Adam Levy is a career diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service. He currently serves in Bogota, Colombia leading the Department of State's efforts to advance human rights and peace. Previously, Adam worked as a Special Assistant to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, as a desk officer for Syria supporting peace building efforts, in addition to assignments in Canada, Cuba, Mali, and China. Prior to joining the U.S. Department of State, Adam worked for Beyond Conflict where he was involved in reconciliation and track 1.5 negotiations initiatives involving Iran, Cuba, South Africa, Kosovo, and elsewhere and with a transitional justice initiative in East Africa. He completed his undergraduate degree with high honors from Tufts University with a focus on peace and justice studies and earned a Master's degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Originally from Ecuador, Adam calls (the winters of) Massachusetts home.
At Tufts, Adam was deeply involved with the Institute for Global Leadership's EPIIC and BUILD programs and was an avid member of the university's Klezmer Ensemble. He describes his time with the IGL as full of sparks. Sparks that created lifelong friendships and professional peers, Sparks that gave him early previews of the intellectual challenges, informational grey zones, trade offs, and moral quandaries facing foreign policy practitioners through research in Serbia and Kosovo, photojournalism projects focused on migration along the U.S.-Mexico border and in Nepal, as well the seeds for a reconciliation initiative in northern Uganda with two IGL alums.
Adam was one of the students who thoroughly drew upon the Institute's offering and routinely gave more than he received.
Thoughtful, incisive, and perspicacious he always knew how to assess and integrate knowledge, theory, and practice, well-honed skills which won him the Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship Program, a graduate school fellowship program that provides funding for graduate students as they prepare academically and professionally to enter the U.S. Foreign Service and enabled Adam to attend Harvard.
Adam's picture and Michael Eddy in Prizren, Kosovo during an IGL-EPIIC sponsored research trip in January 2007. Adam and Michael, both Tufts 2008 magna cum laude graduates and EPIIC alumni were studying the impact of the United Nations on Kosovo graces this Institute archive page documenting the exponential growth of Institute research. By the time I left to become Emeritus in 2016 well over one hundred students were engaged in such immersive efforts, one of the Institute's distinctive accomplishments.
Serendipitously, given what Adam is currently doing at State, as a senior, helped organize and conduct this Program of Justice in Times of Transition workshop with the Colombian Senate entitled: “Politics without Violence: National and International Reflections on Facing Electoral and Political Reform” which surely helped him in his current role.
The Program sought to achieve two interrelated goals: 1) to help the leadership in the Colombian Senate consider how Colombian political institutions such as the Senate could better contribute to the fledgling peace process with the ELN and the FARC and how the Senate in particular could go about reestablishing credibility as a democratic institution; 2) to present to the Senate with strategies drawn from the Central American peace processes for keeping the peace process alive and facilitating a transformation from violence to peace despite evolving and challenging circumstances. The practitioners PJTT brought from Central America to share experiences included: Ana Guadalupe Martínez, Senior Advisor to the Vice President of the El Salvadoran Legislative Assembly and former FMLN leader; Alvaro DeSoto, former Secretary General’s Personal Representative for the Central American Peace Process and Secretary General’s Special Adviser on Cyprus, Western Sahara, and Burma; and José María Argueta, Director of the Central American Institute of Strategic Studies, former and first Civilian National Security Advisor of Guatemala, and former Ambassador of Guatemala to Peru and Japan. The workshop with the Senate was held at a very timely moment when many Senators had been discredited due to links with paramilitary organizations. Discussions at the meeting helped the remaining Senators consider how to revitalize the credibility of the Senate and be a more active leader in facilitating a serious peace process in Colombia.
The PJTT at the time was hosted and the Institute for six years and created this mentorship program, ACCESS.
Adam also participated in the Institute's Program on Narrative and Documentary Practice. He wrote the text "Mining for a Better Life, a story about a Honduran immigrant man, Israel who worked in an immense copper mine in Mexico and who was seeking citizenship papers.
Here is his work with wonderful Sam James, an EPIIC and Synaptic Scholar, and lecturer in the PNDP program who provided the accompanying pictures and subsequently went on the great recognition as a photographer.
What endeared me to Adam is love for his family, especially his younger brother. It told me all I needed to know about his vast reservoir of care and concern for people, both close to him but also quite distant. Human rights were not something abstract for him.