Mentors

Juan Enriquez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Nirmala Rao

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Philip Bobbitt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justine Hardy

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

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

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

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

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

 

Jason Clay

Dr. Jason Clay, the Executive Director of the Markets Institute at the World Wildlife Fund.

Jason is the author of 15 books, more than 300 articles and 700 invited presentations. His most recent books are World Agriculture and the Environment, and Exploring the Links between International Business and Poverty Reduction: A Case Study of Unilever in Indonesia. In addition to his role at WWF, Jason is National Geographic's first ever Food and Sustainability Fellow. He also won a 2012 James Beard Award for his work on global food sustainability.

Jason is a superb and recognized global thinker, and an expert on environmentally sound agriculture, sustainable supply chains, and the protection of human rights through ecological practices. He is a deeply committed practitioner, a researcher and prolific writer having published influential books and many precedent setting policy reports. His collective work has had a profound influence on governments, corporations, NGOs, and activists.

His current work with the World Wildlife Fund focuses on lessening the negative impact of global industries, large scale agrobusiness, aquaculture, and disruptive supply chains on deforestation, environmental degradation, and worker poverty. 

He is noted for his distinctive extraordinarily effective consultation with Fortune 500 companies, focusing on sourcing, accountable and metric-driven corporate social responsibility, and responsiveness to the ecological pressures of global food systems.

He characterizes his role as that of an “extrapreneur,” who creates innovative and impactful relationships between diverse organizations and communities. 

Jason has been a friend and colleague for decades. I had the honor of being his best man at his wedding.

I first met him in 1987 when he was a researcher and advocate at Cultural Survival, a human rights organization defending disadvantaged indigenous peoples globally, and helping to integrate them equitably into world markets.

He has helped me create the rationale for what became the Institute. He served on its first Advisory Board, and some of early themes that we explored were deliberate outcomes of his thinking, such as 1993’s Militarization of the Third World, which resulted from his work in Africa.

He is one of the most resourceful and intellectually provocative thinkers I know, and his intellectual impact at both the personal and systemic level is indisputable. Though a visionary, he is a very tactical and tangible results-driven person.

He writes powerfully about how coming from an impoverished farming background to learn and then teach at Harvard and Yale, he understands the challenges of overcoming poverty and the dilemmas of agriculture, climate, and sustainability.

Jason is tremendously thoughtful and his criticism, always meeting the full measure of constructive feedback and inclusivity. Strong-minded, he is nonetheless both flexible and very self-critical.

He is a man of disciplined passion, and rarely have I met someone who better fits the description “suffering no fools.” His intelligent voice and prescient warnings need to be resonated, and his advice heeded. As it often is.

"I learned early on that I needed to find a job that I was passionate about and that would make me feel good. While I got a PhD and was expected to teach in a university, I never really wanted that life. That said, I have taught at Harvard and Yale. What I have always been most excited about was being on the cutting edge of change and helping improve the lives of others. 

Since childhood, I benefited so much from the support of others. It has always seemed only natural that I needed to pay it forward—not help those who had helped me but help those who had similar backgrounds to my own and needed a hand. My entire education was paid for by scholarships, grants and what I earned at the time. I had a total debt of only $500 for nine years of education. It was important for me to obtain an education without incurring a huge debt. 

To this day, I have only applied for one job. After I got it, I turned it down. I have either created jobs for myself or have been asked if I would be interested in working with others I know and respect to do something that could benefit either people or the planet. 

Jason on his work!

My career has focused on two key areas—human rights work with indigenous people (e.g. Native Americans or indigenous groups in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East) with a group called Cultural Survival based in Cambridge, MA and environmental work with the World Wildlife Fund-US based in Washington, DC.

Through a 45-year career, I have not only attempted to achieve results on my own, but also influence the strategies of others. Toward this end, I have: 
• Worked in 80 countries, including 15 in any given year.
• Given more than 800 talks, with more than 70-80 talks per year at this point. One talk alone reached more than 700 million people through a Reuters article what went viral.
• Given one of the most influential TED talks with millions of viewers.
• Generated more than 3,000 news clips about my issues, solutions and work. 
• Wrote 20 books and more than 500 articles, pieces, blogs, etc. 
• Raised more than $500 million to reduce human rights abuses, support poverty reduction programs, and reduce key environmental impacts.
• Helped raise more than $5 billion for other institutions to address the same issues.

Here are a some of the main accomplishments of my career.  

Human Rights—Giving a Voice to Those Who Aren’t Heard, 1980s and 1990s
• First to demonstrate that human rights violations could be predicted by showing the links between ethnicity, refugees, famine, armed conflict and the control of natural resources. Developed a database of 6,500 indigenous groups and their territories that is used by the US War College to predict armed conflicts.
• Proved that reliable, replicable research could be undertaken within refugee camps on the causes of refugee flows. More than $1 million was spent to discredit my research in Central America and Africa, but it withstood the challenges and generated credible data that changed US (as well as other countries’) policies towards Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mozambique, Sudan and Uganda. 
• Proved that “victims” viewpoints (whether indigenous people, ethnic minorities, famine victims, refugees or displaced people) are no less credible than those of government officials, researchers, aid agency personnel, journalists or others.
• Documented the misuse of famine assistance in 1986 and redirected $2 billion of famine assistance to Ethiopia in 1985-86.
• Drafted the World Bank policy on tribal people for Africa.
• Founded and edited the award winning Cultural Survival Quarterly, 1980-1992, which generated $1 million per year of core support for the non-profit.

Rainforest Marketing—Proving the Value of Rainforests in the Marketplace
In 1988, established a trading company (with loans from US AID and the MacArthur Foundation for a company within an NGO) to buy and sell rainforest products. 
• Founded the first Environmental/Fairtrade product certification program in the US.
• Created Rainforest Crunch ice cream flavor with Ben and Jerry’s (as well as Chubby Hubby) and more than 200 other products with 50 other companies. 
• Generated sales in the US, Europe and Japan of more than $100 million per year.
• Leveraged more than $1 billion in assistance from foundations and multi-lateral and bi-lateral organizations to help local groups and their donors undertake similar work. 
• Generated media coverage in more than 1,500 outlets over 4 years for rainforest conservation and rainforest marketing efforts.
• Featured as a Harvard Business School case.

Commodities—Reducing the Impact of Producing Food and Fiber
Since the 1990s, I have focused on drivers of deforestation—agriculture, cattle ranching, and mining; and developed strategies to halt deforestation that included governments as well as key private sector actors. 
• Identified the impacts of producing 21 key agricultural commodities and what is known about measurably reducing those impacts. 
• Identified the key impacts of producing the 13 fastest-growing aquaculture industries as well as how to reduce them to acceptable levels. 
• Identified the 25 most significant minerals reshaping our planet in the 21st Century. 
• Convened 8 global groups to agree on key impacts of commodity production, identify measurable indicators, and adopt performance standards. Each group includes producers, companies, researchers and NGOs. Each group includes retailers who represent 5-15% of global production.

Supply Chain Management
Since 2000, have focused on helping companies understand how they can use their supply chains to improve the quality of the products they purchase, reduce their negative impacts, and reinforce their “license to operate” in developing countries. 
• Developing ‘carbon neutral food” beginning with payments for carbon sequestration in tree crops and for sugarcane that is harvested without burning. 
• Advised Coca-Cola, Unilever and Mars about how to incorporate carbon payments into their product sourcing to comply with the Kyoto Protocol.
• Worked with Tabasco and Cadbury to purchase ingredients from landless producers and use forward contracting to help them obtain loans with contracts as collateral. 
• Advised Mars on supporting tree planting to offset their carbon footprint while improving the quality of the cocoa they purchase.
• Worked with Unilever to develop carbon sequestration payment systems to cover 30% of the cost of planting new oil-seed, tree crops.  

Corporate Responsibility
The power for change is increasingly with the private sector. What is less clear is that improving their performance regarding the environment or poverty, actually makes companies more profitable. 
• Oversaw the first study of the impact of a multi-national food company on poor people in a single country, looking at Unilever in Indonesia. 
• With WWF, the Calvert Group, Inter-American Development Bank, and the MacArthur Foundation, launched the first ever, $20 M investment fund to help small-scale producers and workers buy equity in downstream agricultural processing operations. 
• Evaluated 15 different worker-owned agriculture operations in Brazil to determine which might be relevant models to guide World Bank investments."

Anne Goldfeld

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Anne Goldfeld is a pioneer and a visionary leader.  In work spanning clinical medicine, basic science, and human rights, she has broken through barriers and dogma to make fundamental paradigm shifts changing what we thought was not possible into a reality.

The quintessential physician-scientist, Anne has seamlessly and spectacularly straddled the interface between care in the poorest and most dangerous environments in the world, and the scientific bench at Harvard.  All the while making fundamental scientific discoveries, and changing clinical practice impacting millions suffering from curable or treatable diseases, she has worked to change the tide of the great epidemics of her time, tuberculosis (TB) and AIDS.  In parallel, she has addressed the great social issues of her time before they became celebrated causes, making a profound impact in each instance.  

In all areas of her endeavor, she has challenged and overcome dogma, using her deep intelligence, commitment of heart, and gifts of insight and observation.

Trained as an internist and infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School, she was perhaps the first medical resident who understood the importance of working and devoting herself to patients in areas of conflict or of extreme poverty in the early 1980s, well before there was a field of ‘global health’.  She lobbied hard at a time when it was not accepted, to spend a month on the Thai-Cambodian border in May 1983 when she was a second year medical resident at MGH.  Working to provide health care in what was at the time a no-man’s land between Thailand and Cambodia with constant shelling in an active war zone, she cared for refugees from the Khmer Rouge genocide and became deeply interested in the medical scars of torture and war, and in treating curable tuberculosis. Upon her return to Boston she began to work on what would turn out to be a landmark piece of scholarship documenting the medical and psychological signs of torture. This study was the first paper to describe the high rate of sexual violence that women experienced in war and torture, and literally opened up the whole field of gender-based violence (1).  And around this time Anne chose to turn her career towards infectious diseases so she could be best prepared to help in conflict zones and in areas where patients did not have access to medicines, and

After completing her clinical infectious disease fellowship at MGH, she received equally intense training in molecular biology in the Biochemistry Dept. at Harvard University so she could apply her scientific interests in developing new therapies and vaccines.  It is there that she started her seminal work on the regulation of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) gene, the gene, which plays a major role in defense against infectious diseases whose overexpression is responsible for death from hemorrhagic viruses such as Ebola and malaria, and is at the root of many different forms of arthritis.  In the lab, based on novel experiments, she first broke down the strong dogma at the time—facing down strong scientific resistance in the early years, that the TNF gene was only expressed in one cell type.  Her studies led her to describe a new paradigm in understanding how genes are regulated in different cell types based on her discoveries (2).  Furthermore, she was the first to describe how HIV avoided the host immune system and avoided triggering the activation of this gene and literally snuck into cells without setting off the cell’s antiviral responses (3).  Even in those early years of her scientific training, her ability to make connections no one else was seeing, characterized her work.

In parallel with her scientific work, her profound commitment to the poor and afflicted in the world stayed strong.  As this first phase of her scientific work came to a reflection point, she returned again to the Thai-Cambodian border in 1989, and was asked to lead the team of doctors and nurses for the American Refugee Committee team that ran the medical care for the 130,000 residents of the Site II South refugee camp.  Confronted by daily human rights abuses by the Thai border guards, she began a systematic effort in the camp to document the violations using medical intake forms she developed based on her research of the medical signs and symptoms of torture.  Her recording of clinical findings based on her research on torture, providing a first demonstration of a medical human rights approach that would be widely emulated. 

As landmine victims were brought into the camp, she named it accurately a “medical epidemic” and began the first ever landmine prevention campaign in the world to educate refugees in the camp to not wander in the fields outside the camp to scavenge food or shelter materials in newly opened up and highly mined areas as the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese backed troops withdrew further into Cambodia.  Again, she used her documentary and scientific skills and snuck her camera into the camp to document carefully each casualty to use it to show the world what a landmine does (4). 

Anne made one of, if not, the first call publicly to eradicate landmines as a weapon of war in a press conference in Bangkok in December 1990 (6). She followed this with the first call to ban landmines before Congress in 1991 (5).  And she began to write about what she had seen and about the global problem. She wrote op-ed after op-ed in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe etc. alone and with Holly Myers urging for a ban (7).  Anne was one of the earliest members of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which eventually won the Nobel Peace prize in 1997.  Serving as an advisor to the Campaign in its early years, she co-founded the US Campaign to Ban Landmines with Myers in 1994 (6).

Simultaneously Anne worked at Harvard Medical School going deeper into immunology and discovering new molecules that regulated TNF and new patterns of gene regulation—work that continues until today.  And increasingly, she applied her scientific skills to address the monumental problems of TB and AIDS in the world and more recently in the last 2 years, Ebola.

As the landmine campaign gained extraordinary global traction, and the refugees who had been in the border regions of Cambodia repatriated, Anne began to turn her attention to TB, forming the Cambodian Health Committee with a Cambodian colleague.  Begun as a tiny NGO in the post-war destruction of Cambodia in 1994 to provide care in this country with one of the highest TB problems in the world non-existent TB care, it has gone on to have a massive impact on the suffering of adults and children from tuberculosis (TB) and AIDS, not only in Cambodia but also in Africa, and regionally in southeast Asia—most recently in Myanmar. The community-based strategies Anne and CHC pioneered have been scaled up to the entire country of Cambodia and they were at the origin of treating AIDS in the country.

Anne was one of the first people to see the connection between TB and HIV and their deadly synergy and while she began to scientifically document the terrible toll of TB and HIV co-infection and to seek scientific answers, she began to advocate publicly to address the human disaster of TB and AIDS.  She engaged the photojournalist and celebrated war photographer James Nachtwey to focus on TB and on TB and AIDS and they began a long collaboration to show the suffering of people unable to access treatment for curable TB and treatable AIDS (http://www.womensconference.org/struggle-for-life/).  The photoessay Nachtwey did of Anne’s work in 2003 (http://www.poyi.org/61/mpoy/nachtweythree01.php), earned him his 7th award as Photojournalist of the Year in 2004 and began to raise awareness of the problem.  Anne and Nachtwey showed their work together (his pictures and her documentation of the stories) in exhibitions in Paris, Bangkok and Berlin.  Anne’s work was featured in Nachtwey’s exhibits at the UN at the US capitol, and in a myriad of publications highlighting the disaster. 

Meanwhile, Anne’s focus in the lab turned more and more to TB and AIDS.  She pulled together the French/US/Cambodian team that would eventually perform the CAMELIA (Cambodian Early vs Late Introduction of Antiretrovirals) Trial, which is recognized by many as the most significant contribution to TB/HIV in the last decade.  The CAMELIA study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2011, showed that the earlier timing of AIDS drugs resulted in a 34% reduction in mortality (8), which translated on a global scale to ~450,000 lives saved yearly with the new regimen, which was then adopted by the World Health Organization. She would be awarded the Presidential Medal from the Cambodian Prime Minister in 2010 in recognition of this work.

Since 2008 Anne has expanded her work in Cambodia to Ethiopia where she began the countrywide program for drug resistant TB in the country with the NGO she co-founded in Cambodia, under its new name, Global Health Committee (GHC).  Passionately committed to the basic human right of assuring that everyone has access to medicines for curable or treatable diseases, she brought the model that had been developed in Cambodia to Ethiopia. In a remarkable and almost unprecedented outcome, as she was told staring the program was impossible, the collaborative program of GHC and the Ethiopian Ministry of Health GHC has treated over 2000 patients as of May 2017 and has reported the highest outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa for treatment for drug resistant TB (11). Anne’s work again turned a dogma on its head—this time that therapy for this disease could not be offered safely and rapidly in a country such as Ethiopia. With the Ethiopian and Cambodian teams she is currently finding ways to expand care for drug resistant TB in Myanmar to children and hoping to initiate care in South Sudan in follow up to a mission she made there in 2014.

Suyu Zhang

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 Suyu is an alumnus of the 2012-2013 EPIIC “Global and Health” Colloquium. Suyu graduated in 2013 with a BS in Biology from Tufts University, and is currently pursuing a M.D. from New York Medical College.

Suyu was born in Zhengzhou China, and grew up in Sendai Japan, New Haven and Cheshire Connecticut. After he graduated from college, he eventually settled in Crown Heights, Brooklyn to “find himself” before medical school. He had the privileged opportunity to work with individuals facing the hardship of economic and healthcare inequality in NYC. Through this experience Suyu developed a deep passion for listening to the story of different people, and advocating for social justice. “You can learn something from everyone”, being a favorite quote of his. Through his work with Memorial Sloan Kettering, Suyu has developed a passion for taking care of the “whole patient”, understanding that the quality of life is a vital consideration of ethical medicine. As a first-generation immigrant American, and a global citizen, connecting with others, and building community is something that is close Suyu’s heart. Shortly before coming to NYMC, Suyu backpacked, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. His final destination was his childhood home of Sendai, which he had not visited for 16 years. Using old Kodak photos, he tracked down his childhood friends, and teachers. This touching reunion left an indelible mark on him, teaching him that people are worth all the efforts. 

During his time in medical school, he continued to pursue his passion for the intersection of humanism, resilience, public policy and medicine. He founded a narrative medicine and social-connectedness project called Humans of NYMC. Modeled after Humans of New York, Humans of NYMC engages medical school students in free script interviews of peers, whereby the interviewee and interviewer work together to craft a narrative to be shared with the rest of the community. This project empowers students to develop narrative competence, that is the ability to better understand the purpose and the meaning from a story that better allows professionals/individuals to connect with others- a key component of providing humanistic medical care. This project also aims to create open dialogue between people of differing backgrounds. In 2019, this project was selected as one of 5 keynote student innovations to be presented at the annual Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Conference in Phoenix,Arizona.

https://www.humansofnymc.com/

During medical school, Suyu also pursued his interest in resilience. A topic heavily covered during his EPIIC course. He dove into the literature by Dr. Carol Dweck, Dr. Angela Duckworth, Dr. Trzeciak, Dr. Daniel Kahneman and many others on the metatheory of resilience, positive psychology, neuroplasticity, heuristics, flow, growth mindset, grit, compassion, empathy, antifragility, gratitude, mindfulness, overcoming adversity & trauma, and the science of wellbeing. He founded, and now directs the NYMC Resiliency Curriculum, an entirely student designed, driven, implemented and researched resiliency curriculum. He is currently writing the official curriculum that is training all medical students at NYMC to cultivate their resilience and resiliency in fighting burnout in the medical field to self actualize their journeys as healers.  Suyu views resilience as an innate drive present in everyone, that can be fostered and strengthened through cultivating our values, and passion. Resilience thus can drive the development of our resiliency, traits that allows us to not only manage the adversities and challenges that the medical education journey and our profession presents us, but to learn to reintegrate these adversity into our lives as sources of growth. Suyu strongly believes in the growth mindset: that our abilities, lives, and futures are not fixed nor set in stone, but rather can be improved through effort.

https://nymcresiliency.wordpress.com/

 

What’s being your experience in medical school, and how has it brought back to the passions you cultivated during your time with EPIIC and the IGL?

 

I was a Longitudinal Integrated Curriculum Scholar as a third year medical student. Students undergo an application process to be selected into this unique learning program across medical schools in the United States. Specifically students engage in a patient-centered learning program, where instead of short block rotations (the traditional format of clinical medical rotation) , they learn the core skills of doctoring by following a panel of patients longitudinally, over substantial time. This experience allowed me to follow a preterm infant through her birth at 27 weeks until when she was discharged at 40 weeks, counsel the mother through the psycho-social challenges of managing the unexpected nature of the birth and helping her be resilient throughout the “wait and see” period; an elderly patient with limited family support suffering from stage III peripheral artery disease; a patient attempting to navigate managing seizures as a result of and rehabilitation from her neurological surgery to remove a meningioma. This patient centered education allowed me to see many wonders of biomedical sciences radically change the lives of those ill; erythropoietin and blood transfusion ameliorate a less than optimal delivery, lamotrigine controlling seizures, phototherapy clearing the newborn of excess bilirubin. Yet, this experience has also highlighted to me the frustrating shortcomings of health care in tackling complex problems that require both compassionate clinical care and a larger policy response.

One patient that I met, a 26 year old male, had suffered a relapse of his opioid addiction. On his chart, he had a multitude of other mental health disorders, including depression, and anxiety. He’d been in and out of rehab, and suffered social wounds as repercussions of his addiction. A recent study by a group of physicians at University of California Los Angeles found that social pain is processed in some of the same brain areas that process physician pain and is quelled by pain relivers. In a sense, the paper states that stigmatizing treatment of people who use drugs, such as ignoring or rejecting them maybe the equivalent of a shock in the cycle of drug addiction: it’s a powerful social penalty that spurts further drug taking. Discussing this patient with many of my physician mentors and teachers, they lamented that aside from stabilizing his post-overdose symptoms, recommending rehab (again), and offering compassionate support, they had little else to offer. I could see the burnout in their eyes; as providers we learn to numb the pain that result from not being able to alleviate our patients’ suffering. My mentors often tell me that “we need a larger policy response”.  Incidentally, a recent scientific literature estimates that over half of practicing physicians and one-third of nurses in the United States suffer from burnout.

In 2013 I traveled to Kosovo as a student researcher, as a part of the Tufts Institute of Global Leadership Program on Global Health and Security. Having grown up in China, Japan, and now living in the United States as an American citizen, I’ve also had a natural curiosity for the diversity of our global communities. This interest blossomed into a scholarly interest in global development, human rights and healthcare during my undergraduate studies. In Kosovo, I was able to study the way in which the nation rebuilt its healthcare infrastructure after decades of conflict in the aftermath of Balkanization. I met and learned of the different ways that multiple institutions and various professionals coordinated to improve primary care, addressing health disparities of ethnic minorities, and design systemic interventions for a crisis of PTSD in a recently post-conflict nation. After graduating from my master’s program, I interned as a health policy researcher at New York University’s School of Population Health, where I had the opportunity to work on a national initiative aimed at improving the cardiovascular health outcomes for underserved populations in the greater New York City Area. Here, I had the opportunity to research different health care delivery and reform models that coordinated efforts between local and federal government, academic institutions and non-profit healthcare organization in an attempt to implement policy and structural changes that has the potential to move the needle on people’s health in a way isolated clinical alone cannot achieve. More importantly, I spent 2 years working one on one with the homeless at a soup kitchen in New York City. This experience taught me how much I loved hearing people’s stories, and making the work (clinical, policy, or academic) about me. To be frank, my time at NYU jaded me a little bit to policy work. Working at Memorial Sloan Kettering really helped realign my passion for the humanism, which set my course for medical school. It’s been great to slowly merge that passion for humanistic medicine, compassion, with the larger policy work that could feel depersonalizing/abstract.

In medical school, I have served on my school’s student government as an elected representative. One of the first thing that I did was perform a qualitative assessment of the needs of our peers (specifically addressing a lack of mental health support amongst my peers). This has led to my founding and directing of the NYMC Resiliency Curriculum. Our resiliency curriculum is based on extensive research into the literature behind resilience, neuroplasticity, the growth mindset, and the spectrum of mental health distress and burnout that exists in a continuum across the medical field: from medical students to residents to physicians. In designing this curriculum, I’ve had the opportunity to further my understanding of burnout, and mental health; along with the opportunity to apply strategic leadership skills in creating partnership with the administrative, different student organizations, peers, and mentors. 3 years after its founding, our program is now an integrated part of our medical school curriculum, trains every single medical school student at our school, and has been recognized nationally for its merits. Most importantly, through my research, I’ve realized that many of the challenges that our patients’ face: for example not being able to receive adequate primary care that not only manages disease but also promote health, are linked to several causes of student, and practitioner burnout: feeling as though their practice does not reflect what they believe medicine should be.

In designing this systematic intervention program, and directing its implementation and growth, I saw my passions for global health, health policy, intersect with my new found interest in the science of compassion and mental health; and most importantly my “ex-tra medicine passions” directly intersect with my career as a future physician. The literature pointed towards the connection between the rising deaths of despair (https://www.npr.org/2020/03/18/817687042/deaths-of-despair-examines-the-steady-erosion-of-u-s-working-class-life those from suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease) to the lack of resilience in our patients. If we can train our physicians to become more resilient, and teach resilience to our patients, could that bridge be overcome? Can we make evident the incentive for decreasing physician burnout is aligned with health policy changes that would better coordinate patient care, and improved health outcomes? These are some of the questions that I hope to answer in pursuing a career of patient centered innovation: bettering shaping medical care to effectively treat individual illnesses, advancing scientific understanding of disease processes, whilst designing, evaluating and implanting policy changes improve community health outcomes, along with better empowering physicians to heal their patients.

 

On a more personal note, I hope to continue to follow my passion for travel, and world futbol in the future. I’m trying to improve my Spanish, so that I can backpack Latin America before all my loan obligations become too burdensome. I’m looking forward to catch some of the classic futbol rivalries like the NorthWest Derby, El Classico, Superclasico, Milan Derby, and Der Klasskier in person. I need to go watch Manchester United play at Old Trafford and Lionel Messi play in person before he retires. How is this related to EPIIC? How is it not? Our passions are related to our success. And success to our passions.

Ananda Paez

Visiting a women’s livelihood center in Morocco

Visiting a women’s livelihood center in Morocco

Describe your experiences with the Institute and its immersive education.

One of the first things I did at Tufts as a freshman was join the Institute for Global Leadership. In fact, IGL was one of the main reasons I chose to attend Tufts in the first place. Exposure to the Oslo Scholars program during my senior year of high school convinced me that Tufts had the international focus and opportunities that I was interested in. I joined EPIIC Global Health and Security as a freshman, and over my 6 years at Tufts (4 as an undergraduate and 2 at Fletcher) I was involved in EMPOWER, Oslo Scholars, NIMEP, FieldEx, and others. I also co-founded the Tufts Latin America Committee that became part of the IGL in 2015.

IGL shaped my experience as a student at Tufts in two ways. First, it offered a challenging and insightful environment in the classroom where, by being exposed to a variety of perspectives and tough questions, my learning experience was enhanced. Second, IGL provided the unique opportunity to have international hands-on experiences that were essential to shaping my career. For instance, it was through the IGL that I was able to do a summer internship at the World Bank. This positive experience contributed to my decision to return to the World Bank after completing my master’s. Throughout my involvement with IGL, Sherman’s mentorship and guidance was and continues to be invaluable to me.

How have these many activities at the Institute opened up opportunities and provided you with mentors?

While at Tufts, the opportunity to do research and internships abroad was invaluable. For instance, my experience with NIMEP in Jordan, Junaid at the World Bank and BRAC in Sierra Leone gave me a lot of exposure and helped me understand the international development sector fairly well. This is why I think I was excited to start my master's right after undergrad. They also opened the doors to a lot of opportunities I wouldn't have had access to otherwise. My experience with Junaid at the World Bank in particular was amazing because not only did he offer mentorship, but he also encouraged me to make the most for my experience at the World Bank. During my time in DC I spent a lot of time speaking to people who were happy to mentor me and it was in great part through these conversations that I identified my interest in the intersection of development and humanitarian emergencies.  Most recently, the Convisero community has continued to be a source of mentorship for me. For example, Dan offered amazing career advise and access to his networks in the region that have been invaluable for me.

How will you engage with the Convisero community?

I definitely want to remain very actively engaged with the Convisero community, by continuing to exchange ideas with its members. In particular, I look forward to mentoring younger students or recent graduates who are interested in international development, in the same way that so many mentors helped me.

What are your intellectual passions?

I am working on expanding the work I did on my master’s thesis on coping mechanisms to drought and hopefully publishing a paper about it in the near future. Though my work right now focuses on specific projects, my core passion has always been broader policy and understanding how everything is connected. For example, given that I am currently working in an area that is affected by severe drought and previously worked in a conflict zone, understanding the nexus between humanitarian response and sustainable, long term development policy is something I have focused on a lot. I was recently surprised to find a UN document from the 1970’s that talked about this nexus, given that the discourse today continues to treat it as something that is new and upcoming. The fact that the humanitarian and development sectors remain separate and that synergies between them are yet to be fully understood or developed is concerning. On a more personal note, writing fiction has always been a passion that I am not trying to pursue more seriously as well. 

 

Your aspirations?

In the short-term, I would like to continue to learn from mentors and friends to gain more experience and a nuanced understanding of key issues in development. In the medium to long term, I wish to work on broader international development and humanitarian policy. I am particularly interested in resilience and system-building and response.

 

What are your thoughts and critiques of aid assistance, and your reaction to the Jameel Poverty Action Lab winning the Nobel Prize in Economics?

I believe that the development sector still has many flaws but also important strengths. For instance, power dynamics in the aid sector are extremely pronounced and often shape relationships between donors and recipients in negative and unsustainable ways.

 I was delighted when Kremer, Duflo and Banerjee won the Nobel as I believe that it is a big win for development economics and will give a lot more visibility to the benefits of this type of work. Randomized Controlled Trials and other impact evaluation methods can help assess the effectiveness of interventions and provide information on how to best use scarce resources. They are the basis of evidence-based decision-making in development which I think is crucial. That being said, there are certainly limitations to RCTs and I find that using them as panaceas is very dangerous. Experimental work can also be easily manipulated to yield particular results in a specific case that then compromises how generalizable they are and their policy relevance. I believe that the more investments in RCTs focus their policy relevance, the more the aid sector will benefit.  

You are to me essentially a "cosmopolitan" - a world citizen. How does rising global ethno-nationalism impact your thinking?

It is definitely concerning to watch the rise of ethno-nationalism around the globe. I am very interested in humanitarian response, and issues of migration and forced displacement are extremely relevant to my work. In the past year I have had a lot of conversations with mentors at the World Bank and other organizations about refugee policy. Something that strikes me is that policy-makers seem to be increasingly clueless about how to address negative reactions within host communities to the presence of migrants and refugees. Evidence suggests that refugees and migrants bring more benefits than drawbacks to a society, and there is little relationship between numbers and the popular discourse, which means that negative reactions are entirely political in nature. It really saddens me to see how this and other issues have been exploited by the ethno-nationalist discourse to serve political gains at the expense of logical and evidence-based policy.

 

 

Daniel Holmberg

Daniel H Holmberg has 30+ years as a principled humanitarian Assistance professional in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. He is currently the senior program policy advisor for the UN World Food Program Country Offices in Libya and Iraq on the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus. 


How did we first meet?

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I first met Sherman Teichman through his former student, acclaimed photo-journalist Nicki Sobecki. I met Nicki in Pakistan in 2010 where I was serving as Country Director for International non-governmental humanitarian aid organization Action Against Hunger / Action Contre la Faim. We had employed Nicki to update our web-page in regard to the work we were doing with populations in North West Pakistan displaced by the Taliban. At a dinner one night in the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad I opened up to Nicki about my two decades in conflict zones, family separation, burn-out, and the feeling that I was trapped in a career path that had no out. She immediately thought of one person. "You need to meet this guy. He is called Sherman Teichman and I think he can help.” I remained in Pakistan for several more months to address humanitarian needs precipitated by the 2010 Indus river flooding, and then followed my wife and kids to the U.S. My wife had just emigrated there 6 months before. Manic and cynical, I met Sherman at Tufts University. After narrating my 20+ years of international experience to him he had two messages for me. 1) "The cynicism has to go, and you need to remember the reason you have devoted your life to this work", 2) "I need you as an INSPIRE fellow at Tufts, to promote the new generation of public service-oriented doers and thinkers". He then directed me towards the Feinstein International Center, and in that one day, not only had I emerged from my cynical funk, but I had been requested by the Feinstein Center Director to apply for a masters program. That was a pivotal day in my life.

Describe your time as an INSPIRE Fellow with us.

I was an INSPIRE Fellow at Tufts for over two years. Having left the U.S. in 1984, and as a non-stop humanitarian practitioner acclimatizing to my home country after several decades, this experience turned out to be pivotal and inspiring door that opened on a new stage of life for me. I was surrounded by excited idealism. I was forced to see my life experiences as valuable, challenged to drop any tired cynicism I had built up, and encouraged to translate my experience to a new generation. It was cathartic and reaffirming of the time bound human tradition of mentoring, which has led to so much good in the world. Somewhat self-centered, I participated in round-table discussions with professionals with whom I had previously seen as 'not part of my highly focused world,' only to discover that we were all part of the same complex mosaic. 

·       ex- U.S. military immigrants from former Yugoslavia who were experts in cyber-warfare

·       U.S. military former commanders of provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq and Afghanistan

·       Humanitarian Assistance professionals who had found a niche in refugee resettlement that catered for the most vulnerable

·       business leaders with a profound sense of social responsibility.

·       Individuals with amazing combinations of academic, military, diplomatic and humanitarian expertise encapsulated into focused capacities

The list went on and on, but the most exciting part was the mentoring I provided that went on after my tenure as an INSPIRE Fellow. The way that Sherman helped me translate my experience into something new, I can now proudly say that I have and continue to do the same for people that Sherman has directed my way.

How were you introduced to the Masters in Humanitarian Assistance program at Fletcher?

As previously stated, Sherman, on the day I met him, directed me towards the Feinsterin International Center and introduced me to the Director at the time (Dr. Peter Walker). I was accepted into this specialized graduate degree program along with four other individuals. It was a mid-career level Joint graduate degree at both the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Though the program was ostensibly for humanitarian practitioners, I quickly discovered that I was the most experienced practitioner in the program and at the Fletcher School. Recognition of my experience led to Dr. Walker asking me to critique graduate projects on humanitarian assistance in complex emergencies at Harvard University, and eventually to offers from both the Fletcher School and George Washington University to be an adjunct professor. This degree put into focus my two decades of field experience, filled in the gaps of knowledge I had, and made me into a sharper tool. Shortly thereafter, I became the U.S. Government's Senior Humanitarian Advisor in Sudan, a country I have worked in extensively since 1992.

Give us a thumbnail of your work? What your passions have been? Your aspirations at this point?

As with most focus topics in the international affairs arena, any given topic has within it a plethora of specialized focus areas. For many years, I worked in a sub-culture of field practitioners in conflict and transitional areas of fragile states. Over time, as I became more senior and a part of the humanitarian architecture that influences political policy decisions, I became aware that INGO voices, while powerful from a 'reality check'-moral basis, were also compromised by their reliance on donors. When I became a U.S. diplomat and the humanitarian representative for the largest donor in the world in a given context, I carried with me the moral compass and operational knowledge from my past and inserted it into the sometimes timid, transactional and dogmatic world of engagement with foreign governments, diplomatic missions with their many equities, and United Nations bureaucracy where it is adverse to change in the status quo. As the former U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia put it, "Daniel speaks truth to power." At times, this had negative effects on my political capital and personal well-being, but through this approach I became the de-facto humanitarian lead voice in both Sudan and Ethiopia. With the support I garnered from INGO's, like minded UN allies, and other diplomatic missions, I was able to challenge comfort zones of big power and big egos, and shift the humanitarian architecture and diplomatic policies towards outcomes that had huge effects on the lives of the millions of vulnerable people we are meant to serve in these countries. Through my years of experience, my almost obsessive devotion to research and having the right information, the correct amalgam of components, and my inclination towards doing better than what is acceptable, to many I have been, on several occasions, one of few in the room with the understanding of what needs to be done ' five steps ahead,' and the risk-taking orientation to act. This is my passion, and now the arena of 'a single humanitarian response' has become an arena I no longer want to commit to. I want to contribute a step further to the thoughtful design of new approaches based in operational and political reality that address the inefficiencies of the current practice and norms of humanitarian assistance. The budget for Humanitarian assistance grows larger every year. Climate change, population youth bulges in developing countries, fragile states faced with a swing to the political right, isolationism of wealthy donor countries, and their subsequent disengagement with issues of regional stability, all denote the heightened relevance of the capacities of the humanitarian assistance community and a need for new approaches. My passion is to be one of the global think tank contributors to this need.

How you have helped our students in the past, and how you are available now to continue doing so?

I recall a persistent inclination I have had throughout my career. When I had a supervisor or colleague who demonstrates ego, arrogance or ineptitude in the work-place, either towards me or towards another, I made a mental note to 'never be like that'. This is easier said than done, because it implies sometimes standing up for change in the status quo and in sub-cultural norms. It is this that has guided my approach not only to assisting students that Sherman has sent my way, but to empowering those I see who have been dis-empowered in the workplace owing to norms of social status and the tendency those with access to information to hold it for themselves in support of the power base they have established. I have taken colleagues and subordinates who are not recognized and divulged to them what is going on in the decision-making realm above them. I actively de-mystify power and decision-making structures to those who are excluded from such knowledge. In doing so, I have seen seeds become flowers and timidity become confidence, in some cases leading to promotions to positions of power and access for individuals I have believed would be worthy of such responsibility, and for whom there was no one else assisting them. My approach is not uncommon, but it is still generally a minority social orientation.

Sherman directed Barbara Majid to me. She had an MPH and was working in New York for the international Rescue Committee. She wanted to go to the field and be a humanitarian practitioner, but didn't know how. I spoke to her at Sherman's behest with a template of 'need-to-know knowledge' in hand as I did so. She impressed, not just her technical knowledge, but with her humanity and work ethic. I reached out to former colleagues at Action against Hunger (the premier nutrition INGO) and told them I found a gem. They followed up. I prepped her for the interview and helped her decompress afterward. Long story short, she became an emergency nutrition coordinator for them in the Congo. I stayed in touch with her, trying to be of help with the adjustment to the field, and the process of taking that field operations energy as a catalyst for inspiration towards shooting for excellence. She kindly offers me up as having gotten her the job. I am honored by such sentiment, but know full well that I was only a helper who de-mystified a piece of the world for a qualified individual. I encouraged her to do the same for others.

I have assisted several other students with guidance and networking introductions, and I am currently assisting IGL grad Ananda Páez Rodas with intro's, guidance on where she can exploit her talents and de-mystifying the seemingly mystifying.

It is this part of my life that inspires me to revitalize former opportunities I had in the field of academics. I was offered an adjunct teaching gig at the University of Denver when I was the head of OFDA in Ethiopia. My organization did not value this enough to give me the time off, but now that I am on a different and new path, it seems obvious that advancing my academic participation as a professor and potential mentor would be one of the things that would be of benefit to myself and others. 

Daniel as a young UN staffer in the rebel HQ of Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement faction leader Riek Machar (Now the vice president of South Sudan) in his Rebel HQ in Nasir, South Sudan ~ 1992. Also in the picture was his British wife Emma Riek, and to the right of Daniel, two nurses from International Rescue Committee. 

With Jean Louis Romanet, we finally met!

 

Cody Valdes

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Cody A. Valdes is Senior Lecturer and Senior Tutor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Sai University, where he will be leading the development of the University’s tutorial system for undergraduate students as well as its Communications foundation course. He will play a role in fostering intellectual life, international projects, and opportunities for holistic growth on campus.

He received his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University in 2017 and his BA in Political Science from Tufts University in 2013. At Tufts he served in leadership positions in numerous programs of the Institute for Global Leadership under its Founding Director Emeritus Sherman Teichman, including its EPIIC colloquium, Empower Program of Social Entrepreneurship, Discourse Journal, Poverty and Power Research Initiative, Solar for Gaza/Sderot, and Synaptic Scholars. He later served as a Teaching Assistant for Tufts’ Department of Political Science, for which he gave lectures in the history of political thought and international relations. He has worked with Healing Minds Foundation’s team of therapists in Srinagar, Kashmir to introduce a mind-body integration programme for youth throughout the Valley. As an Instructor in the traditional martial arts with the School of Oom Yung Doe, he taught self-defense and moving meditation seminars to students and teachers at the International School of Kashmir and the Government College for Women in Srinagar.

***** MY INTERVIEW WITH CODY *****

It was my great pleasure and fortune to be able to introduce Cody to Jamshed Bharucha, who hired him at Sai University, where he is the indispensable fulcrum for my Global Challenges colloquium.

You joined EPIIC for our Global Cities year, and helped to create some of the more significant projects of the Institute - our look at corruption and oligarchy in the Philippines with the PPRI; the efforts to help ASYV with the Mango Tree Project; Sisi ni Amani, Solar for Gaza.

Why were you drawn to these initiatives? Did your efforts yield results?

For the Global Cities year (2008-9) I studied the potential impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics on Vancouver’s homeless and its Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. That same year I joined the Povrty and Power Research Initiative which had returned from its inaugural research effort into oligarchies and corruption in Guatemala and impressed me as being a serious team of very smart older peers. I sometimes wonder if my attraction to the theme of corruption as a freshman anticipated my later attraction to the theme of decline, which includes corruption in the Transparency International sense, but some other significant dimensions besides. In almost all of these efforts I was attracted by the seriousness of the issue at hand and the people I ended up working with.  

How would you describe your temperament? On the one hand, I see tremendous equanimity. On the other, great restlessness.

Yes there is much restlessness. I might refer to Nietzsche’s Gay Science, section 351, or Faust:

Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest.

I would ascribe my restlessness to the fact that in many respects I have not allowed my personality to develop along a normal and healthful course, which instinctively seeks equilibrium and ease in self-definition. I have tried to see all sides of things, which naturally makes one try to be all sides of things. My motivation has been the same naïvely expansive humanism espoused by Faust.

What are your aspirations at the crossroads where you currently find yourself? What will inform your decision? What are important and vexing political or social issues you want to engage with?

I am looking for an organic way forward. My work in Kashmir has been abruptly curtailed by the Indian government’s actions on August 5th, 2019, but the events of that day also galvanized me to engage in Canadian public life. The annulment of Kashmir’s status within the Indian federation demonstrated the utter fragility of constitutional democracy, especially where the qualities of forbearance and humanity can no longer be assumed of publics and their politicians. I would like to see Canada shore up its commitment to the letter and spirit of its federalist constitution and to respect the process of decentralized self-governance and self-determination by all of our provinces, territories, and peoples. I wish that this spirit of self-definition would prevail in our culture as well. I am not satisfied with the pseudo-multiculturalism of our cities where in fact everybody thinks and acts the same. I think it will weigh on humanity’s conscience very heavily, second only to the ecological crisis, if we press the homogenization of human culture any further.

My vision for an academy in Haida Gwaii reflects this latter concern for the future of human development. There is a rich heritage of knowledge accessible in books and the living lineages of disciplines that is more available to us than ever and yet fast slipping from our grasp. Our world is dying of thirst next to these inexhaustible reservoirs. Our minds are no longer cut out to access this knowledge – to participate in culture in the German sense of Bildung or the Greek sense of paideia. I was born around the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Internet was invented. The overwhelming trend during my lifetime has been the breaking down of barriers. Our culture has yet to propose an integral vision of a human being to its youth, i.e., a person who knows the worth of the different varietals of freedom.

What kind of role models do you admire?

I admire what were called in English class ‘round characters,’ people who in their way have assimilated a high degree of contradiction. These are the true empaths of the world because some part of them really is that which they seek to understand. The cost is inner turmoil for as much time as it takes to work out an equilibrium between the opposing elements. Then again, I appreciate the qualities of truly singular and unalloyed individuals and epochs too. For example here is a couplet by the Arab poet Ta’abata Sharran that has always evoked for me the Bedouin spirit of freedom:

[He is a man who] seldom complains of whatever calamity befalls him,

But has plenty of desires, many different directions to move in and ways to go.

Qalil al-tashakki lil-mulimm yusibuhu

Kathir al-hawa shatta al-nawa wa-al-masaalik

To his Jahiliyyan verse one could counter a saying of the prophet Muhammad, and then one would have a pair of remarkable yet contrasting personalities; and one could do this with pairs like Christ and Caesar, Socrates and Alcibiades, Confucius and Chuang Tzu, Hegel and Nietzsche…

What was your experience like creating the Cambridge Reading Group on decline? 

When you think of decline, how do you explain what is happening in our own country, or the world at large? What construct makes sense to you at this moment in political terms? 

We gathered an eclectic group of participants not one of whom was a student of political theory. We had an ecologist, a physicist, a lawyer, a political scientist, Brendan Simms our patron and resident historian, and various others. I convened it in early 2017, less than a year after the Brexit and Trump phenomena that had suddenly made the topic apropos. The group culled some interesting insights from the texts which were documented in a summary we published on Simms’ Forum on Geopolitics website.  

I will say that the tendency in the modern social sciences towards materialistic or impersonal explanations of rise and decline is, in my opinion, misguided. These scientists could take as a model Ibn Khaldun, who derives general laws or patterns of rise and decline from observable facts, yet foregrounds the human element of personality, character, and spirit in the last analysis.

You have many physical practices to balance your intellectual discipline:

Hockey - what does it fulfill for you, and why had you left it for so long?

You have chosen to dedicate yourself to traditional martial arts. Is there any eschatology involved? What informs your dedication to two disparate sports?

Hockey was an important phase in my youth but I left it when my interest in political issues began to eclipse my interest in sport, which coincided with my introduction to the IGL. I would characterize the next seven years as the steady decline of my off-ice fitness regime, until its monotony became unbearable and I went searching for something that was more mental than physical, which I found in traditional martial arts with the School of Oom Yung Doe. This form of movement concentrates the processes of mental development and self-awareness. The rigour tests one’s commitment to certain ideals and also lets one to test certain propositions one might hold about basic problems of the mind and body or mind and matter. The practice has convinced me of the intimate connection of self-knowledge and self-development, the premise of the academy I aim to create.

Your life is a life dedicated to, and is an avatar of the “mind/body” duality, a fusion that few have achieved at such a level, especially at your age.

How do you integrate the disparate parts of your life? What continuities and discontinuities are there?

If the question is the degree to which I have achieved a workable synthesis of my values and ambitions, I think I have not met with very much success. I am an unwieldy grotesque of motivations. I took especial note of Nietzsche’s early characterization of Socrates and the rest of the pre-Platonic philosophers as each being “hewn from a single stone,” single-ingredient and singular individuals, in contrast to Plato and those who followed him, who he characterized as mishmashes of all kinds of Eastern and late Hellenic influences. The latter types are forced to impose a form on their lives arbitrarily, or conform themselves to their times, or aspire to the Renaissance ideal of l’uomo universale and unify their manifold natures. Naturally, these options, if not properly mediated, introduce new incongruities of their own. I think this is one of my principal struggles in life. 

If the question concerns the share of my life that transpires inside of me, as opposed to externally, that share is very much. The greatest events in my life have been thoughts, insights, internal struggles, victories, etc. I have made my decisions about what to do and where to go based on an internal sense of necessity and this has made my life feel integral, even in bad times, and perhaps made its incongruities more apparent than real.  

What do you mean by the "theory and practice of existential philosophy" that you have taught? How does this relate to your work on political thought and intellectual history?

In Kashmir part of my remit has been to engage our team of therapists in a continual process of self-inquiry. To take this seriously one has to make a practice of it and live moment to moment in a struggle for awareness. The danger with developing a theory and language to speak about awareness is that these quickly replace the real thing. The point is to overcome spiritual lethargy and release blockages, and over the past year we tried this by many means: conversations about death, guided journaling, a group reading of Victor Frankl’s memoirs from the Holocaust, and physical and mental challenges to bring the problem “into the moment,” where it needs to be.

Awareness is only aroused for a reason. In our team’s case it was the ethical and professional imperative to work with clients sensitively and effectively. A therapist needs to discern and respect the existential dimension of a person’s struggles – the questions of value, priority, ethics, identity, etc. that the client must learn to resolve. Practically, we were trying to develop the intellectual acuity and self-control to not impose one’s own understandings of life and values on a person in a space where there are countless opportunities to do so. This is a principle that many teachers embrace who teach by the so-called Socratic method. 

My training in intellectual history was less relevant to this work than one could have anticipated. It is true that modern existential psychology derives from the existential turn in modern philosophy of the late 19th century, but that was part of a larger crisis of faith in the West that is mostly irrelevant to Kashmir, where piety and religiosity remain robust. We had no need to study the intellectual history of existentialism. Instead we drew on our own experiences of working through these issues.

You spoke of an aspiration to create an academy on the island of Haida Gwaii. What attracts you there? You had never spoken about the profession of teaching, yet you have taught and you are skilled in explanation and mentoring. Are you reluctant to choose that path?

I have had extraordinary teachers and I have drawn from life-changing bodies of knowledge, and I want to share what has most enriched my life. The academy would challenge its students to live with the greatest possible simultaneous commitments to self-development and self-knowledge, and to exist continually at their point of tension.  

I envision a holistic education as a counterpart and compliment to the narrower kind of education our undergraduates are getting, one that is at once too cerebral and yet inadequate to the goal of teaching individuals how to think, and not just how to speechify and formulate arguments for set convictions but to truly understand their convictions. The syllabus would be both typically Western and Eastern, in that it would entail an investigation into the character of modernity that would involve a serious study of the history of ideas, as well as a much more visceral and internal process of acquainting the individual with his or her own psychic process. The goal is to posit and establish a link between one’s flesh-and-blood consciousness and one’s ethical, political and aesthetic commitments, while helping one to access richer states of consciousness that one’s upbringing in Western modernity has perhaps left attenuated. Western philosophy itself has reached the point where it recognizes the necessary connection between embodied persons and their ideas, yet it utterly lacks a discipline such as the ancient rishis of India developed to purify and refine that connection and prepare individuals to liberate themselves from their conditioning and access the full range of powers of their own minds. This is why I include traditional martial arts in the curriculum — although traditional yoga could just as well serve the purpose. Western science cannot develop such a discipline, and nobody should wait for it to do so. A popular mythology of suspect provenance even holds that individuals are incapable of overcoming their conditioning, or of gaining any significant control over their psycho-mental process, and that freedom of will and freedom of thought are illusory. This is a formidable perspective that deserves consideration; but I would tempt the prospective student to consider that this is the conclusion of a dispirited kind of person, for whom the myth may indeed be true, but that there exist other possibilities for those willing to realize them. My role as an educator would be to present a student with this possibility. Our syllabus would be designed to prepare them for this work.

Haida Gwaii is an extraordinary land with a powerful energy and it is the traditional home of a remarkable people. This academy would be open to all, but I would hope to work closely with Haida youth and to find ways for non-Haida students to substantively learn from the Haida. The academy would aim to attract students from other parts of the world for a ‘gap-year’ that they could take at some point after graduating high school and before turning thirty, or as long as they retain the labile quality of youth.

People speak of privilege, admittedly often in a disingenuous way. How do you understand this concept, and what have you done with it in your life?

I have misgivings about the ascent of the concept of privilege in our culture. In its current usage it carries strong materialistic and individualistic overtones and implications that put it in direct contrast to what would otherwise be its counterpart in traditional culture, namely an expression of gratitude for the fact of one’s existence and for the endless bounties and harmonies of the world, including the blessings conferred on us by other people. It is extraordinary that the etymology of kufr, the word for the cardinal sin of Islam, disbelief or apostasy, in pre-Islamic Arabia denoted extreme, arrogant ingratitude. That this concept should have been adapted to express rebellion against God suggests the centrality of gratitude to at least one of the world’s major spiritual traditions. It would be found to have a central place in the others as well, I am sure. But modern culture characteristically perverts the sentiment by foregrounding privilege in its stead, actually rendering gratitude taboo. A privilege is something one enjoys for oneself or which others aspire to enjoy for themselves. It is spoken of as if it did not entail a proportionate duty, or the possibility that its possessor would choose to distribute its fruits. Gratitude is an attitude that actually encourages one to possess one’s advantages lightly by continually placing them in a higher perspective. But today the weightiest expression of civic morality, exercising power in a position of public trust, is reinterpreted as a privilege, as if it were not a sacred duty and a burden. This is why I think that the ascent of this concept points to a decay of our understanding and practice of power. The ethos of the modern world naturally sees only material advantage to the individual when it speaks of privileges. It is striking that this ethos has found an outlet in the progressivism of our day. To be sure, the fault lies primarily with our leaders and with those who have been given every opportunity to become valuable members of society but failed to wield their power with wisdom. Seemingly without fear of posthumous reproach and incapable of resisting conspicuous emolument, they have contributed most decisively to this breakdown in public trust. But I think it is important not to admit a way of speaking about privilege and access to resources that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of power and sees only people who win and people who lose. The empirical reality might suggest that this is our world, and the hustlers themselves might think they are triumphing over such a world, but it is imperative to sustain, not the illusion, but the proper understanding of what power is for. To reinterpret power as mere privilege is to reproduce the social corruption that one decries.

I underwent a phase when I thought the cosmos was basically devoid of any compelling reason to abide by a sense of morality and duty or to aspire to anything. Then I realized that my life was something given to me on trust, and that I had to steward and develop myself for the sake of what I understand to be life’s imperatives. From this realization there was a relatively sensible road via Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel back to the conception of civic responsibility that is motivating me today.

As to what I have done with the opportunities given to me in my life, I have tried to do them honour by brooking no slackness or half-measures from myself. That said, I have been on a winding path whose inner logic I have had to follow, and which often took me very far from ‘active duty.’ There was a seven year gap between my work in Kenya and my work in Kashmir during which I mostly lived the life of the mind, although I did some teaching. While I was working in Kenya, I realized that I would only be able to do as much good in the world as I had made good in myself. I resolved that I would acquire some substance and wisdom before I attempted to help others again. I also had the crisis of faith to which I just referred, which compelled me to search for a greater understanding of myself anyway. This led me into teaching and further formal study. My curriculum vitae has exactly mirrored my intellectual life since then.

You are a voracious reader, eclectic and yet disciplined to an extraordinary degree. How do you choose? What works had the most impact? What are you reading that has surprised you?

How do you understand the breadth of your intellectual curiosity? How have you explored it?

I try to read the right book at the right time. Usually I have an instinct for what would further my understanding. But there are times when I try something out prematurely or when I push my interest in a certain batch of books too far, when a sense of discipline detaches from a sense of pleasure and tries to carry on austerely. There should always be pleasure in reading.

When I was a teaching assistant at Tufts I was deeply impressed by the majestic scope of Hegel’s philosophy of history. I gave myself a comparable syllabus – I wanted to comprehend the world’s peoples and civilizations and especially their literary, religious and philosophical achievements. This elided with my specific interest in the problem of decline in history that I was contemplating at the time and that I continue to study. Because we have far more sources and translations available to us than 19th century philosophers of history did, the syllabus has grown to ridiculous proportions; but this fact is also a principal consolation of my life. I admire the emission of the 15th-16th century German humanist Ulrich von Hutten: ‘Oh century! Spirits wax strong; studies bloom; it is a joy to live!’

You live the life of the mind in both some of the most abstruse and sophisticated ways of thinking and argumentation. How does that translate into working with non-literate societies? Across cultures?

I do not have any interest in the abstruse way of communicating practiced by our campus philosophers and academics. I would think that good rhetoric is an obligation for the learned, especially for those with a ‘postmodern’ understanding of the nature of their work as entailing not the discovery but the creation of knowledge. I could no longer pursue my studies in academia because these kinds of contradictions were too pronounced.

My work with our team of therapists in Kashmir has been so challenging and rewarding because to present oneself as a coach among a team of highly trained individuals, one has to be what one wants to communicate. This had nothing to do with a language barrier, but with the basic fact that actions speak louder than words, and that people are greater arguments for ways of being than their arguments.

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Giovana Manfrin

Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Giovana is an alumna of the 2015-16 EPIIC '“Future of Europe” colloquium, where I first met her as a classmate. She graduated the following year with a BA in International Relations and a minor in Economics.

Originally from Curitiba, Brazil, she is currently a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she analyzes data-driven policies, interventions, and evidence-based gender research for policy design and delivery with the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP). She works closely with the WAPPP Executive Director informing policymakers and stakeholders in different nations on strategies that close gender gaps in political leadership. Giovana also works with a network of international projects inspired on WAPPP’s political training program, the "From Harvard Square to the Oval Office: A Political Campaign Practicum," to help bring more women to the highest levels of political decision-making and statecraft.

The exchange below was conducted in the Fall of 2019. We discuss her unique and remarkable story, her time in EPIIC and at Tufts, her current aspirations and motivations, and the role she envisions for herself in the future.

As her friend, I value Giovana’s determination, candor, and warmth tremendously. It’s an honor to know her, and to be able to present her here.

- Jerome Krumenacker, 2019

EPIIC was one of the first experiences you opted into upon entering Tufts. What drew you to the course as a recent transfer student? What was most meaningful to you about the experience? 

The theme was “The Future of Europe” when I transferred to Tufts in the Fall of 2015. What first drew me into EPIIC was my novice problematization of Europe. Brazilian by nationality, I didn’t know much about studies of Europe. But I knew enough to find issues with that broad categorization – just as Brazil has very little in common with other regions in Latin America (more so internally and across many pockets of Brazilian communities), being insensitive to the minutiae of the European fabric, I thought, would make any student of the world very shortsighted.[1]

Unlike any other class, “The Future of Europe” – and the larger EPIIC colloquium experience – turned out to defy any and all neat assumptions of statehood, unity, conflict, peace, and statecraft. In every session, I felt a level of pressure and chaos that would boil my blood. I never ceased to feel challenged but, strangely, I also felt homeward-bound. Now that I look back, it had indeed been a while since I had last felt the drive that EPIIC re-installed in me.

Perhaps because I was brought up that way, I am someone who gets interested in navigating complex situations, people, and places. I grew up in a somewhat turbulent environment where poverty, angst, and dreams met. As a result, very broadly, I learned to appreciate – and frequently look for – some degree of chaos in life. Complex and convoluted situations and domains – from individuals to ideas and work-place environments – have always taught me how to seek the highest levels of wisdom, to come up with the most creative solutions, and to find the greatest fulfillment in working with others. So, when I quit my decades-old career as a ballerina to continue my undergraduate studies of international relations at Tufts, I was uncomfortably numb.

Gladly I met the IGL, and was accepted into the EPIIC 2015-2016 cohort. The class itself was my own version of Brendan Simms’s Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present – our first assignment, the 720-page book that we read within the first few weeks of the semester. Just like Simms’s book, EPIIC delved deeply into the account of the past half-millennium of European history, but (unlike the book) never forgetting the traditionally-marginalized angles that are often left out of conversations about state formation: multiculturalism (as read in Pallavi Aiyar’s The New Old World); the politics of memory (as we learned from Dan Stone’s Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945); and political disfranchisement (as seen from the many readings on migration referred by Mark Miller, Julia Stewart-David and Kelly Greenhill). Just like the many ideas of Europe, every EPIIIC session that year was illuminating, and revealing. EPIIC brought color again into my every-day.

All in all, I needed the level of difficulty and intensity that EPIIC was about to offer; as soon as I heard the rumors about the class being “too much,” I was sold. I wasn’t wrong – it was indeed very demanding. But it became one of my most enriching life/school experiences. Little did I know that the friendships that I made in EPIIC would also come to stay. Today, they are my dearest and most trusted circle of friends. Liam, Jérôme, Maria, Mile, Paulina, Raasika, Reece (in alphabetical order, or else they’ll lose my number) and everyone else from our year, as well as folks who were also part of the larger EPIIC/IGL ecosystem – Cody Valdes, Heather Barry, Jacob Throwe, Rizwan Ladha, and most uniquely, Sherman – are essential components of one of the strongest pillars of my support system.

To “what was most meaningful to me” about the EPIIC experience community, not only I rediscovered my purpose as a student, but I also found my most loyal friends. Overall, I also regained the best version of myself – one which I thought had gotten lost for good.

You had a very unique background compared to others in that EPIIC class, or at Tufts in general - most of us expected from a much younger age to come to an American liberal arts university for our chosen field of study, and I don’t recall meeting anyone else who was on track to become a professional ballet dancer. How did you come to your interest in global affairs, and what can you say in retrospect about the transition? Did you perceive your relatively circuitous path as an advantage, or as barrier? How do you feel about it now? 

I became interested in “international relations” as a field of study from a professor at Miami Dade College (where I studied before transferring to Tufts), an inspiring woman of incredible character who did an even more incredible job helping us understand the impacts of international security on individual people’s lives. Later on, I studied these links again at a class at The Fletcher School on nuclear politics with Francesca Giovannini. But my ever-growing interest in deeper cultural intelligence has been part of me much earlier than that.

It is hard for me to explain in words, but I remember always thinking about how other parts of the world behaved, so as to see how we could learn from one another, in an effort to become better citizens of the same globe. Likely because of the pervasive inequalities that surrounded me, I was never satisfied with the theories from geography, religion, and history alone. I always tried to look for better answers for why politics and modern economic growth have led some places to be so institutionally dysfunctional. Fast forward to now, I like to think of IR as an ideal opportunity to absorb the contributions from every individual social science. Jérôme and I were talking about this the other evening over jazz records and wine.

Letting go of my ballet career wasn’t easy. I was dancing since I was 2 and had my last performance was when I was 21. Like I mentioned, I lacked a bit of purpose as the years went by after I stopped dancing. But experiences like EPIIC reaffirmed my passion for that deep curiosity and solicitous worldview to addressing the world’s most gruesome problems. I got to act on that childhood tenacity, because the constant turmoil and instability of regions that I was learning about put me on an unending road of learning from people.

On adapting from being a ballerina to an aspiring diplomat – it felt to me nearly the same as when I took my first solo flight to Miami, when I was 16, when I left home. When I watched the plane contour the immense curve from the south of Brazil to the south of Florida, I realized that there were more than two Americas, and a bigger world to be understood; other “theaters” to be studied.

On the roads that stretch behind us, this hasn’t always been possible, but I learned to embrace my background as a ballerina. Today I think that my understanding of people and of the world to be much more unconventional – in terms of being nuanced and apt to integrate factors that traditional IR theories have forgotten about. To me, this essentially means studying gender, racial and cognitive diversity, heterogenous preferences within a state demographic, faith, food, dialects, and all of the intersectional variations of the social, intellectual, economic, political, cultural, geographic, linguistic, analytical, human gamut that compose international affairs.  

You found unanticipated new passions and sources of inspiration during your senior year at Tufts, not least the course on nuclear security you took at Fletcher. How did your experience in EPIIC draw you to these opportunities, and prepare you for them? How do they continue to influence you? 

What I learned in EPIIC became a valuable tool that I will always take with me – to be always analytical and humble, however the segment within international affairs. I like to think that we will always be students of world politics, independent of the level of field experience acquired. World/international politics are complex by virtue and in “kaleidoscopic” levels; as such, EPIIC showed me that by being humble in garnering and seeking all facets of knowledge, studying politics can be a very efficient approach to potentially solving problems of global scale.

This encouraged me to venture into the politics of nuclear energy, which turned out to be a very meaningful way that I found to understand international security. Nuclear, both as a technological and foreign policy tool, is source of geopolitical instability. I saw it recently happen with Brazil at the turn of administrations, with the rapid expansion of our nuclear-fueled submarine that had been somewhat dormant – to the worries of the IAEA. 

That aside, I will always strive to be most humble and analytical in my pursuits within the IR field. Currently, I work on the intersection of politics and economics, assessing evidence-based policy across countries that focus on the merits of gender equality in political leadership. More simply put, I analyze political, economic, and social landscapes, in an effort to disseminate data-driven solutions to governments about what works to create gender equality in parliaments around the world. 

The collection of these experiences showed me that I am very “data-heavy.” By data I mean everything from the intangible qualities that are very hard to code in a dataset, such as preferences or patterns of behavior, to the coordinates of geospatial data. Although I am fierce about working within the domains of international security within international relations, EPIIC has broaden my horizons by teaching me to be, again, analytical and humble.

How did the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School become your destination after graduation? How have you grown in your roles there, and what you learned from them? 

I think that the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) is one of the very few evidence-based think-tanks within a larger policy environment that is the Harvard Kennedy School. In my senior year at Tufts, I was looking to get more proficient in applying that deep level of analysis into the practical world of politics. My objective after graduating was to learn how to be an effective political analyst regardless of area of focus within world politics. Not having had any prior formal teaching on the role of gender, the focus of WAPPP on global gender equity really challenged me, and gave me the opportunity to enrich the range and depth of my knowledge of international affairs more than I expected.

I started at WAPPP first as an undergraduate intern working part-time during my senior year. I was then hired into working very closely with the Executive Director after graduation in 2017. A year after, I became a fellow managing research projects on gender and politics, traveling internationally at short notice, and always analyzing data-driven tools that help governments effectively capacitate gender diversity, parity, and inclusion into political leadership. It has been the mission of creating intersectional diversity in politics and how important that is for peace and security that motivated my long hours and unexpected travels.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have learned how to apply a gender lens in international relations from WAPPP. Unfortunately, this has been severely under-appreciated by IR scholars left and right. I very much hope this can change and would expect that, going forward, it becomes its own required module in IR curricula, and that it also further becomes more actively sought by students and teachers, academics and practitioners alike.

What’s next for you? Longterm?

I have always thought of myself as becoming a diplomat within defense and security later on. The job of a diplomat working with disarmament affairs or ethical AI governance, for example, would fall in that category.

Because I think the road into diplomacy is a long one, I would love to gradually grow into that direction. With that, I see myself working next with geopolitics and intelligence. I know that this may sound like a diversion, but to be successful in these roles, I would love to purse an advanced degree in economics. As a researcher working with political data, I have developed great respect and value for evidence-based, data-driven strategies, which is enabled by quantitative research. This is confidential for now, but I am going to apply (and hopefully get accepted into) the Tufts MS in Economics.

In essence, I see myself being able to work very well across the spectrum: (1) mastering data collection and analysis (which my current role at WAPPP has allowed me to do, and which a master’s degree in economics would take me to a higher level); (2) distilling and disseminating information to stakeholders (which the role of a geopolitical or intelligence analysts entails); and (3) enacting a policy decision in the realm of defense and security. The core problem that I see with diplomacy is that diplomats don’t have much of a role in informing political decisions. But right now, I am only 25, and have plenty of time to reflect on, and to learn.

[1] One of the class readings, The Idea of Europe: An Essay by George Steiner, made me settle on a just notion what Europe is. The Idea of Europe is now my favorite prose.

 

Reece Wallace

I am a Tufts alumnus and proud member of EPIIC’s 2015-2016 colloquium on the Future of Europe. With encouragement from Sherman, IGL staff and my EPIIC classmates, I was supported at every step of my college journey across the social sciences and humanities and from Medford to Oxford and back.

Graduating with a degree in philosophy in 2019, I went on to focus in philosophy at the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. My thesis centered on the moral and political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., weaving together longstanding interests in the interface between philosophy, intellectual history, and “the real world”.

I have since worked as a writer in a range of professional contexts. After a stint as a reporter on the financial industry, I worked as a proposal writer for the Foundation and Institutional Advisory practice at AllianceBernstein, a global asset manager. I currently work on proposal writing and business development for the Foundations and Endowments Specialty Practice at Truist Bank.

I look forward to more professional twists and turns as I explore the challenges and opportunities around me. For now, I’m happy to have landed back in my hometown of Houston, where I enjoy reading, fishing, and mild winters. 

This exchange was had during his time as a Masters student at the University of Chicago. We begin with his time at Tufts and in EPIIC. We touch upon his chief interests in moral and political philosophy, literature, history, and the humanities generally. We also discuss his aspirations to find a vocation in teaching, practicing journalism, or otherwise engaging in the publishing and editorial world. I expect he will find the means to combine his many interests and pursuits, knowing him to be both a deep thinker and an integrator of ideas. I know he will do great things in any and all domains he engages in.

Reece is among the most thoughtful and intellectually principled people I’ve met. It’s a privilege to have known him as a classmate in EPIIC, and now to have him as a friend.

- Jerome Krumenacker, 2019

EPIIC was one of the first experiences you opted into entering Tufts. What drew you to the course as a freshman? How did it shape the rest of your college experience?  

I probably would never have heard of EPIIC if it hadn't been for Caitlin Thompson, who at the time I started at Tufts was an upperclassman instructor in the Experimental College and my orientation leader. She spoke about EPIIC in a way that no one else was talking about their schoolwork. I couldn't quite tell what she was getting at (who can know what they're really getting into before they actually get into EPIIC?) but something about the challenge, the camaraderie, and the clarity of purpose she described cut through the noise of orientation week. I went to Sherman's information session a few days later and somehow decided I would give this thing a shot. It was the first academic and intellectual risk I'd ever really taken, but it felt like the right one to take.

In the short term, EPIIC gave me a taste of social science and its complicated interface with the world. It helped me hone in on themes I found resonant and let me follow up on those interests. In my case, those interests tended in the direction of political theory, which is part of the reason I went on to major in philosophy.

As much as any experience I had in college, EPIIC taught me to seek out difficulty. To seek out difficult ideas and debates, but also to seek out the complex social circumstances they're embedded in. It's easy (for me, anyway) to go through the motions, seeking the path of least resistance and avoiding the intellectual and social-emotional risks of important work. But you just can't do that and succeed in a project like EPIIC. You need to learn to be confident in what you know and honest about everything you don't. You need to trust other people and take seriously the trust they put in you. You need to know how to lead and how to follow. You need a sense of your horizons. I think EPIIC gave me those skills and that sense. 

Overall, The experience was breathtaking--breathtakingly challenging, breathtakingly fun, breathtakingly meaningful. I came away from the year with new standards for myself and my work, and friends who continue to hold me to them.

Is there anything particularly unique and meaningful about the friendships you made?

I'm definitely introverted, and often shy to boot, but I love people. More often than I'd like, I have the experience of wanting deeply to connect with and feel comfortable around people I admire and feeling like I fail at it. There are steps I can take to improve myself and manage that feeling, but to some extent I think it'll follow me wherever I go. For whatever reason, though, the friends I made in EPIIC are that rare type who put me totally at ease. Not intellectually at ease (they can think circles around me), but as their friend and fellow traveler. My friends from EPIIC are some of most thoughtful, kind, and humane folks I know.

You studied philosophy at Tufts, and I know you to be sensitive to the tension between the life of the mind and the call to civic engagement. How have you navigated that tension through your time at Tufts? How did EPIIC influence your approach?

Philosophy felt like the right place to sit with various tensions. For one, it's right there at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, disciplines I love and whose boundaries are very porous. Although they're often hybrids, I think philosophers are very much humanists in this respect: they worry about how and whether they can justify their work in a world that demands action. There are purists who dismiss this worry, but more who take it seriously. The professors and classmates I found in philosophy, as in so many other places at Tufts, grappled honestly with the tension of theory and practice. In particular, I'm grateful to have been a student of Lionel McPherson and Erin Kelly, excellent thinkers who shaped the academic interests I'm pursuing in grad school. Maybe most of all, I admire Susan Russinoff, my advisor. She's a fantastic teacher and an advocate anyone would be lucky to have. They are all people who recognized their stake in the world and took responsibility for it. I think I discovered that ethos in EPIIC, and I've tried to stay close by it ever since. 

Near the end of my time at Tufts I had the chance to join the Ethics Bowl team, one of the nerdier things I did as an undergraduate (and that's saying something). I joined up at the prompting of some good friends and with the encouragement of Professor Russinoff, our coach and sponsor. As a practical ethics contest, it falls naturally at the intersection of philosophy and the world, of thinking and acting. This was a place I wanted to be.

I didn't realize at the time that Ethics Bowl would lead me farther beyond the ivory tower than I had imagined. In my last semester, my teammates and I traveled to MCI Concord, a prison, to work with incarcerated students on ethical reasoning and help facilitate a version of our competition. It was intense, humbling, and amazing to start a conversation with the students at Concord about justice and punishment and the ways we have of thinking through our responsibilities to each other. I can't imagine a higher purpose for philosophy, for academia, or for life than to struggle with these issues.

You have a deep interest in a broad range of eclectic topics, including, for example, international justice, theory of mind, and nuclear security. What core principles and convictions tie together how you think about these themes?

I wish I had a good answer! The honest through-line is probably that I have too much time on my hands. Like a lot of topics I'm interested in, they are all conditions in the lives we live and the society we share. They’re all given, in the sense that they came before us, but not in the sense that they're unchanging. I think if we pay attention, we can notice the circumstances under which they do change, and consider what that means for us. 

I've been thinking especially about how notions of identity condition us to think about ourselves and the problems we face. Racial, ethnic, gender, and national identities are all critical background conditions which, as we're seeing now, sometimes break into the foreground in our personal and political lives. They are incredibly consequential, and yet they change constantly, and faster than we recognize. I'm interested in how and whether philosophical analysis can pinpoint what we mean when we talk about these identities, how we use these identities in practice, and how we ought to think about, talk about, and use them. 

What drew you to the Masters in the Humanities at the University of Chicago? Will you gravitate to a particular discipline, or choose a multidisciplinary focus?

I'll probably focus somewhere between political philosophy and literature. If that doesn't sound like a focus, well, I can't argue with that. Unlike a lot of other, more specialized master's programs, the MAPH allows you to work across and even beyond the traditional humanities disciplines over the course of the degree. I think a tragedy of the disciplines, or at least of grad school, is that you have to sacrifice so much interesting, worthwhile stuff in order to gain "expertise" in something. I really appreciate that I can make my own way here and stave off some of the pressure to specialize for a little while. 

What are the virtues of generalizing? How does resisting specialization allow you to grow in ways you might otherwise not?

Hopefully I'll learn more and more about the virtues of generalizing as I go! As far as growth is concerned, I think being a generalist forces you to first articulate and then address problems and projects, making the case for their importance in terms that aren't domain-specific. Needless to say, we can't do without specialists. But I think specialists sometimes fall into a blinkered worldview that sets the agenda for them. Often that's what we want--it's an efficient way for super-competent people to prioritize and throw themselves at prescribed challenges. On the other hand, there's always going to be an important place for people who, because they don't have the scaffolding of a particular professional community or a narrow skill set, have to set think hard about setting the agenda in light of the connections they see between things.

What’s next for you? What are your aspirations?

I'm using this year to hone my academic and non-academic writing skills, which I'd love to put to use somehow.

From there, whether I go the PhD route or not, I plan to give myself at least a year out in the real world, and I'd like to fill it with something worthwhile.  

By "real world," I mean the world that exists outside the incentive structure of the research university system. I think it's hard to overstate how much that incentive system distorts values, relationships, and self-image (in good and bad ways), and it's always worth reminding myself of that fact as I consider the costs and benefits of a career in or outside academia.

Journalism really interests me, for example. Teaching, too. Ultimately I don't want to be too precious about what comes next. I want to be grateful for now, and for all the opportunities I'm unbelievably lucky to have moving forward.

What draws you to writing and journalism? The joy of the act? An impact you aspire to have?

Both! My own writing certainly hasn't made an impact in the world, but it has definitely impacted me. There will never be anything else like writing as a tool for learning. And when it's done really well, it's one of the best forms for sharing what you've learned. I hope that someday I'll have learned something well enough to help someone else understand it. I would be in a position to do for others what great writers do for me every day.

Whose writing and philosophy do you admire?

These days I'm interested in  Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and especially Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of them formulated compelling responses to unimaginable injustice. In King's case, he's only fairly recently been taken up by scholars as a full-fledged philosopher instead of rather than just a great orator. This is long overdue--his thinking about justice, ethics, and nonviolence are subtle, powerful, and highly relevant today. 

 

Mike Niconchuk

Michael Niconchuk is a researcher and practitioner at the intersection of mental health and psychosocial support, peacebuilding, violence prevention. 

Beginning his career working in community development among former combatants from the armed opposition in Guatemala, he has worked for more than a decade with refugee communities in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, and Germany building trauma-focused community mental health programs. From 2012-2015 he served as the Emergency Response Coordinator for Questscope, leading interagency humanitarian coordination and the establishment of referral systems for young refugees in conflict with the law. In 2015 he was awarded a Fulbright Postgraduate Award to complete his master's degree in social cognition at University College London, where he researched the neurobiology of dehumanization and trauma. In 2017, he joined Beyond Conflict's neuroscience and social conflict innovation lab, spearheading various research projects exploring the neurobiological aspects of intergroup violence and conflict-related stress and trauma.

Since 2019 he has supported international efforts to repatriate, rehabilitate, and reintegrate children and families of foreign fighters in the Islamic State, strengthening trauma-informed law enforcement and community responses in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, The Maldives, Iraq and Bosnia. Michael currently serves as a Program Manager with the Wend Collective. He is a consultant to UNDP’s mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) programs and also serves on the Advisory Board to the New York-based Counter Extremism Project (CEP). 

Mike is a co-author of The Field Guide for Barefoot Psychology, an innovative trauma psychoeducation and self-care program for Syrian refugees, and is an author of the US Institute of Peace’s RISE Action Guide for the reintegration of extremism-affiliated adults. 

In this interview, Michael “Mike” Niconchuk reflects on some of the intimate lessons he has learned on healing and coping from refugees he has developed friendships with over the last five years working in post-conflict and displaced communities in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. He has a particular focus on young people at risk of violence and conflict with the law. For three years, after the start of the conflict in Syria, Mike worked as an Emergency Response Coordinator in Za’atri Refugee Camp in Jordan, leading various projects for violence reduction, youth leadership, and alternative education. Since then, Mike has worked with refugees across various stages of their migration journey—from Greece, to Germany, to Canada, and the United States—conducting research on the links between forced displacement, stress, social cognition, and social behavior.

He also shares insights he has gained from his empirical social cognition and neuroendocrinology research into the biological impacts of subjective belonging and violent extremism, while studying as a recent US-UK Fulbright scholar at University College London.

Mike continues to pursue innovative research that combines methods from neuroscience, peace building, and conflict reduction. Currently, he works as a consultant for various organizations in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, using a behavioral science lens to design and evaluate programs for violence prevention and psychosocial wellbeing. In 2016, Mike was named an Innovation Fellow at Beyond Conflict, where he continues to develop his research on the psychology and neurobiology of displacement, violence, and marginalization.

I recently accompanied Mike, an alumnus of our Institute, to the Island of Lesvos, Greece, to participate in a Tällberg Foundation workshop on the underlying cause and potential long-term consequences of Europe’s refugee crisis, “Clash of Civilizations?”

EuropeNow In your opinion, what is the global challenge in front of us in terms of migration, trauma, and healing?

Mike Niconchuk Millions of people have fled to Europe in the past three years. By boat and by foot, the means people have used to get to “somewhere better” have pushed to the boundaries of empathetic imagination and moral consciousness, leaving us in a place of fatigue, cognitive dissonance, and political polarization.

Beyond basic needs and economic integration, there is an imperative of healing that accompanies the refugee crisis,

Whether in Canada, Europe, or the Middle East, from my experience, resilience outshines trauma, and that deserves attention. Much of mental health—in our rhetoric, policy, and prescriptions—is approached from a deficit model as opposed to an asset model. We focus on what is wrong with the person after conflict, without reveling in how much remains intact. While it is imperative to continue to innovate in the clinical space, I continue to learn so much about healing and coping from communities still living what many would blanket label as “trauma.”

For me, the challenge has two major components. First, how do we best work with communities to understand their own healing and resilience, as much as we try to understand their suffering? And second, how can we best unravel and conquer the growing politics and fear and polarization that has done so much damage to otherwise beautiful chances for mutual healing and coexistence?

EuropeNow What are you trying to do?

Mike Niconchuk I’m trying to work with people during and after conflict, and restore their minds to pride and joy despite having lived through these horrible circumstances.

Brain sciences offer a fantastic lens for unpacking individual and group-level drivers of conflict. Beyond clinical psychology, which has formed the bedrock of trauma healing and mental health care, neuroscience and social cognitive science provide additional ways of looking at how we think, above and beyond the political or behavioral summations of what we think.

Just as there are certain commonalities in the narratives and impacts of conflict on communities in various geographies, brain science affords a unique luxury of stripping bare something we all share—brains—and cautiously interrogates it to better understand how we create conflict, how we experience conflict, and how we change because of it. These three questions are key to designing better programs for resilience, recovery, and healing. By understanding what conflict, migration, and trauma do to us at cellular, chemical, and cognitive levels, we can work together to strengthen the “better angels of our nature.”[1]

EuropeNow What brought you to this intersection of brain science, migration, and program design?

Mike Niconchuk My mother lived through one of the most notorious wars in the Western Hemisphere, in Guatemala. As a child, being part of a family formed by war never meant much to me. It was not until I started my undergraduate education in International Relations at Tufts that I began to ask bigger, deeper questions about what it means to live through war, leave your home, and start over. At the time, it still barely dawned on me that my own mother lived through a conflict, considering she barely talked about it at home. Now, I’m not surprised she never talked about it.

My family’s story is not rare, and I take pride in a blurred line between academic pursuit and self-awareness. The U.S., a land of immigrants, if an amnesic one, is rich with stories and lessons about migration, trauma, and healing. Wars in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, or the Far East pushed millions of people to pursue futures in the “Land of Opportunity,” either by force or by choice. In 1950 alone, the United States accepted nearly 250,000 immigrants,[2] though of course not all of these were victims of forced displacement. My mother moved to the U.S. because she fell in love, not because she was forced to flee, but that does not diminish her experience of war, or the legacy it left in her, and her family’s, minds. Her story has grounded me with a solid understanding that “refugees,” in the legal sense, are hardly the only ones whose minds, hearts, and trajectories, are profoundly affected by conflict. That is not to diminish our media, philanthropic, or practical focus on refugees, but to remind that war is bigger, and its tendrils exceed our most liberal categorizations of victims.

The questions I had about trauma, memory, and its extended impacts only grew over three years in Jordan, while working in Za’atri Refugee Camp. On the periphery of the world’s most talked-about humanitarian crises, the youth I worked with were spinning quickly in a revolving door of conflict and vulnerability. Some still could never fathom picking up a weapon. Others had fought in the early days of the conflict. Others had been imprisoned, abused, threatened. Others were contemplating return to any number of rebel groups who were doing the “right thing,” in their minds.

I continue to explore the biological and neural correlates of violence, trauma, and recovery, as well as the myriad social cognitive issues such as values, stereotypes, forgiveness, belonging, fear, and stress that spin in that revolving door of conflict, between victimization and perpetration.

EuropeNow Is healing possible?

Mike Niconchuk For Mahmoud, a twenty nine-year-old refugee from Damascus, all he wants is to be able to cope with each day, to find some way to make meaning in a numbing routine of restricted movement, isolation, and risk. For others, healing means shedding the intrusive thoughts that creep in their minds, which poke them like a hot iron and force them to recall images they have tried to forget.[3]

Refugees move, but their experiences, their thoughts, and traumatic memories move with them.  Not all victims of conflicts and not all people who live through violence are traumatized,[4] and the mandate of healing after crises is not confined to those whose symptomology qualifies as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Indeed, the question of healing is bigger than PTSD, and is bigger than the refugee crisis. While this may seem controversial to those outside of the mental health sector, there is an important distinction that we must make between trauma, trauma-induced disorders, and other consequences of exposure to violence[1]. The word trauma or traumatized can be used carelessly by media and by practitioners outside of, and to some extent within, the mental health sector. Particularly when it comes to refugees, the label “traumatized” predictably accompanies too many headlines about those fleeing conflict zones. In American politics today, there is much talk of “healing divisions” while divisions seem to be multiplying each day. One of the founding fathers of trauma healing—Bessel Van Der Kolk—highlights some of the cross-causal commonalities of stress on the individual, suggesting that the “human response to overwhelming and uncontrollable life events is remarkably consistent”[5] across different types of events—childhood abuse, natural disasters, or living in a concentration camp.

Without doubt, war affects the minds and memories of all survivors, but traumatizedimplies a pathology that must be separated from other psychological and social impacts of war, if we are to work meaningfully, and honestly with refugees, internally displaced persons, and other survivors of conflict.[6]

In my own work, I look at the idea of “healing” through an asset-based and biological framework. To phrase it as a question, I ask how do non-medical resources like social belonging, agency, and economic integration affect biological and psychological resilience of those who have lived through war? We know, for example, that social isolation and exclusion affect physical health and wellbeing, and result in acute changes in stress hormone levels. Perhaps the opposite is true, that refugee communities who enter into societies (in neighboring counties, or in Europe, or in Canada) that facilitate a greater sense of belonging and social mobility have demonstrable positive changes in stress hormone responses, fear-reactivity, and pro-social behavior.

My own questions in no way challenge or disagree with advances in clinical treatment of PTSD and other disorders. It is, however, a different lens through which to ask the same question of how we restore normalcy—biologically, socially, and emotionally—after suffering. So, overall, yes, healing is possible, and we have just begun to scratch the surface of understanding how humans heal after conflict, just as we have only begun to scratch the surface in our understanding of the extent to which violence is a deeply embodied experience.

EuropeNow So, what exactly is required of humanity, in Europe and elsewhere, to increase the possibility and space for healing?

Mike Niconchuk There are practical steps that need to be taken in the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) sector—increased funding, training, advocacy—to increase and expand opportunities for healing at a clinical level. The mental health and wellbeing of refugees is critical to their social, economic, and cultural integration, even if integration is still ill-defined. Beyond integration policy, the cultivation of a sense of belonging, place, and meaning is fundamental for mental and social wellbeing, not just for refugees, but for anyone.[7]I would go so far as to say that the mental health and sense of belonging among migrants, and their children who will be European-born, is a security issue.[8]Maybe, if placed in that lens, refugees’ mental health will be given the public health and policy attention it deserves.

Imagine if even 15 percent of refugees arrived in Germany with missing limbs. We would assume that their current state would jeopardize their social and economic productivity, no? Trauma and stress, even social stress below the threshold of “trauma,” have biological and cognitive impacts which negatively affect physical health,[9] executive functioning,[10]can lead to anti-social behavior,[11] and can even lead to higher risk of depressive symptoms in offspring.[12] The crisis of refugee mental health and healing is a generational one that should be met with cutting edge research, bold policy, and realism.

There is progress, on many fronts, though most initiatives remain small scale. In Germany for example, the International Psychological Organization (Ipso), Berlin, is training a cadre of several dozen refugees with psychotherapy training in their home countries, to serve as psychotherapists for new arrivals to Germany. The idea of providing clinical services in refugees’ native language—the language of their memories—is an important first step, but requires tremendous human resource investment and cultural sensitivity.

Over a beer, Nisreen—who has a Master’s degree from the University of Damascus—expressed her fundamental concerns over “integration” stress, and what that means for her:

“At every step, our lives are about doing what others tell us. Our country was destroyed. No one asked me. We had to flee to Lebanon. No one asked me. We had to come here and start over, and no one asked me. They tell me we have to do this and that, and that we can’t do certain things. Why doesn’t the world try to integrate with me? Why is integration always about me becoming less of me, and more of what someone else wants me to be?”

So much of healing is about meeting people where they are. Where “they are” is in unpleasant space where discomfort sets the stage, and compassion and fear battle for control of our minds and our actions. To heal, within our own communities or to heal others, requires some acceptance of an uncomfortable new world order, where the options for opinion and policy seem increasingly binary, torn between myopic, but natural, tribalism on one hand, and strategic, if anxious, embrace, on the other. In working to heal others who have experienced unfathomable loss, we will spend much of the time looking in mirrors, where our personal pasts and historical legacies loom ominously. If we confront those mirrors successfully, we can truly make healing as powerful a force as loss.

 

Mike Niconchuk has spent more than five years working in post-conflict and displaced communities in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, with a particular focus on young people at risk of violence and conflict with the law. For three years, after the start of the conflict in Syria, Mike worked as an Emergency Response Coordinator in Za’atri Refugee Camp in Jordan, leading various projects for violence reduction, youth leadership, and alternative education. Since then, Mike has worked with refugees across various stages of their migration journey—from Greece, to Germany, to Canada, and the United States—conducting research on the links between forced displacement, stress, social cognition, and social behavior. As a Fulbright scholar at University College London, Mike began empirical research into the biological impacts of subjective belonging, and continues to pursue innovative research that combine methods from neuroscience, neurobiology, peacebuilding, and conflict reduction. Currently, Mike works as a consultant for various organizations in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, using a behavioral science lens to design and evaluate programs for violence prevention and psychosocial wellbeing. In 2016, Mike was named an Innovation Fellow at Beyond Conflict, where he continues to develop his research on the psychology and neurobiology of displacement, violence, and marginalization.

References

[1] Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined (Vol. 75). New York: Viking.

[2] Haines, David. (2015) Learning from Our Past: The Refugee Experience in the United States. Special Report, United States Immigration Council. Available at: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/refugee-experience-united-states

[3] Ehlers, A., Hackmann, A., Steil, R., Clohessy, S., Wenninger, K., & Winter, H. (2002). The nature of intrusive memories after trauma: The warning signal hypothesis. Behaviour research and therapy40(9), 995-1002.

[4] Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine48(10), 1449-1462.

[5] Van der Kolk, B. A. (2003). Psychological trauma. American Psychiatric Pub.

[7] Kawachi, I., & Berkman, L. F. (2001). Social ties and mental health. Journal of Urban health78(3), 458-467.
[6]
 van Ommeren, M., Saxena, S. and Saraceno, B. 2005. Mental and social health during and after acute emergencies: emerging consensus?. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 83(1), pp. 71-75.

[8] Calamur, Krishnadev (15 June 2016) “Are Immigrants Prone to Crime and Terrorism?” The Atlantic. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/06/immigrants-and-crime/486884/

[9] Schnurr, P. P., & Green, B. L. (2004). Trauma and health: Physical health consequences of exposure to extreme stress. American Psychological Association.

[10] Hayes, J. P., VanElzakker, M. B., & Shin, L. M. (2012). Emotion and cognition interactions in PTSD: a review of neurocognitive and neuroimaging studies. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience6, 89.

[11] Breslau, N., Davis, G. C., Andreski, P., & Peterson, E. (1991). Traumatic events and posttraumatic stress disorder in an urban population of young adults. Archives of general psychiatry48(3), 216-222.

[12] Yehuda, R., Bierer, L. M., Schmeidler, J., Aferiat, D. H., Breslau, I., & Dolan, S. (2014). Low cortisol and risk for PTSD in adult offspring of holocaust survivors. American Journal of Psychiatry.