and standing up to dictators. She never hesitated to use her voice, and I hope to be able to do the same in my life. “
— Luka Ignac (MAGES’22), McHenry and Huffington fellow at SFS. He was in Albright’s last class in fall 2021.
“I don’t know how to quite convey this feeling in words, but Secretary Albright, with her lifetime of accumulated knowledge and experience of the world, telling me that what I did was important, that what I did mattered — that is something that will never leave you.”
—Hannah Beswick (MAAS’14), Global affairs specialist whose work has spanned the United Nations, government and academia.
SFS is embedding science, technology and global business into world-class degree programs.
by HERB SCHAFFNER
While the Walsh School of Foreign Service may already be in its second century of existence, the SFS curriculum is far from stuck in the past. On the contrary, the school has continued to challenge its students to think holistically about how to confront the biggest international threats and opportunities today — including increasingly focusing its coursework on the intersection of global affairs and other areas such as science, technology and business.
Years ago, SFS got ahead of the curve and began to incorporate these kinds of analyses into international affairs. Three of its programs — the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Business and Global Affairs (BGA) and Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) — are leading the way in this interdisciplinary training and international affairs education and research.
The newest of these, CSET, “was established to connect policymakers with high-quality analysis of emergent technologies, particularly with relevance to their security implications,” says Dewey Murdick, CSET’s director. “The goal of CSET is to provide information that changes the course of decision-making
and positively impacts those decisions.”
At CSET, analysts crunch data to help experts and elected officials dispel misinformation about policy issues and debates when making decisions. More than 100 undergraduate and graduate students have worked as research assistants in the program.
“Technology is shaping how people interact,” Murdick says. “It’s shaping how policies get thought through. It’s shaping the actual things that used to require a ton of manual labor to do. You need to have people from different worldviews so that you don’t have blind spots. You need to be careful about your perspective.”
National security expert Jason Matheny was the founding director of CSET in 2019. He took leave to join the Biden Administration as deputy assistant to the president for technology and national security. In all, more than a dozen former staff and students have transitioned to government roles at various levels of service. Entering its fourth year, CSET has made itself indispensable to policymakers and scholars alike.
“What CSET, as an organization, can be proudest of is our beliefs about what kinds of research are needed to do the work here,” says CSET’s director of strategy, Helen Toner. “In the first few weeks of CSET in 2019, we identified semiconductors, the hardware required to run AI systems, as a crucial topic that had
received too little attention. Because of the way that we’re structured, the way we’re funded, we were able to say, okay, let’s go all-in on this. It was open-ended because we all agreed we needed to understand this space much better than we did. Saif Khan was one of our first research fellows. After two years and something like a dozen papers later, he made a significant contribution to the national security community’s understanding of how semiconductors affect national competitiveness, especially their role in AI.”
Now, CSET is growing with a significant additional grant from funders including Open Philanthropy and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that boosts total funding from 2019 through 2025 to more than $100 million. The program plans to build on a trio of efforts that have already established CSET as a unique resource of nonpartisan information for policymakers: AI standards and testing, biotechnology and making subgrants for technical research
One area of expansion is work on AI standards and testing. “We will focus on all the ways AI systems can go wrong and how to fix that, and how to manage that, especially in a national security context,” Toner says. “We have already hired two people full-time to get started on that and we are looking to hire more.”
“To accomplish anything of importance in society requires the cooperation of the business community and the policy community.”
CSET will also delve into critical questions of biotechnology and its applications. To better understand the field of genomics and how scientists are researching ways to manipulate it, for example, it will create computer models to understand and better estimate the risk of research that alters viruses and potentially increases the dangers of pathogens. The new analysis will be used by scientists and policymakers to help guide their decisions.
CSET’s third area of growth is the launch of its own grant initiative. “We’re calling it Foundational Research Grants,” says Toner. “We view certain questions as important from a policy and strategy perspective, [and they also] require technical expertise and technical research — the in-depth, in-the-weeds technical research we like to do to get traction on high-level questions.
“For example, if we’re thinking about international treaties and AI, then obviously, U.S. diplomats would love to know, if we did enter an AI-related treaty, what are the prospects of verifying that treaty? Is it possible at all? Is it easy? Is it expensive? Those are questions around diplomatic and policy interests that are also technical questions. Through this new program, CSET will make subgrants to support expanded technical research that can feed into these important policy and strategy questions.”
Another initiative breaking disciplinary barriers and revolutionizing international affairs education at SFS is the Bachelor of Science degree in Business and Global Affairs (BGA), Georgetown’s SFS and MSB interdisciplinary undergraduate degree. “To accomplish anything of importance in society requires the
cooperation of the business community and the policy community,” says Brad Jensen, McCrane/Shaker chair in international business at the McDonough School of Business (MSB) and director of the program.
“To solve climate change, to make progress on inequality, to respond effectively to global health crises like a pandemic,” he says, “government can’t do it alone. Business can’t do it alone. No country can do it alone. So, it’s got to be done by business and government working together across borders.”
“We need to train leaders who are more than competent, who are comfortable and understand the rich interaction between those two communities, and who are comfortable moving between those communities and understand the motivations, the strengths and the weaknesses of both communities,” Jensen says.
In 2017, Georgetown convened a task force, including faculty from both schools and various administrative deans, under the leadership of MSB Vice Dean Pietra Rivoli and then-SFS Faculty Chair Irfan Nooruddin, to design the joint degree program. The second cohort of BGA entered classrooms last fall. For those students, the joint degree does something refreshing and all too rare: gather professors from different disciplines to teach together in the same room.
“We decided we’re going to yoke faculty together and make them talk to one another,” Jensen says. “For example, I’ve been teaching in the gateway course, which is the first-year course. I’m an international trade economist. I’ve worked with political scientists from SFS and another colleague from the business school to put this gateway course together. As you might imagine, economists and political scientists sometimes approach issues differently, and the students see that. Even if there were two economists, one from the business school and one from SFS, the schools have different worldviews, pedagogical traditions and practices. Bringing the faculty together in this way can be incredibly frustrating — but even more rewarding.”
Students work towards intense interdisciplinary challenges that include evaluating the impacts of the global corporate value chains on communities and learning to manage operational,
financial and political risks. SFS Professor Shareen Joshi, in her course Global Organizations and Culture, encourages students to examine biases, blind spots and assumptions about the effects of culture “on how an American firm is expanding overseas.” For Joshi, there is enduring value in how, “the students learn to look inward, within, at what is the firm in the United States, and how is that related to the context of the United States? And when it goes abroad, what are some of the issues, like how is it affected by its own culture and the culture into which it expands?”
Joshi and MSB Professor Michael O’Leary lead the BGA second-year course, Global Organizations and Culture. They focus on culture from several viewpoints, exploring how it influences how societies think about themselves and behave toward others.
“This is where, again, we see the beauty of melding these two schools together,” Jensen says. “We get that kind of foundational view of what culture is from the SFS and Professor Joshi, while Professor O’Leary sets up this issue of cross-cultural teams and how colleagues from various places around the world work together online or perhaps in person. You’ve got time change, you’ve got language, you’ve got culture. How do we bring this together to make it work?”
For Joshi, economics can be understood only in a context that reveals the struggles of those who lack agency and voice. “My critique of economics comes from the overlap of society, culture and economics,” says Joshi. “I study women, local activism, selfhelp groups, environmental mobilization. All these situations raise so many questions, but they almost all have in common: How does the context determine the life of the individual?”
“Students are very interested in social identity, inclusion and justice,” says Joshi. “As a scholar, I examine these issues through the prism of economics. Broadly speaking, how does context shape opportunity — human capital opportunity? I do see that as an economics question. How does gender, how does cost, how does colonialism, how does environmental contamination determine the potential of an individual to be all they can be?”
Joshi frames the second-year course to explore how global economic interactions are shaped by cultural factors. Culture in these terms, she says, is about deep analyses. “It’s about why this country in Africa that was hit hard by the slave trade still has understandable, residual mistrust of institutions. What does it mean to succeed there? How do you deal with the fact
that all societies are stratified? In India, it might be caste, gender and religion. In America, it might be race, but stratification is stratification everywhere.
“Our students believe there’s this American idea that science is truth, data is truth. Science is good and technology is good. But again, it’s adopted in a context. It can be a weapon to some and a blessing to others. Science and technology can change society, and society can absorb science and technology differently depending on its structure. So, we talk about things like agricultural technologies. The Green Revolution of India fed a billion people — I’m probably alive because of it. But it worsened gender inequality. And it created more class-based inequality, and it poisoned the waters. So how do you do agricultural businesses in India in that light? We talk about the hard stuff.”
Ultimately, it’s the students, Joshi says, who make the second-year course so dynamic. “I love the students because most come here to learn with a moral compass, with a moral framework, with a desire to do good in the world. I like working with students like that, people who want to see beyond boundaries, people who want to critique ideas rather than cultivate themselves as the next set of stars to champion those ideas.”
Another hub of innovation at SFS is the popular STIA undergraduate and graduate programs. The STIA program, established 40 years ago, now oversees the second-largest undergraduate major at SFS, and the only major focused on science and tech. The STIA gateway course attracts more than 100 students a year and enrolls students from schools across the university, including nursing, business and the College. The program recently launched the first science and technology-focused graduate concentration at SFS, as well as a new postdoctoral fellowship program. The STIA faculty conduct research on issues ranging from climate change to global health and lead field research efforts around the world.
Joanna Lewis, provost’s distinguished associate professor of energy and the environment, has directed STIA for the past three years. “As the current STIA faculty member who has been here the longest, I have had the opportunity to see the program grow and evolve over the years, including through the hiring of many energetic new faculty, and watch it become a truly inspiring place,” she says. “STIA is very dynamic. All the faculty work on different issues in science and technology that have direct implications for international affairs. Our common thread is that we all have and value science and technical training that informs our research.”
Research interests and projects of 2022 STIA graduates exemplify the breadth and depth of opportunities students and faculty pursue. STIA honors student Anjali Britto (SFS’22) works with Professor Sarah Stewart Johnson on the effects of galactic cosmic rays on the preservation of organic molecules in Mars analog samples. Britto and Johnson also examined how international scientific cooperation gave rise to the joint American-European MOMA instrument, which analyzes rock and soil, aboard the upcoming Rosalind Franklin Mars rover. Honors student James Bond (SFS’22) was a Raines Fellow and finalist for a Truman Scholarship. His senior thesis explores the concept of monopoly, comparing case studies of Union Pacific Railroad and Facebook to assess the changing meanings of the concept in the data-driven present with Big Tech. Pre-law student Olivia Kleier (SFS’22),
mentored by Lewis, traveled the United States for her honors thesis, from Hawaii to Virginia, to explore how the lived experiences of policymakers influences state-level climate adaptation policies. STIA faculty are constantly adapting the curriculum to reflect emerging issues in science, technology and international affairs. For example, Lewis recalls when a current STIA major approached her last year: “He told me, ‘What I’m really worried about is the electric grid and its vulnerabilities, from blackouts to cyber attacks.’ We were able to identify a faculty team who are now teaching their first course this semester on the electric grid.
“We were able to quickly put together a new course jointly taught by an electrical engineer and an energy markets expert. It’s a really exciting class that was immediately oversubscribed. That’s just one example of how we can be nimble as a program to address changing issues in the world.”
Across the spectrum of curriculum and research, SFS scholars and students are engaging with and decoding technology disruptions. Assistant Professor Katherine Chandler teaches the popular SFS course Bodies, Technologies and Violence. Her research concerns the intersection of technology, media and politics. Her first monograph, Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media
A conversation with Vice Dean for Undergraduate Affairs Mark Giordano about how he sees the undergraduate program amid shifting dynamics of technology, policy and power.
Q: Congratulations on your new position. Tell us a little about your journey so far at Georgetown.
A: This is my ninth year at Georgetown. I came because I was interested in teaching, but I ended up leading the STIA program [Science, Technology and International Affairs] after a year on campus. It was a great opportunity, and we were able to strengthen the foundation of the program, bring in new people who represented a broader array of issues intersecting technology and international relations, and work together to improve undergraduate opportunities. Then, after five years, I stepped down with the hope that I would go back to just the teaching, but then the vice dean position came up.
Q: You’re in demand!
A: My first year started as the pandemic settled in. Most of my initial plans, even the simple starting points of sitting down to have conversations with students, staff and faculty, seemed to be derailed with the end of in-person meetings, the need
to get classes and professors retooled for online instruction and trying to meet the needs of a student body studying remotely from around the country and the world. But the experience also clarified that we can implement change at a university more quickly than many assume. COVID made it clear we could put the whole university online in two weeks, and even if it wasn’t perfect, it showed us that we could fundamentally transform in a short period if we wanted to.
At the same time, the protests of 2020 and the issues raised around Black Lives Matter caused the entire university to reflect
on its values and actions. At SFS we needed to ask: What we are doing in our classes? What is the purpose of us being here? How are we training students, and for what? We had, and have, an outpouring of faculty interest, student interest, administration interest, asking if we can do better. The COVID crisis and the ability to use technology differently, coupled with Black Lives Matter and the history of exclusion and racism in this nation and Georgetown’s history with enslavement, have set us up for a rethink.
Q: What are some of the changes that resulted?
A: People have come together to discuss what changes we could make. We have a faculty committee that’s gotten together voluntarily to ask questions about their syllabi and provide lessons for others. Do I have any female authors on my syllabus, for example. Something that is apparently simple is revealing — and important. Efforts like this bring change course by course. The overall curriculum operates at a different scale operationally and strategically.
Q: Meaning what?
A: The undergraduate program at SFS has a unique structure. Some majors, such as STIA
Perform Drone Warfare, surveys unmanned aircraft from 1936 to 1992, describing how life and death are adjudicated through conditions organized as if control were “unmanned.”
“Many people continue to operate with this idea that technology is just a tool,” Chandler says. “When my students come out of my class, they’ve begun to develop a real vocabulary to be able to explain to the people around them that no, technology is not a tool. … It is shaping how we have our social relationships. It’s shaping our political relationships. It’s shaping our identity. It shapes how I understand myself.
“We have a framework of international affairs predicated on a
and CULP [Culture and Politics], are largely run by faculty sitting in SFS. Others are based largely on classes offered in other schools. From a university point of view, there are operational advantages to the structure. But from an SFS point of view, it can make intellectual ownership and community-building within some of our majors, and even some of our core classes, difficult. I’ve been working with others on some changes to address this.
The other side of the challenge is more strategic and about what we should be doing in the future, what questions we should be asking ourselves.
I look at our curriculum in four dimensions: it’s what we teach, how it is taught, who’s teaching it and, then, who we are teaching. Each dimension has multiple stakeholders. As an example, I have an interest in who we’re admitting and what they bring to our campus, but so does Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Scott Taylor and so does GU Admissions. And so does the student body who is here now. Look at the work of Adam Shaham (SFS’22) and Amanda Feldman (SFS’22) trying to bring change to our legacy admissions policy. All the dimensions interact to create “the curriculum” and the experience students take away from that. Effective change means many conversations.
clear distinction between the international and the domestic. That no longer makes sense, and we can see how technological systems make this apparent. Our technological systems are built, mined, created from resources that exceed the United States, and then their impacts far exceed the boundaries of the United States. And so, we already see this kind of permeability in our relationships. We can think about that in ways in which it matters for everything from warfare to politics of the border.”
SFS is helping students learn new ways of seeing and new skills for understanding the influence of technology in decision-making. Whether examining the human rights dimensions of mining rare minerals for smartphones and EV batteries, the implications of drone warfare and surveillance or the ethics of genome manipulation, future policymakers need strategies and skills to keep up with the pace of technological change.
“As an undergraduate,” Chandler says, “you need the skills to do research, to think about the problems, to talk to experts to help you identify and better understand the problems in places so you can go and learn more information about them. We need to be changing and updating our thinking to reflect that better.”
Q: What are examples of how SFS has changed the undergraduate curriculum from a science and technology perspective?
A: The joke used to be that SFS stood for “safe from science.” But you would be hard pressed to find a global affairs issue that doesn’t have science and tech at its core: climate change, the pandemic, political communication, AI and cyberwarfare, genome editing, food security. The list goes on. We added a science requirement three or four years ago for all undergraduates, sending the message that global affairs requires an awareness of technology as much as our traditional pillars of history, economics, international relations and, of course, area studies. Within STIA itself, the team created a new way of introducing the major through the core class, Science and Technology in the Global Arena. It is co-taught by a revolving set of four faculty members who introduce students to four different fields from four different perspectives. Many students join thinking they are interested in, say, traditional security but then are fascinated by the global health professor. And then they discover that global health is also security. The class is about content, and it’s about the way of imparting specific knowledge. But it’s also a way to expose students to a broader range of issues and faculty before they must
make choices about what they’re studying. The current problem is that the class is too popular, and we have to figure out how to manage the size. It’s a successful model that could only happen because of an institutional change.
Q: Any closing thoughts?
A: Just as an international affairs education needs an appreciation of science, it also requires an appreciation of other ways of knowing and expression that go beyond a traditional set of ideas and term papers. That’s why we have an ethnomusicologist and an astrobiologist and why we embrace the power of the performing arts through the Global Lab for Performance and Politics and our Culture and Politics major.
While we need to move beyond tradition in some ways, we also need to go back to tradition in others. Regional studies have declined across the United States and is out of favor in academia — that is a problem for this country and for the world. SFS maintains a second-language proficiency requirement, and we support regional studies through a major and the scholarship of eight regionally focused programs. But we can do more to help our students develop a deeper understanding of place. A team is plotting right now how we are going to become an example of how this can happen.
by SUSIE FRANK
Last August, when the Taliban re-took power in Afghanistan with staggering speed, tens of thousands of activists, teachers, journalists and American allies found themselves desperate to escape the new regime. Understanding the stakes, a wide-ranging group of Georgetown students, faculty, alumni and leadership mobilized to evacuate those who could no longer live safely in Afghanistan. From round-theclock exfiltration to fundraising and clothing drives, this group helped close to 2,000 Afghans escape, and assisted hundreds more in the resettlement process. These are some of their stories.
Palwasha Hassan knew she had to leave immediately. The prominent women’s rights activist, long-time director of the Afghan Women’s Educational Center and a founding member of the Afghan Women’s Network, had been facing harassment and assassination attempts from the Taliban for years. And now they had taken power.
“We knew it was coming, but no one expected the Afghan government to go down so fast,” said Hassan. “The day after the Taliban took over, they came to my home. They searched my office. My staff were terrified. I was afraid for our lives — and to lose the work we had done. My organization has been around for 30 years.”
Hassan would be one of the lucky ones. She was already in contact with colleagues from Georgetown and other organizations, who promised to help her and her family evacuate when the time came. And now it was time.
Guided by nearly round-the-clock calls and messages with colleagues abroad and friends on the ground, Hassan and her family — which included her elderly mother and pre-teen niece and nephew — began what would be a harrowing six-day journey to safety.
Ambassador Melanne Verveer, the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) was on vacation when she received word that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan’s government had fallen. She had been hoping it wouldn’t happen so quickly but was prepared with a plan for evacuating women at highest risk of reprisals.
“Our team went to work immediately. My colleagues and I at the GIWPS have been involved with Afghan women for many
years. It’s been a long struggle. So we knew what direction things were heading. We had been working for months to put a list together of some of the highest profile women — people who were going to be in serious jeopardy if the Taliban took over. We worked closely with the White House’s Gender Policy Council and the State Department’s Global Women’s Issues office and others to make sure we identified the most at-risk people,” said Verveer. “Our list grew to 1,500 women and their families.”
“Secretary [Hillary] Clinton was very much involved and particularly helpful in obtaining resources and negotiating with other countries to host refugees and allow evacuation planes to land,” said Verveer.
No one knew how long U.S. troops would have access to the Kabul airport, which meant Verveer and her colleagues had very little time to connect the women on the list to the people who could get them on a flight out of the country.
“It was a tortuous process. We would get someone to the airport and then the Taliban would send them back. And sometimes it was our own Marines at the gate who sent them back, because they didn’t have the right documentation. It was a combination of people in government and a small group of us outside of government, who were working as hard as we could to get these women leaders and human rights activists out as soon as possible. All the while we’re hearing from them — they are being threatened. They are hiding everything written in English, burning documents,” said Verveer.
After August 15, things started happening quickly for Hassan and her family. “We were told that we had a pass that would get us into the airport, so we packed and left as fast as we could. But when our car arrived at the airport, it was complete chaos — people were fighting and shooting. We had to turn around,” said Hassan.
Two days later they tried again. Hassan’s contacts told her to try a different gate. They were turned away. Hassan began to worry that they may not get out. They tried a third time — she had an evacuation team contact working inside the airport. This time it worked. Somehow, Hassan and her family got through the pandemonium and walked through the airport gates, where more chaos awaited them. The Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul has one runway. It was not made to accommodate hundreds of people or dozens of planes.
“The airport was crowded and dirty. We were there for two
days with very little food or water,” said Hassan.
Finally, Hassan and her family boarded a plane to Kuwait. But the Kuwaiti government wasn’t prepared to receive refugees. After several days sleeping on a bus, the family boarded a plane for Bahrain, where they finally received food and rest.
“They brought us water and food immediately, and then took us to a hotel. It felt like such a luxury! Such a blessing. They also provided clothes — so many people had left in the middle of the night with their pajamas on. One man was missing his shoes. He had gone through this whole ordeal barefoot,” said Hassan.
After two days in Bahrain, officials put them on another plane — this one headed to Washington, DC, where they began the process of applying for visas. After a few hours they were taken to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, to wait for their paperwork to go through.
Timothy “Tito” Torres (IBP’21) was finishing up coursework in Berlin when he heard about Kabul’s fall. The news hit him hard. Over nine tours in Afghanistan as a U.S. Army Ranger and in various military diplomatic roles, he had made many friends in Afghanistan and understood how much danger they were in. His phone started getting flooded with calls and messages from friends and former colleagues who feared for their lives.
Torres knew he had a role to play. And as he contacted organizations on the ground to find out what they needed, he also reached out to his classmates for support.
“When I got the call from Tito, there was really no question for me,” said Kristie Cole (IBP’21). “We had been working on a joint thesis project together with our classmate Zach Pyle (IBP’21), and we had grown very close. He was getting inundated with calls from Afghans and his own interpreters. I wanted to help.”
It turns out that Cole had a crucially important skill set — fundraising. While completing her master’s degree, Cole was also working as the chief fundraiser for the School of Foreign Service. Cole took a brief leave of absence from her job and started working with two nonprofits that Torres had identified that were chartering planes to fly out of Kabul.
SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE CLASS OF 2023
“It was a combination of people in government and a small group of us outside of government working... to get [Afghans] out as soon as possible.”
Pyle, also a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, partnered with Torres to direct on-the-ground operations, communicating with evacuees to guide them safely through Taliban-controlled Kabul and then onto departing planes. Over the course of two and a half weeks, Torres, Cole, Pyle and eventually about a third of their IBP cohort raised more than $8 million to fly more than 600 individuals out of Kabul on private planes and guide hundreds of other Afghans over land to safety. And yet the thought of all the people who didn’t make it weighs heavily on the team.
Zahra Wakilzada and her family fled Afghanistan to Pakistan in 2013. They wouldn’t arrive in Washington, DC until 2015, when she was 15. As of this writing, Wakilzada’s grandmother and extended family are still in Afghanistan. Many are activists and educators, and in immediate danger.
“Even before Kabul fell, I was worried because the Taliban were able to take the province that I grew up in. I watched videos of the street where I used to play as a child, now full of Taliban running back and forth with guns.”
Along with her aunt in Arlington, VA, Wakilzada was on the phone with family members as they made the dangerous journey out. She continues to help relatives with their visa applications and raise money to pay their legal fees as they go through the process.
Two of her cousins are stuck in limbo, in Albania. “They were admitted
to the East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. They were on the list to be evacuated. They tried to get to the airport in Kabul two or three times before finally getting on a plane to Albania. They are waiting at a refugee camp there, and have been rejected for student visas twice,” says Wakilzada. “We have no idea what will happen to them.”
Wakilzada is a junior in the School of Foreign Service majoring in International Politics with a concentration in International Law, Ethics and Institutions and is double minoring in Women’s and Gender Studies and Diplomatic Studies. She plans to enter the field of diplomacy. As an Afghan woman and refugee, she brings an important perspective. “I hope to be at the table when decisions are being made, to bring some insight and a human perspective when it comes to Afghanistan,” said Wakilzada.
Torres has completed 11 combat deployments and received multiple bronze stars and a Purple Heart. And yet this was one of the most difficult things he has ever been through. “I was in no physical danger, but the emotional toll of having to almost play God — I can take you and your brother, but I can’t take your uncle — is massive and difficult to process. There were many nights when our plans didn’t work and we didn’t get them through the gate. And that’s crushing,” said Torres.
Cole, Torres and Pyle were working on a joint thesis project focused on Africa when Kabul fell. With encouragement from faculty, they shifted their project to focus on the NGO and civilian response in Kabul from August 15–31. Thanks to support from Georgetown leadership, they had help from two research assistants. Professors Daniel Byman and Ben Connable lent their vast foreign policy and research expertise to the project. The group is now working on a book that combines narrative accounts with the data from their research.
A PROFESSIONAL AND ETHICAL OBLIGATION TO HELP
Christine Fair, a professor in the Security Studies Program had previously served as a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation and a political officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, among other things. She had forged close relationships with many Afghans.
“I spent quite a bit of time in Afghanistan and that meant there were a lot of Afghans who facilitated my time there. Because of their involvement with the U.S., the Taliban planned to kill them. It was my professional and ethical obligation to help,” she said.
“We made lots of promises to the Afghans over 20 years, and I felt very strongly that... we had an obligation to the people who had been our allies.”
Fair started by tracking down Task Force Pineapple, a U.S.-based private-public partnership that had formed quickly to extract Afghans at high risk for reprisals: Afghan Special Operations Forces. She then had to find other networks that were focused on aiding more broad categories of at-risk Afghans including women, children, people identifying as LBGTQ+, artists and athletes. Her friends and colleagues were doing the same. Soon, she and her colleagues were fielding calls, emails and texts round the clock.
“Successes were hard to come by and burnout was high,” said Fair. “Yet this was nothing compared to the suffering of Afghans who had to fit their lives in a duffle bag and hop in a truck with complete strangers.”
“I’m a big believer in what’s known as Secretary Colin Powell’s ‘Pottery Barn rule’ of foreign policy: you break it, you own it,” said Bruce Hoffman, a professor in the SFS and senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We made lots of promises to the Afghans over 20 years, and I felt very strongly that regardless of the U.S.’s strategic interests, we had an obligation to the people who had been our allies.”
Hoffman used his intelligence community and special operations forces contacts to connect people to safe houses, routes, flights and other resources. Hoffman and Fair put together a guide of a dozen or so “tradecraft” techniques for avoiding capture in Afghanistan, which was used by U.S. military forces operating covertly in-country and by paramilitary extraction teams of veterans operating on their own.
“I would get a call in the middle of the night — ‘Change of plan: the Taliban raided our safe house. Call your contact.’ Keep in
Above: Graduate students (IBP‘21) Zach Pyle, Kristie Cole and Timothy “Tito” Torres reflect on an eventful year on the last day of classes in 2021. Over the course of two and a half weeks, Torres, Cole, Pyle and their IBP cohort raised more than $8 million to fly more than 600 individuals out of Kabul on private planes and guide hundreds of other Afghans over land to safety. Opposite: Bruce Hoffman is a professor at SFS and senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations and U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.
mind, I’ve only been to Afghanistan once. And now I’m calling people from a U.S. suburb and telling them they have to pack their bags and leave right now. It was absurd,” said Hoffman. “They had to put their trust in absolute strangers.”
Sam Schneider (C’13) started checking in on Syed Zabiullah Langari in early August, as provincial capitals started to fall to the Taliban. He met Langari in 2013 when they both worked for TOLOnews, an Afghan media outlet based in Kabul. They had stayed friends over the years, and he was worried. And then the day before Kabul fell, Langari called.
“He asked if I could help him leave the country, and I said yes, even though I had no idea how we were going to do it,” said Schneider.
Things quickly escalated on the 15th. “Suddenly my network of co-workers and friends in this space started scrambling for information. There were so many unknowns. I knew my mom would have some insight. She’s on way better listservs than I am, as a former member of the State Department.”
Sam Schneider (C’13) and his friend Syed Zabiullah Langari’s two nephews after they relocated to the DC area.
Sam’s mom happens to be Cynthia Schneider, distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy, co-director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics and the former U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, among other things. She was also receiving urgent calls from her international network.
Working together (and with several other individuals and organizations), mother and son Schneider led the effort that eventually brought Langari and his two nephews to Chevy Chase, Maryland. They are now getting used to life in the U.S., living in a guest house that belongs to Georgetown history professor Jo Ann Moran Cruz.
Back on campus, a variety of Georgetown students started organizing support for arriving Afghan refugees. Verónica María Hoyer (MPP/MSFS’21) is a U.S. Air Force veteran who served two combat deployments in Afghanistan. After hearing the news, she contacted military units, asking them to send volunteers to grassroots Afghan-American organizations based in Northern Virginia. She also worked to mobilize not just student veterans, but the larger university population. They held clothing drives and “Sunday Funday” events for Afghan families staying in temporary housing at Fort Picket, in Virginia. In 2021, the Georgetown University Student Veterans Association, a chapter of the Student Veterans of America, won chapter of the year, largely due to their work helping Afghan refugees.
Tara Nouri’s (SFS’22) father was born in Kabul, and she grew up visiting her Afghan relatives frequently.
“This summer my family was watching events back home very closely. I decided to start organizing to ensure that Afghans arriving
to the U.S. would have something to arrive to,” she said. In addition to helping Afghans she knew personally with their visa applications, Nouri organized a clothing drive, with three drop-off sites across campus. “We put up posters everywhere and got lots of donations, too,” said Nouri. They sent what they gathered to Fort Picket.
“Afghanistan is an incredible country,” says Nouri. “It’s beautiful and hospitable with an amazing culture. It’s so much more than you see in the news. I can 100 percent see myself living there at some point,” said Nouri.
Victor Cha, professor and vice dean for faculty and graduate affairs at the SFS, is still amazed at how quickly Georgetown was able to organize scholarships for Afghan students. “It all happened in less than four weeks,” said Cha.
Coordinating with Dean Hellman, the Georgetown provost and faculty and deans from other schools, Cha and his colleague Julie Walsh McMurtry, assistant director of the SFS’s Center for Latin American Studies, reached out to several Afghan students, inviting them to apply to a master’s program in SFS. Some of them were civil servants who had worked for the Afghan government, some were activists and some were diplomats.
“We decided that, if we could admit them to one of our programs and help them start a new life, we should do it,” said Cha.
Once accepted, Georgetown agreed to pay full tuition plus a living stipend. “Many were leaving with just the clothes on their backs,” said Cha. “I’ve been at Georgetown for 26 years and this was one of the times I’ve been most proud of the university.”
Georgetown University leaders, students and alumni have a long history of engagement with Afghanistan. When the Taliban fell in 2002, Georgetown was one of the first universities to respond, and established the U.S. Afghan Women’s Council at Georgetown that year. University leadership was quick to respond last August as well.
“When Kabul fell, I was not surprised to receive a call from the [Georgetown] president’s office, asking how they could help. The university helped us raise money and to establish fellowships and scholarships. They could not have been more committed.
Georgetown has been supporting Afghan human rights for decades,” said Verveer.
continues her research and activism as a senior fellow at Georgetown. In December 2021, Hassan received the prestigious Hillary Rodham Clinton Award, given in recognition of leaders whose work has made the world more peaceful and stable for women. Upon receiving the award, she said she was accepting it on behalf of all the women of Afghanistan.
Hassan’s family waited in limbo at Fort McCoy for three months. It was uncertain whether or not their visas would come through, until Hassan received a job offer from GIWPS.
“The job offer helped me show that I already had a network,” said Hassan. “My colleagues at the GIWPS really came through.”
Now Hassan and her family are settled in the DC area while she
Hassan is one of two Afghans who are now senior fellows at GIWPS. Roya Rahmani, an Afghan diplomat who served as Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the United States, has also found a new home at Georgetown.
Hassan looks forward to continuing her work from a new platform. “I think my experience is relevant to any post-conflict situation — we don’t have these emergencies only in Afghanistan. We are dealing with extremism all over the world.”
The Emergency Fund for Afghan Women, a partnership between the nonprofit Vital Voices and GIWPS, evacuated nearly all 1,500 women on their original list and has raised $12.5M to date. The funds have been used to cover the costs associated with the evacuations and to support those Afghans who are currently in Albania until they reach their final destinations. Visit vitalvoices.org/get-involved/ways-to-give/donate-2/ to make a donation.
SFS reaches out to high school students with two new programs.
by SARI HARRAR
Two new SFS initiatives connect high school students from historically underrepresented communities in Washington, DC, and across the U.S. with rigorous SFS courses, stimulating discussions, high-stakes international crisis simulations and mentoring. Begun in 2021, the SFS Future Global Leaders Fellowship and a partnership with the National Education Equity Lab (NEEL) continue in 2022 with two iconic experiences: Georgetown’s Summer International Relations Program for High School Students and a three-credit version of the well-known SFS course, Map of the Modern World.
“Educating the next generation of global leaders is our core mission,” says Scott Taylor, SFS vice dean for diversity, equity and inclusion. “We want them to better represent the diversity of the United States and the world. Our goal is to open our doors to create opportunity not just for a few Black and brown faces but for a much more diverse group of students to bring their much-needed voices to an international affairs education and career.”
While the programs are not a direct pipeline to Georgetown admissions, they’re spurring interest — by building on the relationship between SFS and DC high schools and inspiring students to consider Georgetown and SFS when it’s time for college. “Two of our seniors decided to apply after they earned A’s in Map of the Modern World,” says Frank Nuara, social studies chairman at Elmont Memorial High School in Elmont, NY, which offered the course for the first time last fall. “Succeeding in a real college course from an elite university raises your confidence about what you can do and where you belong.”
That’s the point, Taylor says. “Whether students move into public, private or third-sector spaces in international affairs, or simply feel new excitement and interest in their own potential and possibilities, it’s valuable and important for all of us.”
Eighteen juniors and seniors from Washington, DC, public schools took part in SFS’s week-long summer programs for high school students in 2021, as Georgetown’s first cohort of Future Global Leaders Fellowship scholarship recipients. “Thinking and talking about global health, diplomacy and intelligence with experts and students from around the U.S. and around the world really made an impression on me,” says McKinley E. Barkley, 18, a senior at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in DC. “I’ve done a 180-degree turn in my ideas for college majors and towards a future that may include international affairs.”
“Succeeding in a real college course from an elite university raises your confidence about what you can do and where you belong.”
The Future Global Leaders summer program provides full scholarships for Georgetown’s International Relations Academy and Washington & the World Academy. It is offered by the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies and taught by SFS Professor Anthony Clark Arend (SFS’80). The program is expanding in 2022 with more scholarships for more students. “The time when young people are really thinking about careers is in high school,” says Arend, professor in the School of Foreign Service and director of Georgetown’s Summer International Relations Program for High School Students since 1988. “For more than 30 years, these programs have helped open minds about what a future in international relations could be. The goal of the new Fellows program is to reach out to local high school students who might not otherwise be aware of this program and provide funding so they can attend.”
Barkley, who’s enrolled in her school’s International Baccalaureate Diploma program, has studied three languages — Korean, German and Spanish — and is involved in student government and the National Honor Society, applied for the International Relations Academy after hearing a virtual presentation by Arend. “I’m a fourth-culture kid,” she says. “My parents are African-American, from different parts of the U.S., and as a military child I was born in Hawaii (lived there until second grade) and raised for eight years in Germany. I know that it will take new perspectives to further understanding in the world. Diversity is important — you won’t be able to see where others are coming from if you’re always surrounded by the same people with the same thought processes.”
While the 2021 program took place virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was plenty of opportunity for interaction with students, teaching assistants and presenters. “George Little was my favorite speaker,” Barkley says. Little, a former CIA and Pentagon spokesman, spoke about his experiences during the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. “He was an amazing storyteller,” Barkley notes.
Little is one of many experts who give presentations. “I’m the emcee of the program,” Arend says. “I give the introductory talks
Above: “Educating the next generation of global leaders is our core mission,” says Scott Taylor, SFS vice dean for diversity, equity and inclusion. “We want them to better represent the diversity of the United States and the world. Our goal is to open our doors... for a much more diverse group of students to bring their much-needed voices to an international affairs education and career.”
Barkley was part of Georgetown’s first cohort of Future Global Leaders Fellowship scholarship recipients.
about international relations and discuss international law, then I introduce all of our incredible speakers.” Other recent guest speakers include terrorism expert Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault, an associate teaching professor at SFS’s Center for Security Studies; CNN foreign affairs correspondent and former Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty; E. William (Bill) Priestap, former assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division; David M. Edelstein, vice dean of faculty in Georgetown College and a professor in the Department of Government at SFS; and retired senior CIA operations officer David Gutschmit.
The highlight of every program week is a crisis simulation. With limited time, students decide how to approach a global catastrophe. Last summer, Barkley’s class grappled with a cyberattack against the U.S. “The idea is, students have been hearing about foreign policy for a week, now let’s give you the opportunity as a decision-maker or advisor to respond to one,” Arend says. “There’s some dramatic urgency to it because time is short.” Cast as advisors to the president, Barkley and her classmates chose instruments of foreign policy to wield against hackers threatening
to cut off power to a large part of the U.S. “We considered diplomacy, threats, even nuclear war,” Barkley noted. “Our teaching assistant let us figure it out.”
In early spring, Barkley was waiting for responses from college admissions offices, including Georgetown University. She was thinking about a future that might involve intelligence or medicine. At school and at home, conversations about current events have new depth. “We live in the nation’s capital, so I think it’s important to stay on top of what’s happening,” says J. Kaye Barkley, McKinley’s mother. “McKinley and I have more engaging conversations about the world. This has given her the opportunity to do some critical thinking on a new level about real-world events.”
In the fall of 2021 and spring of 2022, more than one hundred high school sophomores, juniors and seniors at seven different schools took an expanded version of Georgetown’s Map of the Modern World class — an iconic course required for all SFS undergraduates. From the connection between colonialism and African bor-
ders to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and China’s declaration that it is a “near Arctic state,” students develop ways to think about the geopolitical issues that are, or will be, in the news.
The class was the first in Georgetown’s new partnership with NEEL. The program brings college credit-bearing classes from U.S. colleges to high school students in historically underserved communities at no cost to students. By 2020, 10,000 high schoolers from more than 200 Title 1 schools in 32 states had taken virtual versions of classes taught at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Howard and other top schools. Over 83% pass (85% for “Map”), earning free college credit. 96% of NEEL students say they’d recommend it to others.
“We were interested in partnering with NEEL for several reasons,” says Mark Giordano, professor of geography and vice dean for undergraduate affairs, who teaches Map of the Modern World — a class introduced more than 25 years ago by retired SFS
professor Charles Pirtle. “We want all high school students to graduate with global issues on their minds,” says Giordano. “We also want to make sure those engaging in international affairs represent our whole country, not just small segments. We’re also hoping it will broaden the pool of SFS applicants.”
That may be happening already. At Elmont Memorial High School in Elmont, NY, two out of 15 students who took “Map” last fall decided to apply to Georgetown after finding out they’d earned A’s in the class. “This is much more rigorous than an advanced placement class,” says Nuara, the social studies chairman at Elmont. “Students had to meet the same standards and keep up the same pace as a Georgetown freshman. It’s extremely valuable to have that experience before college, especially if you come from a family where you’re the first generation that will go to college.”
The NEEL motto is: “Talent is equally distributed, opportu-
“We want all high school students to graduate with global issues on their minds... [and to see that] those engaging in international affairs represent our whole country, not just small segments.”
nity is not. We aim to change that.” The goal: “We want talented students to experience the fact that they can be as competitive and as successful as students from more affluent neighborhoods,” says Shaquille Dunbar, a NEEL student success manager and course manager for the Map of the Modern World class. “They can earn college credits, boost their resume and see that where they’re born and raised does not dictate how they can succeed in life.”
Stherly Mirtil, 16, a junior at Homestead Senior High School in Homestead, FL, fit Map of the Modern World into her fall class schedule along with science and English classes at Miami-Dade College. She encountered the course’s memorable first exam: learning the name and location of the world’s nations. “To be honest, it was really challenging at the beginning,” says Mirtil, who’s also on her high school track team. “But as we moved further into the coursework, my interest grew. Now when I see a country mentioned on the news that we studied, I know what’s going on there. It’s more meaningful.”
“Map” had gone online at Georgetown because of its size and COVID rules, making it easy to accommodate high school students. Some of Giordano’s regular teaching assistants agreed to work with the high schools as teaching fellows. NEEL and its university partners work together with high school teachers to support students. Teaching fellows from each university lead discussions in weekly small-group meetings on Zoom with a high school class. They also give advice about assignments, studying for exams and answer questions about their college experience in special Question and Answer sessions twice each term. Course managers like Dunbar help classroom teachers prepare their students. Once a class is over, the relationships continue. Mentors are available to help students with college and financial aid applications.
“We want students to get used to taking advantage of the resources they’ll have at college, like a teaching assistant’s office hours,” Dunbar says. “People are afraid sometimes to ask for help, so we purposefully built this in. We want them to know there’s a space for you to get support. And conversations with professors and assistants isn’t just about this week’s classwork. They’re about building relationships and learning more about potential careers.”
Mirtil says “Map” hasn’t shifted her college and career trajectory. “I want to be a forensic psychologist, probably for the FBI,” she says. But the experience has boosted the deep-down knowledge that she can thrive in a challenging college program despite the stresses. “I know what to do — I’ll just do my work.”
help talented students experience the fact that they can be competitive and successful.
As an undergraduate, Maher Bitar (SFS’06, L’12) immersed himself in academics and activism. Now, he’s applying everything he’s learned to advance critical policy issues relating to intelligence. by EMMA FRANCOIS
As the Special Assistant to the President and senior director for foreign intelligence programs, Maher Bitar (SFS’06, L’12) holds a key position in the National Security Council (NSC) — a role many students would consider a dream job. But for Bitar, with his sweeping interests and decades of experience in international affairs and humanitarian law, there’s always room for dreaming big.
“I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” he says with a laugh.
Indeed, he is currently only one year into his appointment under President Joe Biden. And while there is much more Bitar can’t reveal about the inner workings of the NSC, he did explain that his job is one of both strategy and logistics. With his team, Bitar coordinates intelligence-related policy, ensuring agencies adhere to legal requirements and that the right senior officials have access to the relevant information.
“So we have an active role in shaping policy,” Bitar said.
Like so many alumni in his field, Bitar can trace his interest in foreign affairs and human rights back to his Georgetown days.
“I came to Georgetown interested in learning as much as possible about international relations, foreign policy and, as part of that, also understanding the Middle East and my own heritage as a Palestinian-American,” Bitar said. “I was extremely fortunate because Georgetown was almost unique in having an Arab Studies program.”
In addition to the rigorous academics, it was the practical experience of activism and life on the Hilltop that shaped Bitar’s understanding of how he’d like to spend his working life. Bitar arrived on Georgetown’s campus in the fall of 2002, only months before the Iraq War began.
“There was a broad mobilization on campus for and against the Iraq War, and I think for a lot of folks from my time there that was very formative,” Bitar said. “For me, it was a blend of activism and academic immersion in areas that I was interested in.”
After graduation, Bitar studied international relations at Oxford University and law at Georgetown. He began his
career working for the State Department, which he described as an intense but illuminating apprenticeship. Quickly, he learned the “art and science of diplomacy,” as well as other critical skills from thinking creatively to clearly communicating diplomatic challenges in writing.
“There’s a unique opportunity when someone is in government to try to shape things,” Bitar said, “but be very realistic about what they can shape.”
Following that role, Bitar served as a director for the NSC covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs, and then as a deputy to the then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power.
“I really benefitted from what I described as an apprenticeship,” Bitar said
when reflecting on his first positions. “I really just learned and absorbed how [government officials] went about their work and the trade — it is a trade, a set of skills that you learn, and that’s carried me through my career.”
Then, in 2017, Bitar served as general
“It’s important for our government... to actually reflect our country and the diversity of our country.”
counsel for four years, overseeing all legal matters on national security for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In that role, he advised Committee Chair Rep. Adam Schiff as the primary lawyer on then President Donald Trump’s first impeachment inquiry in 2019.
His advice for recent graduates? Find a mentor who has mastered the trade and learn by absorption.
“It’s important for our government, across various components of the government, including in national security, to actually reflect our country and the diversity of our country,” Bitar said. “And in that sense, as an Arab-American in government, I’m in the minority — but I’m able to contribute, and I think that’s also important.”
Pati Jinich (CLAS’05) melds policy expertise, a talent for research and a lifelong love of cooking to create acclaimed books and programs. by HERB SCHAFFNER
“The series transformed me,” Pati Jinich says about La Frontera , her PBS special series based on Jinich’s explorations of food, culture and history on the border between Texas and Mexico.
Jinich (CLAS’05) is a James Beard Award-winning chef of Mexican cuisine who has dedicated her career to building a shared understanding between her two home countries: Mexico, where she was born, and the United States, where she is making her home with her family. Her long-running hit PBS series Pati’s Mexican Table has brought Mexican flavors, colors and textures into American homes and kitchens, as viewers have watched Jinich thoughtfully and enthusiastically guide them through the various geographic regions of Mexico.
“I am from Mexico,” Jinich recounts, “and I had wanted to be an academic since my school years. My grandparents were refugees fleeing persecution from Eastern Europe who came to Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. From an early age, I wanted to find ways in my life to contrib-
ute to our home country that has given me so much, and I love.”
Jinich met her husband Daniel on a blind date, and they were married in Mexico City in 1996. When the couple moved to Dallas, Jinich began researching and cooking Mexican cuisine out of homesickness for her native Mexico City.
“I started cooking to feel close to Mexico,” Jinich says. “Soon I was meeting other people in the Mexican diaspora. I started connecting with and learning from them about how we cooked, how we got these
“I began to realize that being in the kitchen and learning the history and human impact of recipes is a noble way to learn about a culture.”
recipes and how to make them. I heard all these different accents, and I realized I knew little about my home country even thought I had lived there so many years.”
“I began to realize that being in the kitchen and learning the history and human impact of recipes is a noble way to learn about a culture.” Two years later, Jinich relocated to Washington, DC, with her husband and their first-born son, where she resumed her academic pursuits, earning her master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Georgetown. There she met Michael Shifter from the Inter-American Dialogue, who recruited Jinich as a policy analyst.
Jinich and a colleague began comparing recipes on Peruvian and Mexican ceviche, buoyed with a friendly spirit of competitive cultural pride. “I jumped into full-blown research into ceviche in both countries... Finally, I went to Michael and said instead of policy analyses I think I will be better at food writing. I started to contribute recipes and then took up residency.”
From there, Jinich joined the Mex-
ican Cultural Institute in Washington, DC, where she launched a series of live cooking demonstrations along with multicourse tasting dinners, which she still runs today. Behind all the work Jinich did in bringing Pati’s Mexican Table to PBS viewers was her determination to expand how aspects of Mexican life are viewed through what she calls “narrow labels.”
“When I started Pati’s Mexican Table years ago, I wanted to help change pre-conceptions about Mexico and Mexican culture,” Jinich says. “In the first couple seasons, I went to places I knew. As the show evolved, I started taking the show to parts of Mexico I didn’t know.”
“Through the series I developed relationships with the Mexican people and my audience,” Jinich says. “As public perceptions and myths about Mexico began to dominate the public discourse, I wanted to
share different perspectives and show who [the] people and culture really are.”
As Jinich notes, the audience also evolved. The show started to broadcast interviews in Spanish with subtitles, rather than summarizing with an English language voiceover. Jinich continued to explore the human equation amidst the cliches. “I saw all the coverage and news about El Chapo and Narcos and wanted to open a new perspective,” Jinich says. “In Season 8, we went to Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa, to explore their regional cooking and culture.”
Jinich then cast her eye to the border. “I had long wanted to do more of a documentary out in the field that is much more journalistic,” she says. “I wanted to use food as a tool of understanding to tackle different and substantial themes, to shine a light on all the aspects of the
border, not just the bad things.”
La Frontera enjoyed an enthusiastic reception from viewers who embraced the stories of art, identity, food and common cause. In one segment, Jinich talks with Sergio Tronsoco, the author of The Last Tortilla, Crossing Borders and Nepantla Families: An Anthology of Mexican-American Literature.
“In la frontera, we belong to each other. We depend on each other.” Troncoso tells Jinich. “It’s rough, there’s not a lot of money. What we create is Nepantla, which literally means in the middle ground. Here you have a fluid identity in which you move like water, you pick and choose who you want to be. That meeting in the middle is what border is about,” Troncoso says.
“Borderland is that more fluid state of mind,” Jinich replies, “that is just not that image of the wall.”
In her new book, SFS Professor Emily Mendenhall applies an anthropologist’s lens to her hometown. by ROBIN WARSHAW
Listening to people’s stories is central to Emily Mendenhall’s work as a medical anthropologist. The stories she hears in countries around the world help her research the complexities through which people experience illness.
Mendenhall, a professor in the Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) Program, studies how diseases and conditions that occur globally — such as diabetes, HIV, trauma and cancer — are influenced by local economic, political and social forces, and how that affects people’s lives.
That’s why, when she spent the 2020 pandemic summer in her hometown of Okoboji, Iowa, where resistance to COVID-19 recommendations was taking hold despite infections, she wanted to understand what was going on. So, she asked local residents to tell her their stories.
“This is who I am,” Mendenhall says. “As an anthropologist, you live as a listener, observing and listening and writing and thinking. I almost couldn’t not do this.”
She and her family arrived in Okoboji in early June, and what she calls “the social phenomenon that was unfolding” was clear. The area’s tourist strip bars were
jammed with unmasked people, despite a spike in COVID cases. Mendenhall was shocked that public health officials had no power to counter what was happening.
At first, her listening to locals was aimed at helping public health efforts that summer. Her work grew to encompass thoughts from about 100 people and became Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). “As an anthropologist who studies the social experiences of epidemics,” she wrote, “I could not help myself from delving deeper.”
In the book, she explored what she saw and heard as well as the area’s history and culture, both mythical and real. Okoboji is in northwest Iowa’s Great Lakes Region, where the economy depends on a boom of
“As an anthropologist, you live as a listener, observing and listening and writing and thinking. I almost couldn’t not do this.”
summer visitors. The region is 96 percent white, politically conservative and Protestant. In 2020, two of every three votes went to then-President Trump.
Mendenhall attended public meetings, visited the local Walmart (which had a national policy mandating masks) and talked with people who held varied and often politicized opinions about the pandemic and its impacts. She heard about social media disinformation, economic pressures, worries about children and schools and inaction by government leaders. Some residents felt powerless, confused or fatalistic about COVID. Others voiced conspiracy theories or a rugged individualism that made public health safety about personal freedom.
She struggled with her feelings about Okoboji, which she remembers from childhood as a place where people showed concern for each other. When floods hit in 1993, she recalled, everyone helped fill sandbags to protect the community.
Seeing how her hometown was reacting to the pandemic “was soul-rattling,” Mendenhall says. “The kind of insensitivity to, or almost apathy of, human life was really upsetting to me. I wanted to understand why people thought that way.”
After returning to her home near DC, she taught her fall Georgetown classes virtually and thought about Okoboji. Spring plans for work in South Africa were cancelled due to COVID. Her book writing began to flow, despite questions she still wrestled with. In the epilogue, she asked, “What does it mean to do meaningful work globally when things are such a mess locally?”
Mendenhall sees hope for change and more compassionate public leadership in young people now in high schools and colleges. “I think we will see a changed America as they grow up and get power,” she said. “But that’s a long way away.”
Professor Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s new book provides “last mile” strategies to help development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens and expand their rights and freedoms. by
HERB SCHAFFNER
As a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, SFS Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs Rajesh Veeraraghavan volunteered in India as a social auditor of public works programs funded by the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the country’s landmark antipoverty law. It wasn’t long before he witnessed a tense encounter between Dalit workers (poor villagers of marginalized caste, formerly known as “untouchables”) and local officials. Veeraraghavan recalls the standoff in his new book, Patching Development: Informational Politics and Social Change in India
In the days prior, Veeraraghavan and activists met with villagers, most of whom were illiterate, to learn if they had been
assigned jobs and paid as required by NREGA. Examining their bank passbooks (“kept” for them by local officials), Veeraraghavan says, “they asked me to read some of the entries aloud. To one worker … I said, ‘It looks as if you worked 40 days this past year, received Rs 4,000 for it in your account and then subsequently with-
“If we want to be clear on how change happens, we need to do our implementation work at the city, town and village level...”
drew it.’ [The worker] gave me a blank look that quickly turned to rage.”
None of the villagers present, it turned out, had received any money for the jobs they performed.
When some of the workers attended a meeting the next week to confront officials about the theft of their wages and their dignity, their bosses shouted them down. Some workers charged the stage, and a scuffle broke out, but eventually the meeting resumed, and in an unprecedented moment, the villagers laid out the truth to their social and economic superiors.
Veeraraghavan’s book, published by Oxford University Press in December 2021, draws on his 18 months of fieldwork primarily based in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. His research demonstrates that the “last mile” of policy implementation is where the dreams and goals of policymakers are achieved or diverted. Local politicians and landowners have many ways to neutralize antipoverty policies that hurt their interests — mistreatment of the illiterate Dalit workers is one example — and marginalized citizens need to be empowered and given access to government information to level the playing field.
Veeraraghavan describes in the book how India’s landowners resisted NREGA because it meant laborers leaving their land to work for the government. “Humans are very adaptive to resisting and sabotaging change,” he says. “Local systems of power are hard to transform, not because of inertia but because of counterstrategies.”
Dealing with local power systems requires the state to solicit and make transparent local information, as was done in Andhra Pradesh. The series of responses
that can overcome these levels of established resistance is what Veeraraghavan calls “patching development” — “continually making small fixes to respond to evolving power dynamics.”
“Patching isn’t about tech or solutionism. It’s about execution, with changes in institutions, technology, documents and other socio-technical processes. It’s about whom you hire, whom should be auditors, where we should conduct meetings. It’s about all these details. Patching is ultimately a political process of exercising power.”
“Patching is a framework for thinking about social policy programs. It goes beyond the debate of centralization and decentralization and opens up another empirical path that will shed more light on evaluation and implementation of laws that are crafted in the best intentions.”
Patching Development turns the telescope of policy analysis around. “We give so much focus to first-mile issues of passing and writing the law into regulation. We focus on how to design the program. My story comes after that. If we want to be clear on how change happens, we need to do our implementation work at the city, town and village level, going door to door to track how benefits are distributed.”
“The book is about understanding that implementation requires facing local power systems that are not impressed or waiting around for a clever policy design. They react to your institutional design. Everything that you try will be met with a reaction to that design. Implementation in an highly unequal society needs a way to effectively deal with local power systems.”
“That was a tough meeting,” Veeraraghavan recalls of his experience with the meeting in Bihar. “You can look at that meeting and ask, is that what India really wants, for that level of tension? But as I report, there are different levels and ways of measuring success. In Andhra Pradesh, the state created mechanisms to constantly patch resistance. But for those workers in Bihar, the fact that they could publicly question local power brokers and force them to admit the truth was a momentary victory and something to celebrate.”
India’s sweeping anti-poverty law, NREGA, coupled development policy with human rights — the right to know, and the right to work. Every person has the right to ‘audit’ their legal benefits and job assignments.
Soon to be a double SFS graduate, Brian Britt (SFS’21, SSP’22) studies domestic and foreign terrorism, but his interests in making the world a safer place extend well past our stratosphere. by EMMA FRANCOIS
Brian Britt (SFS ’21, SSP ’22) wasn’t born with an interest in space.
“I know there are many people who grow up wanting to be astronauts, who think that space is the coolest thing ever,” Britt said. “That was not really me.”
That changed when, as a sophomore, Britt took a class called Space, Security and Exploration with Dr. Matthew Daniels.
“That class was probably one of the most important academic experiences I’ve ever had in my life,” Britt said. “Over the course of the semester, I began to realize the degree to which space underpins every aspect of modern life, and how, over the coming decades, that importance will only increase.”
Since that class, Britt has strived to bring an interplanetary, humanistic angle to his academic pursuits. In 2019, Britt co-founded the GU Space Initiative, a student-run organization dedicated to promoting space thought among undergraduates. As a master’s student in the Security Studies Program concentrating on terrorism, he’s had the opportunity to satisfy his vast interests by taking classes like Outer Space: Strategic Capabilities. Britt also currently works for a think tank con-
ducting research on climate change in the Arctic, a project he feels especially close to as he grew up in Anchorage, Alaska.
Exploring and understanding our own planet has proved just as formative for Britt in his thinking about the universe — and where humans fit into it. During his time at SFS, Britt sought meaningful opportunities to study abroad. In the fall of 2017, he travelled to Santiago, Chile, where he witnessed the country’s political structure collapse, and his GU Impacts fellowship took him to the Philippines.
“It really showed me the importance of what my graduate program is geared toward and the holistic nature of security studies in not only protecting people in the state,” Britt said, “but also giving people a livelihood and ensuring their lives are prosperous and free and just.”
Though he’s not yet sure where his passions will take him post-graduation, it can be said that the sky is hardly the limit.
“I’d really like to act on my ability to make the world a better place,” Britt said, “and use the tools I’ve come away from Georgetown with to make the world a safer, more prosperous, secure place.”
Mohammad Lotfi’s (SFS’23) days often start at 4am with Physical Training and end with lively discussions on international relations among his classmates. by EMMA
FRANCOIS
A self-proclaimed “SFS fanboy,” Mohammad Lotfi (SFS’23) is passionate about making the most of his Georgetown experience. In addition to studying International Politics with a focus on Security Studies, he is also in the Air Force ROTC program.
“You join the military because you believe in a certain set of values and that, honestly, is one of my favorite parts of being in the military,” Lotfi said. “It has some of the best people, I think, and some of the most dedicated, principled people.”
Last semester, Lotfi secured an internship with the U.S. Mission to the United Nations within the Military Staff Committee but, due to COVID, worked at remote offices in the DC area. He mainly worked alongside American Military Advisors focusing on peacekeeping operations in Mali, Western Sahara and the Central African Republic. This spring will be his first full-time semester on campus and in-person — as a transfer student from Boston, he is looking forward to experiencing Georgetown for the first time.
“It definitely feels like I’m being prepared for a future,” Lotfi said, “not just within the military, but the place I want to go, doing service in the government and such.”
Lotfi, who is Moroccan but has been living in Boston so long he considers himself a
Bostonian, speaks Arabic and has been sent to Advanced Arabic Language and Culture courses in Morocco by the Air Force. He intends to become a Language Enabled Airman within the Air Force and is currently pursuing proficiency in Classical Arabic through SFS. During the winter break, he traveled abroad and studied Egyptian Arabic for six weeks in Cairo.
As far as plans for the future, following graduation Lotfi will commission into the Air Force, and hopefully one day apply for the U.S. Foreign Service.
Whether he’s working for the military or the State Department, he wants to live a life of service — and maybe one day, much later, create a place to bring service members together and capture that feeling of being part of something bigger.
“My dream job is to own a hookah bar in DC,” Lotfi said. “I’m definitely going to pursue that until the day I die. I really want to own a restaurant or café and grow old sitting outside it drinking coffee.”
Mohammad Lotfi (right) sits in front of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia with a childhood friend during the summer of 2019.
After graduation, Shirin Vetry (GHD’22) will bring her expertise in global human development to the State Department. by EMMA FRANCOIS
When Shirin Vetry (GHD’22) speaks about her plans to live a life of service, she talks about reimagining our systems to be fully inclusive, improving the livelihoods of everyone.
“And when I say ‘everyone,’” Vetry said, “I mean everyone.”
Vetry, who is also a Pickering fellow, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 with a degree in political science. Her passion for understanding and reinventing structures has brought her all over the globe, from Uganda to France to Colombia — but her dedication to building a more inclusive world isn’t new.
“What I do really, really care about,” Vetry said, “is understanding: What are the underlying drivers of inequality, and how can we go about disrupting and transforming the systems that we’re in such that we can create a world that really functions to the benefit of everyone?”
Vetry is currently in her second and final year with the Global Human Development Program, where she is pursuing certificates in both Gender, Peace and Security, as well as Diplomatic Studies.
“The majority of my coursework has
been centered around the intersections of economic growth, social inclusion and post-conflict reconstruction,” Vetry said.
Aside from the engaging classwork, Vetry said she has enjoyed opportunities to learn from and collaborate with fellow classmates, which she described as fostering a supportive community.
“The program has really pushed me in my thinking and analytical skills,” Vetry said. “First, it taught me the fundamental economic, statistical and management tools needed to analyze and evaluate development projects. From there, GHD provided me the space to critique these development tools, recognize their limitations and reflect on my capacities and positionality to re-imagine current power structures to truly make people better off — especially the most marginalized.”
Currently, Vetry is wrapping up her exciting capstone project: designing a tool to help the Ministry of Economy in El Salvador mainstream gender and environmental considerations into their economic development projects. She particularly appreciated the opportunity to test her tool with different Ministry teams — and journey to El Salvador to lead a workshop on risk analyses and understanding the impacts of projects during the creation phase.
“This really ties into my interests,” Vetry said. “How can I move forward in my career ensuring that I am not only improving policies and programs, but also transforming the systems and processes that build these programs as well?”
Following graduation, Vetry will spend the summer working with the economics department of U.S. Embassy Seoul. And after that, in September, she’ll be joining the State Economics Section as a political affairs officer.
“Having a development and inclusion lens,” Vetry said, “and being able to take that to State is something I’m really excited to be able to do, to bring nuance and new perspectives.”
Dr. Michael David-Fox, professor in the School of Foreign Service, became the new director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) in July 2021. He succeeds Professor Angela Stent, who served as director since 2001. David-Fox began teaching at the School of Foreign Service in 2011 and has since co-founded the scholarly journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.
Dr. Jacques Berlinerblau, the Rabbi Harold White professor of Jewish civilization at SFS, takes a new lens to much-studied author Philip Roth in his new book, The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography. A scholar of religion, politics and Jewish-American fiction, Berlinerblau combines the intersections of his expertise to investigate Roth’s work in light of current movements in racial reckoning and sexual politics.
Dr. Daniel Nexon, professor in the School of Foreign Service, advances a new approach to the study of international order in Undermining American Hegemony: Goods Substitution in World Politics, co-edited with Morten Skumsrud Andersen and Alexander Cooley. The book draws on case studies to show how alternative sources of military, economic and social goods hollow out the liberal world order.
Dr. Derek Goldman, professor of theater and performance studies, chair of the department of performing arts and co-founding director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and Clark Young (COL’12) adapt the text of their stage play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski to present an illustrated version of the powerful script, complete with essays and conversations from diplomats, scholars and artists.
Dr. Katrin Sieg, professor of German and director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies, questions Germany’s museums as they grapple with colonial history and violence. In Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum, Sieg examines how museums may impact how Europeans envision antiracism on a global scale.
Dr. Rebecca Katz, professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security, and Matthew Boyce, doctoral student in the Global Infectious Diseases Program, meet our public health moment with Inoculating Cities: Case Studies of Urban Pandemic Preparedness. Their new edited volume explores the threats that infectious diseases pose in urban environments and offers examples of threat reduction and mitigation techniques that could prevent future pandemics.
Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, teaching professor at the Center for Jewish Civilization, paints a historical picture of Jewish communities in India in his new book Growing Up Jewish in India. The book weaves discussions of Jewish diaspora with the story of artist Siona Benjamin. Soltes also published Eros and Eris: Love and Strife In and Beyond the Greco-Roman World, exploring love and hate in Greek and Latin literature.
Dr. Charles Kupchan, professor of international affairs, edited Anchoring the World: International Order in the Twenty-First Century — a new anthology that sets forth alternative visions for promoting international order and prosperity in the 21st century. Made possible by the generosity of the family of former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the publication of this incisive collection celebrates the centennials of SFS, Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Dr. Tamara Sonn, Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani professor in the history of Islam at the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, edited Overcoming Orientalism: Essays in Honor of John L. Esposito The book counters Orientalist tropes and honors Professor John L. Esposito’s work linking world religions, presenting Islam as a global tradition adapted by diverse communities.
Dr. Juan Luis
Manfredi Sánchez, Prince of Asturias distinguished visiting professor at the BMW Center for German and European Studies, explores the role of cities in globalization through Urban Diplomacy: A Cosmopolitan Outlook. In examining how cities influence events through diplomatic, political and communicative processes, the author shows how urban political agendas impact foreign policy.
Dr. Erik Voeten, Peter F. Krogh professor in geopolitics and justice in world affairs, uniquely approaches the ideological divisions threatening the liberal international order in his first book, Ideology and International Institutions. Voeten argues that multilateral institutions act as efforts by states to promote their ideological positions, weakening global governance and intensifying populist threats.
Dr. Paul Miller, professor of the practice of international affairs and co-chair for Global Politics and Security at the Master of Science in Foreign Service program, published Just War and Ordered Liberty, which examines the intellectual history of just war through three theoretical traditions: Augustinian, Westphalian and Liberal. Miller shows how different interpretations of justice, law and sovereignty change the just causes for warfare and sets out a unifying vision for just wars.
Anna von der Goltz, assistant pxrofessor in the School of Foreign Service and Department of History, reframes the political and cultural forces at work in the West German student movement in The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany Von der Goltz traces the influence of these activists to explore the enduring role of Christian Democracy in German political life.
Dr. Abraham Newman, professor in the School of Foreign Service and director of the Mortara Center for International Studies, co-edited The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence, a collection that examines key implications of information networks and weaponized interdependence, including on the global economy.
“[The play] poses the radical thought that every action, no matter how small, has great meaning.” by HERB SCHAFFNER
In 2014, director and Georgetown Professor of Theater and Performance Studies Derek Goldman and Academy Award–nominated actor David Strathairn first unveiled “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.” Originally written for an ensemble, the duo reimagined the play as a solo performance in 2019 for SFS’s Centennial. This was followed by an international premiere in London in January 2020, but further performances were delayed due to COVID-19. Now, “Remember This” has received rave reviews following runs at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, and Chicago’s Shakespeare Theatre.
“Remember This” tells the story of Jan Karski (PHD’52). A member of the Polish underground in 1942, Karski witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust firsthand. He delivered the first eyewitness accounts of the events unfolding in Eastern Europe to Allied leadership, including in a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office. Tragically, his accounts were largely dismissed.
“Writers Clark Young and Derek Goldman masterfully craft a lean narrative
David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski in "Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski." The play and Strathairn's solo performance have impressed reviewers in Chicago and DC (Photos: Cole Trudo).
around this overwhelmingly complex and emotional story that packs a powerful punch in 90 minutes,” writes Sheri Flanders in her review for the Chicago Sun Times. “This is not an easy play to watch; even if you have heard these stories before, and if the internet is any indication, far too many have not.”
Chris Jones, writing for the Chicago Tribune, concurs. “Young and Goldman... have penned a fine work that... looks both at the legacy of one remarkable man and, in so doing, at the cause of the millions who died and left behind witnesses.”
Strathairn’s portrayal of Karski was one of the highlights of the play’s performance at Georgetown in 2019, and reviews of these recent runs show that the actor still shines in this role. In her review for The Washington Post, Celia Wren writes, “Strathairn is a riveting presence who gets mileage from gestures as small as a finger clenching.” Similarly, Flanders writes, “Strathairn successfully walks a delicate path in representing Karski and his remembrances, wearing each char-
“Writers Clark Young and Derek Goldman masterfully craft a lean narrative around this overwhelmingly complex and emotional story that packs a powerful punch in 90 minutes.”
acter like a thin veil, without falling into caricature or comedic stereotype, even in moments of levity.”
Although “Remember This” is a solo play, there’s more to the production than its star. Reviewers praised the crew for their work in bringing Karski’s story to life. “Suspense is a more frequent mode, with lighting designer Zach Blane and sound designer/composer Roc Lee helping to conjure such events as a Blitzkrieg bombing and an escape from a moving train,” Wren writes. Flanders celebrates Blane’s lighting design as well, writing, “Lighting Designer Zach Blane enhances Strathairn’s storytelling prowess by
gracefully shifting from stark angles to atmospheric nebulous washes, as Karski’s story morphs from an unremarkable life, to refugee, to resistance spy.”
As with many who have viewed the play, Sheri Flanders finds it calls upon us to examine our humanity and courage to change: “One of the things that makes ‘Remember This’ so compelling is that it does not provide easy answers... it zooms in on the intractable knot of one of humanity’s worst sins — complacency. The play is bookended with a call to action, to look inward and ask what we can do to create change — and if we are already doing something, to do more.”
of 2021 Together
Again at Nationals Park for Conferral of Degrees
MAY 24, 2021
Students in the Class of 2021 gathered in person for the first time since March 2020 to celebrate their commencement at Nationals Park, home to the Washington Nationals Major League Baseball team. In ceremonies for undergraduates and graduate and professional students, Georgetown conferred over 6,500 degrees. In his remarks to the graduating class, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia stressed, “We come from every corner of the globe. We represent the multitudes of the earth. But together, we are Georgetown.”
Former Afghan Finance Minister Khalid Payenda Speaks on Corruption, Taliban Takeover and the Country’s Future at SFS Event
SEPTEMBER 2, 2021
SFS hosted Khalid Payenda for his first public remarks since resigning as Afghanistan’s minister of finance. In a conversation with SFS Dean Joel Hellman, Payenda discussed the Taliban’s takeover, the corruption that hollowed out the country’s U.S.-supported government and what Afghanistan’s economic future might hold. Payenda painted a grim outlook for
JUNE 23, 2021 SFS welcomed alumnus and U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (SFS’09, D-GA) to campus for the school’s first in-person event since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The audience consisted of students in the Class of 2024 who participated in Georgetown’s Summer Hilltop Immersion Program (SHIP). Sitting in Georgetown’s Red Square, Ossoff discussed the international issues he works on in Congress and how he has drawn upon his SFS education throughout his career. Students also had the opportunity to pose their questions to the senator, asking what unique perspectives are needed in government as well as how to balance local priorities and higher-level concerns.
Afghan civilians under a Taliban government, concluding that, “all indications are, if anything, [the Taliban] are more brutal than they were twenty years ago.”.
NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg Asserts Alliance’s Role as “Cornerstone of Transatlantic Security” at SFS Event
OCTOBER 6, 2021
In conjunction with the Brookings Institution, SFS co-hosted NATO Secretary General Jens Stolternberg for a conversation about how the military alliance is adapting to today’s increasingly complex security environment. Throughout the event, the secretary general emphasized the need for collective transatlantic cooperation on security, especially in light of a shifting dynamic between the Alliance and Russia and the rise of China.
Samantha
NOVEMBER 8, 2021 In an event cosponsored by the Global Human Development program and the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, SFS hosted USAID Administrator Samantha Power to celebrate the agency’s 60th anniversary and share her vision for inclusive international development. Power stressed the need to critically rethink USAID’s role across the globe — listening to partner countries and reflecting on how to “build back better.”
The Colombian Peace Agreement 5 Years Later: A Conversation with Juan Manuel Santos
NOVEMBER 18, 2021
Georgetown hosted former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, where he reflected on the five year anniversary of Colombia’s Peace Accords with the country’s oldest guerilla group, FARC-EP. In a discussion moderated by incoming Founding Director of the Georgetown Americas Institute Alejandro Werner, Santos discussed his work with various stakeholders in Colombia and the international community to end the decades-long conflict with FARC guerillas, emphasizing the importance of learning from successful peace negotiations.
The 2021 Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards: Women’s Rights are Human Rights
DECEMBER 6, 2021
Hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS), the event commemorated the 1995 Fourth UN World Conference of Women in which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first declared “women’s rights are human rights.” After opening remarks by Clinton
and GIWPS Executive Director
Melanne Verveer, the event honored five extraordinary women leaders: Patricia Espinosa, Dr. Marina Pisklakova-Parker, Guo Jianmei, Dr. Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda and Palwasha Hassan.
Paralympian Aimee Mullins (SFS’98) and Professor Victor D. Cha Explore the Politicization of International Sport at SFS Event
FEBRUARY 2, 2022
At a virtual event two days before the Beijing 2022 opening ceremony, Paralympian and alumna Aimee Mullins (SFS’98)
and sports diplomacy expert and SFS Professor Victor D. Cha had a conversation that explored the pressure faced by athletes competing on the global stage, the factors that determine Olympics host city decisions and the power of sport to transcend even the thorniest of international disputes.
SFS and Georgetown Offer Solidarity to the People of Ukraine and Share Analysis and Recommendations for How the World Should Respond
FEBRUARY 24, 2022
The SFS and Georgetown communities came together after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in an SFS town hall on the first day of the invasion, to hear faculty analysis on Zoom events for alumni and the public and to rally on Healy Lawn. As the world watches Ukraine and tries to gauge what the Kremlin will do next, the SFS community will continue to respond to the conflict through events, scholarship and teaching and continue to raise our voices in support of the Ukrainian people.
Friday, November 15, 2019 A stage performance by Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn of My Report to the World, honoring Jan Karski
Saturday, November 16, 2019 A day of on-campus lectures, discussions and master classes hosted by esteemed alumni and faculty