Don Thieme

A seasoned military diplomat, scholar, foreign policy practitioner, and teacher, Don Thieme brings more than 30 years of global experience to strategic problem solving in contested domains and operational environments. Before retiring from the U.S. Marine Corps, Don served in a wide variety of infantry and Reconnaissance units that deployed throughout Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Horn of Africa. When not deployed, Don was an Olmsted Scholar (Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków), a Council on Foreign Relations Term Member, and an MIT Seminar XXI Fellow. He was a personal advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for NATO expansion, theater campaign plans chief for U.S. Marine Forces in U.S. Central Command, and served seven years as a senior attaché in Warsaw and London, where he regularly analyzed foreign policy and recommended pragmatic actions to very senior U.S. and foreign leaders in pursuit of U.S. strategic objectives.  

At the U.S. Naval War College, he has served as a Professor of National Security Affairs and as Director & Professor of Writing in The Writing Center. He now works as a contractor in the War Gaming Division of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He has written over 600 posts for the Naval Wargaming Virtual Community of Practice, focusing on critical thinking that addresses emergent opportunities and threats at the convergence of technological, tactical, operational, and strategic levels of conflict and war.   

Don has taught in various fora from West Point classrooms to the desolate train tracks at Auschwitz, focused on the art – and action – of learning more than just strings of facts, but the inherent complex inter-relationships of human-ness in chaotic environments. He has published more than three dozen articles, helped write the Harvard University Carr Center Mass Atrocity Response Operations Handbook, and is a sought-after speaker on Holocaust and genocide issues. He is also a former Tufts University INSPIRE Fellow and Outward Bound Lecturer. There he worked closely with Sherman Teichman’s team to conceive and execute the 2015-2016 program of study focused on enduring strategic interests and emerging challenges in Europe and the Trans-Atlantic partnership that included non-traditional education as well as a four-day workshop and symposium New Security for a New Europe. Simultaneously, he wrote his Dissertation on the technological temptations and power of biotechnē as a threat to both individual liberties and liberal democratic governance.   

Don spends his ‘spare’ time raising four amazingly dynamic children, hunting, fishing, leading Boy Scouts, and running marathons to raise money for the charitable Semper Fi Fund. He occasionally actually catches a striped sea bass, and despite only intermittent success, still strives to teach his children some manners. He has given up on the two dozen ducks and chickens in his backyard.

In Memoriam - Yaron Ezrahi

A distinguished Israeli political theorist, philosopher, and professor at the Hebrew University, he was a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute which he co-founded in Jerusalem. At the IDI he co-foundedThe Seventh Eye, Israel's magazine for press criticism. As a Senior Fellow at the IDI, Ezrahi joined a committee of scholars headed by the former chief justice Meir Shamgar which wrote the most recent draft of a constitution for Israel.

Yaron was a wonderfully brilliant friend. I first met Yaron in 1965 when we were studying together at the Hebrew University on the Givat Ram campus. He was my first encounter with a “public intellectual,” even if I never even imagined the concept at the time. We spent many hours talking over the next years I spent in Israel, in Cambridge, and then many times over the ensuing decades long-distance. He introduced me to ideas in Encounter magazine, to the founders and contributors of the socialist journal, Emda, to friends, Menachem Brinker, Avishai and Edna Margolit. He involved me in the origins of the creation of the Open University of Israel, and in a Van Leer strategic think tank, introduced me to many iconoclastic security analysts on political, military, and long range-strategic thinking, including Abrasha Tamir and Meir Pa’il. He was active in Peace Now, and one of his students I knew through him, Emil Grunsweig was the first casualty of the peace movement. LINK 

Ezrahi was known for his work on the relations between modern science and the rise of the modern liberal democratic state and his later work that focused on the deterioration of the Enlightenment version of the partnership between science, technology and democracy.

Among his books are The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy, Can Democracy Recover? The Roots of the Crisis in Democratic Faith, and Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions.

He was prescient. This review he wrote expressed an irony that sadly deeply resonates today: “Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, War, Peace, and the Bomb.”

Einstein's impact on the relations between science, politics and freedom, however, transcends his record as a public intellectual. Ironically, the unintended wider cultural legacy of his physics worked against his commitment to democratic values and his faith in the mission of scientists to publicly combat violence and irrational politics.

In a letter to Rolland in August 1917, Einstein insisted that “only facts can dissuade the majority of the misled from their delusion”. But Einstein's concept of facts, as expressed in his exchange with the French philosopher Henri Bergson, was rather esoteric. Failing to appreciate the importance of common-sense realism as the basis of democratic public discourse, he did not seem to anticipate that the shift from newtonian to einsteinian physics would widen the gap between authoritative scientific knowledge and lay opinion. His liberal-democratic commitment was contradicted by his view that “naive realism”, the belief that “things 'are' as they are perceived by us through our senses”, was a “plebian illusion”. Deeply concerned about the turning of the public into a herd in the country of Kant and Goethe, he also failed to see that the public in democratic societies is not exactly moved by rational arguments free from rhetoric and theatricality.

Yaron’s last book, that he completed shortly before he passed away, Can Democracy Recover? The Roots of the Crisis in Democratic Faithanalyzed the current crisis of democratic institutions and of faith in democracy. It explores the current breakdown of common-sense conception of political reality and the erosion of democratic political epistemology that trigger the disruptive proliferation of popular political conspiracy theories. 

This, from his 2012 essay “The Reality of  Political Fictions: Democracy Between Modernity and  Postmodernity,” published by the IDI in an edited collection By the People, For the People, Without the People? The Emergence of (Anti) Political Sentiment in Western Democracies and in Israel.”

“Unlike philosophical knowledge and political science as fields of systemic propositional knowledge, the business of political constitutional and legal wisdom is not so much to explain or rationally justify, but to guide what Vico so insightfully called the acting out, or the enactment of the fictions which are necessary to the foundation and regulation of the civic order.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the fragility of the American democracy relates to the fact that the government of the Union rests almost wholly on legal fictions. The Union is an ideal nation that exists so to speak only in the mind, and whose extent and bounds intelligence alone discovers. But at the same time de Tocqueville argued that he never admired the good sense and practical intelligence of the Americans more, than in the manner by which they escape the innumerable difficulties to which their federal Constitution gives rise. Much practical wisdom was displayed also by the French revolutionaries when they chose to ichnographically embody the secular Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen within the image of the Mosaic tablets, thus tapping deeply engrained religious sensibilities in support of man-made or “natural laws.” 

A leading insightful authority on Israeli politics and democracy, Ezrahi was one of the leading interpreters of Israel's politics and civic culture in the Israeli and international media. His book Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel examined mounting tensions between nationalism and liberalism for Israeli attitudes towards military violence, political rhetoric, education and culture.

Yaron was a frequent analyst for Israeli and the international media, particularly cited in many of Pulitzer Prize columnist Thomas Friedman’s New York Times columns. Recently the IDI and the Hebrew University held a conference on the ‘Future of Democracy’ in memory of Yaron featuring former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Friedman.

Over the years Yaron was very generous with his time and with his judicious advice to the students I would selectively recommend to him. His last name is derivative of the Hebrew word for citizen – Ezrach.  He embodied that fully. He died in 2019, and I, and so many of my close community, including Irwin Cotler, miss him, his voice, his influence, tremendously.

Eli Levite

Ariel (Eli) Levite was the principal deputy director general for policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission from 2002 to 2007. He is a nonresident senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program and Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment. 

Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment in 2008, Eli was the principal deputy director general for policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission from 2002 to 2007. He also served as the deputy national security adviser for defense policy and was head of the Bureau of International Security and Arms Control (an assistant secretary position) in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. He was the co-leader of the Discriminate Force Project at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. 

Before his government service, Eli worked for five years as a senior research associate and head of the project on Israeli security at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (subsequently renamed INSS) at Tel Aviv University. He has taught courses on security studies and political science at Tel Aviv University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Davis. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies. 

He is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur.

Eli has published extensively, most recently “Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies” and “Three Ways to Break the Nuclear Stalemate with North Korea,” both with George Perkovich for the CEIP Nuclear Policy Program. Some of his more recent publications include: "Israeli Strategy in Transition, in Shaper Nations: Strategies for a Changing World; “From Dream to Reality: Israel and Missile Defense,” in Regional Missile Defense from a Global Perspective; “Will Nuclear War Break Out in the Middle East?;” Do Nuclear Weapons Have a Future? and “Reflections on Nuclear Opacity.”

A wonderful friend and adviser, his contributions at the Institute included the Nuclear Middle East, Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions, and the convening of a professional workshop on the State of the State in the Middle East and North Africa He was an Institute INSPIRE Fellow in 2011. I had the honor of awarding him the Dr. Jean Mayer Award for Global Citizenship

Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul (Shafik) Islam is professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a professor of water diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the director of the Water Diplomacy Program. He works on availability, access, and allocation of water within the context of climate challenges, health, and diplomacy.  Shafiqul’s research interests include water diplomacy, hydroclimatology, hydroepidemiology, remote sensing, and climate challenges.

He is noted for interdisciplinary approaches to create actionable knowledge by blending science, engineering, policy, and politics using methods and tools from complexity science, systems thinking, principled pragmatism, and negotiation theory. Islam maintains a diverse network of national and international partnerships and is engaged in several national and international consulting and training practices in the United States, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Shafiqul is a 2020 Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the 2016 recipient of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Water Prize for Creativity. He has over one hundred journal publications and four books on water diplomacy. His research and practice have been featured in numerous media outlets, including the BBC World Service, Voice of America, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, Nature, and Yale E360. 

Shafiqul participated in the 2005 EPIIC professional workshop on “Water as a Source of Conflict and Cooperation: Exploring the Potential,” which helped lead to the development of the Tufts Water Diplomacy Initiative. He most recently guest lectured for me through the Krea University Distinguished Lecture Series I helped started with a wonderful colleague, Professor Nirmala Rao, Vice Chancellor of Krea.

We are close personal friends and refer to one another as “bunkie,” having shared a bunk bed room at the Appalachian Mountain Club EPIIC Outward Bound weekend during the EPIIC Oil and Water year when he was one of our guest lecturers.

His daughter Maia Majumder was my TA and student in EPIIC’s Global Health and Security colloquium and symposium. I had the honor of being the lead toast and escort for Maia at her wedding.

Maia, an extraordinary young computational epidemiologist, .was a panelist in our Convisero webinar on the Human Impact of Covid-19. She is playing a significant role in the Moderna vaccine trials.

Sara Roy

Sara Roy (Ed.D. Harvard University) is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies specializing in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dr. Roy is also co-chair of the Middle East Seminar, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and co-chair of the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

We have been friends for decades, first collaborating in one of the very earliest symposia I created, in 1987’s “The Future of the West Bank and Gaza,” and subsequent lectures, NIMEP projects and including the 2014-15 EPIIC year on the “Future of the Middle East and North Africa.”

Sara spent time doing dissertation fieldwork in Israel and in the Gaza Strip as a research assistant to the West Bank Data Base Project,  led by another EPIIC Symposia participant, Meron Benvenisti.

She has written extensively on the Palestinian economy, particularly in Gaza, and on Gaza’s de-development, a concept she originated.

Sara is the author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development; Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, and editor, The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment, Research in Middle East Economics; Gaza: Reflections on Resistance; and Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector. Her forthcoming book,  Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance, will be published in 2021. 

She also has authored over 100 publications dealing with Palestinian issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia among other international venues.

We share the same conviction that “Israel’s occupation is about the domination and dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and the destruction of their soul. At its core, occupation aims to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. And just as there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied, no matter how much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims.” 

I had the pleasure of assisting her daughter,  Annie Schnitzer, in becoming a LEAP Fellow.

Iris Adler

Iris Adler is a 2021 Fellow at the Shorenstein Barone Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard University Kennedy School.

She is a former reporter, News Director and Executive Director for Programming and Podcasts at WBUR Radio in Boston. In these roles she has reported widely on Boston and New England, overseen the station’s news coverage, special projects and national and local programs. Most recently she created WBUR’s Innovation Lab where she oversaw new programming initiatives, including all of the station’s original podcasts and wbur.org’s opinion site Cognoscenti.

She also worked as the Executive Editor at NECN, a regional television news channel covering the six New England states, where she developed a nationally recognized documentary unit. She was the producer and reporter on a range of documentaries, from the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine where Arab and Israeli children live together, to a series of documentaries on the men and women who returned from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with PTSD and brain injuries.

Over the course of her career, she has won every major regional and national award for her work in both television and radio, including the Edward R. Murrow award, the Alfred I. Dupont award, and several Emmys. Iris has been married to Sherman for thirty-six years.

Wendell Wallach

Wendell Wallach is a consultant, ethicist, and scholar at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and  a senior advisor to The Hastings Center. He is also a fellow at the Center for Law, Science & Innovation at the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law (Arizona State University) and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technology. 

At Yale, Wallach has chaired the Center's working research group on Technology and Ethics and is a member of other research groups on Animal Ethics and End of Life Issues.

He is the author of A Dangerous Master: How to keep technology from slipping beyond our control was published by BASIC Books in June 2015. He also co-authored (with Colin Allen, Indiana University) Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford University Press), which mapped the then new field of enquiry variously called machine ethics, machine morality, computational morality, or friendly AI.

He is a series editor for eight Volume Library of Essays on the Ethics of Emerging Technology

The collection consists of eight volumes which focus on issues in: sports technologies and human enhancement; medical technologies; information technologies; biotechnology; nanotechnology, geoengineering and clean energy; military and security technologies; and ethics, law and governance.

The volumes encompass the ongoing debates and the cutting-edge issues of futuristic challenges and additional technologies under development..

He has also authored innumerable articles germane to our interests: http://wendellwallach.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Wallach-CV.pdf

Wallach has an international reputation as an expert on the ethical and governance concerns posed by emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and neuroscience. 

He received the World Technology Network award for Ethics in 2014 and for Journalism and Media in 2015, as well as a Fulbright Research Chair at the University of Ottawa for 2015-2016.  The World Economic Forum appointed Mr. Wallach co-chair of its Global Future Council on Technology, Values, and Policy for the 2016-2018 term.

I first met Wendell Wallach when he presented several wonderful talks, “Eye to Eye, Drone to Drone: The (De)Personalization of Warfare,” and “Neurotechnologies and the Future Soldier,” at the EPIIC symposium on Conflict in the 21st Century.

As Wendell has described it he also created a widely circulated proposal for an executive order from the US President, “Establishing Limits on Autonomous Weapons Capable of Initiating Lethal Force.” 

He did so on the advice, and with the collaboration of another participant, Lt. General Arlen “Dirk” Jameson, who had served as Deputy Commander in Chief and Chief of Staff of U.S. Strategic Command before retiring from the U.S. Air Force after more than three decades of active service.

Irwin Cotler

The Hounorable Irwin Cotler is the Founder and Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal, where I am honored to be a Senior Fellow. His life is dedicated to the search for justice and peace for all. He is one of the most honored, acknowledged and effective of global human rights thinkers and activists.

Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University, Professor Cotler is a greatly respected scholar of constitutional and comparative law. He has been noted for seminal legal arguments and opinions in the critical areas of free speech, freedom of religion, minority rights, peace law and war crimes justice.

As Canada’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Cotler reformed Canada’s Supreme Court appointment process, helping to make it the most gender-representative Supreme Court in the world. He chaired the Canadian Cabinet Committees on Aboriginal Rights and appointed the first-ever aboriginal and visible minority justices to the Ontario Court of Appeal.

He initiated the first-ever law on human trafficking; crafted the first-ever legislation to grant marriage equality to gays and lesbians; issued Canada’s first National Justice Initiative Against Racism and Hate. He overturned more wrongful convictions in a single year than any prior Minister.

Cotler became the first recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award for his leadership in the “creation of a beloved community.”  He was also the recipient of the Honorary Frederick Johnson Award from the Centre for Research-Action and Race Relations for his exceptional contribution to the rights of the Canadian Black Community 

An indefatigable international human rights lawyer, Professor Cotler was Counsel to Nelson Mandela and represented Canada’s Liberal Party at Mandela’s funeral. 

Among other renowned prisoners of conscience he defended included Argentina’s Jacobo Timmerman, and Russia’s Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov and Nathan Sharansky. He was the Chair of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg.

A leading global Parliamentarian, Cotler Chaired the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran; Chaired the Inter-Parliamentary Group of Justice for Russia’s slain Sergei Magnitsky; Chaired of the All-Party Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition, and Co-Chaired Global Parliamentarians for Tibet.

Cotler was the first Canadian Parliamentarian to call the mass atrocity in Darfur a genocide. He established a Canadian “Day of Reflection on the Lessons of Genocide” referring to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, and was counsel for representatives before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

He has transformed the lives of so many. He was a Member of the International Legal Team of Chinese Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo, international legal counsel to imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, the Saudi Human Rights Lawyer, Waleed Abdulhair, Venezuelan political prisoner Leopoldo López, and Shi’ite Cleric Ayatollah Boroujerdi in Iran, and Leader of Anti-Slavery Movement in Mauritania, Biram Dah Abeid.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian democracy activist imprisoned by the Egyptian government, was represented by Cotler, and acquitted in 2003. With Cotler, my Institute awarded Ibrahim the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award.

He has been lauded as “Counsel for the Oppressed,” while those of us with the Human Rights Foundation consider him “Freedom’s Counsel.”

Professor Cotler is a member the panel of independent international experts designated by the Secretary General of the OAS to determine whether there was reasonable ground to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed in Venezuela. For his advancement of human rights for Venezuelan people, he received the Special Award by the Standing Committee on Foreign Policy, Sovereignty and Integration of the Venezuelan National Assembly. 

He is the first Canadian recipient of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation’s Centennial Medal; the first recipient of the General Romeo Dallaire Award for Human Rights Leadership; the recipient of the Sir Zafrullah Khan Award for Distinguished Public Service, in honor Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister, a renowned international jurist and scholar of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

Recognized as a “a scholar and advocate of international stature” in sixteen honorary doctorate degree citations, Professor Cotler is an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the National Order of Quebec, and was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

A legal consultant in the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, Cotler has also defended both Palestinians and Israelis against their own governments; and counsel for the Association of Ethiopian Jews before the Supreme Court of Israel. He is the co-Founder and Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and is a prominent leader in Shoah remembrance.

For decades, Cotler has been a colleague, ally, and a close friend We met in our very early twenties, both young chairs of the US and Canadian delegations to the World Jewish Congress in Israel. Cotler was later chief counsel to the Canadian Jewish Congress at the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on Nazi War Criminals in Canada.

We collaborated on investigations on the Patriot Act, War Powers Act, extraordinary rendition, torture, civil liberties and national mock Supreme Court and Senate hearings with my Institute’s ALLIES program. As Canada’s Justice Minister, he sought to strike a balance between rights and national security concerns, guarding against arbitrary and unnecessary limits on rights in the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act.

Cotler is the Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran, and with my alumnus Amir Soltani, the Boroumand Foundation, and PEN America, we are working closely together to free Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh. See the webinar that we convened together.

As part of my responsibility as a Senior Fellow at Wallenberg, we worked together to support the opposition to Maduro’s regime in Venezuela; on his submission on “Consular Responsibility to Protect Journalists,” to the High Level Panel of Independent Legal Experts on Media Freedom, as part of Wallenberg’s Media Freedom project.

We are working on anti-corruption efforts to extend the adoption of Global Justice for Sergei Magnitsky legislation; and on Uyghur rights together with a Fellow Wallenberg Fellow, Rayhan Asat.

I proudly wrote the inscription on the Dr. Jean Mayer Award given to Cotler:

“In recognition of a lifelong passion and concern for human rights; for the determination to defend the most illustrious and the most anonymous; for a distinguished career of integrity in international law and in the administration of justice, one dedicated to the dignity of the individual, with compassion for the oppressed and unrepresented”

Yom Hashoah - National Holocaust Remembrance Day - is a poignant and painful historical moment of remembrance and reminder - of bearing witness - of learning and acting upon the enduring and universal lessons of Holocaust remembrance, including; 

• Lesson One: The danger of forgetting - the imperative of remembrance - le devoir de memoir: of remembrance of horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened: of the Holocaust, as Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor Professor Elie Wiesel would remind us again and again: “The Holocaust was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were targeted victims”; of the demonization and dehumanization of the Jew as prologue and justification for their mass murder; of the mass murder of six million Jews, 1.5 million of whom were children, not just as a matter of abstract statistics, but as we say at such moments, of remembrance: “Unto each person there is a name, each person is an identity, each person is a universe,” reminding us of the teaching -- “hametzil adam ahat, ke’ilu hitzil olam kulo – that if you save a single person, it is as if you have saved an entire universe.” And so, the overriding first lesson: That we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other's destiny.

• Lesson Two: The Dangers of Antisemitism of which the death camp Auschwitz - the most brutal extermination camp of the twentieth century - is both message and metaphor: 1.3 million people were deported to the death camp Auschwitz; 1.1 million of them were Jews. Let there be no mistake about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism itself did not die at Auschwitz. It remains the bloodied canary in the mineshaft of global evil today, toxic to democracies, a threat to our common humanity; and as we've learned only too painfully and too well, while it begins with Jews, it doesn't end with Jews. Indeed, antisemitism is a paradigm for radical hate as the Holocaust is a paradigm for radical evil.

• Lesson Three: The Danger of State Sanctioned Incitement to Genocide. As the Supreme Court put it, “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.” These, as the court put it, are the catastrophic effects of racism. These, as the court put it, are the chilling facts of history. It is this teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other, this is where it all begins. In particular, incitement to genocide is not merely a warning sign of preventable tragedy; it is itself an international crime prohibited in the Genocide Convention. We have a responsibility to recognize, address, and redress this violation of the Genocide Convention.

• Lesson Four: The Danger of Holocaust Denial and Distortion, Inversion and Banalization. Holocaust distortion is not only an assault upon history but an assault on memory and truth - a conspiracy to whitewash and cover up the worst crime in history.

• Lesson Five: The Danger of Silence in the Face of Evil - where silence becomes complicit with evil itself - and the importance, the responsibility, to speak up, and stand up, and combat the conspiracy of silence.

• Lesson Six: The Rescue of Raoul Wallenberg - the Responsibility to Pay Tribute to the Rescuers - the Righteous Among the Nations - of whom the Swedish non-Jew and Canada’s first Honourary Citizen, Raoul Wallenberg is metaphor and message. Raoul Wallenberg demonstrated how one person with the compassion to care, and the courage to act, can confront evil, prevail and transform history.

• Lesson Seven: The Danger of Indifference and Inaction in the Face of Mass Atrocity and Genocide. In the face of such evil, indifference is acquiescence, if not complicity in evil itself. For years, we knew but did not act to stop the slaughter of the innocents in Syria, ignoring the lessons of history and mocking the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine. What makes the Holocaust, and genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, and more recently the Rohingya and the Uyghers, so unspeakable is not only the horror of the genocides – which are horrific enough – but that these genocides were preventable. Nobody could say we did not know. We knew but we did not act. The international community cannot be bystanders to such horror – we must act.

• Lesson Eight: The Dangers of Impunity. If the twentieth century, and the first decades of the twenty-first century are the age of atrocity, they are also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice; and so it is our responsibility to ensure that these hostis humanis generis - these enemies of humankind - are brought to justice, lest the culture of impunity incentivize more atrocity crimes.

May I close with a special word for the Holocaust survivors amongst us. For you have endured the worst of inhumanity, yet you somehow found, in the resources of your own humanity, the courage to go on, to build a family, to build a future, and to make an enduring contribution to each of the global communities in which you reside - and where we have all been your beneficiaries. 

And so, may this Holocaust  Remembrance Day be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but may it also be a remembrance to act - on behalf of our common humanity, and our universal values.

Irwin Cotler, International Chair of the RWCHR

FIRST TO STAND: The Cases and Causes of Irwin Cotler

First to Stand is about committed human rights activists who know if they stand up, it won’t be long before others are standing with them.

Susannah Sirkin

Susannah Sirkin is the former director of policy and a senior advisor at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), where she worked from 1987 to 2022, helping to launch the organization and lead its many investigations and advocacy initiatives spanning almost four decades. In her most recent capacity, she oversaw PHR’s policy engagement, including with the United Nations, domestic and international justice systems, and human rights coalitions.

Her work at PHR over the years included overseeing the documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Darfur, Sudan; coordinating exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals; and documentation of the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. Sirkin played a lead role in PHR’s extensive documentation of attacks on health care facilities and personnel in conflict zones, including Syria and Yemen. She initiated PHR’s program to train doctors, lawyers, law enforcement officers, and judges to respond to sexual violence in conflict zones, initially working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, and Kenya. Sirkin has authored and edited numerous reports and articles on the medical consequences of human rights violations, physical evidence of human rights abuses, and physician complicity in violations.

Today, Ms. Sirkin serves as a member of the Steering Committee for the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition. She represented PHR from 1992 to 2001 as a member of the Coordination Committee of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. From 2017 to 2019, Sirkin was a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is a recipient of Tufts University’s Jean Meyer Global Citizenship Award.

Sirkin holds a BA in Modern European studies from Mount Holyoke College and an MEd from Boston University

I have known Susannah for decades, since late 1970’s when we worked together to secure the freedom of emigration of Soviet Jewish democratic “refusniks, traveling to Moscow, Leningrad and elsewhere. She has participated in numerous Institute events, including EPIIC symposia, and professional workshops and simulations for decades since 1988. I had the honor of awarding Susannah Sirkin, my good friend, our Institute’s Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2012.

Padraig O'Malley

Padraig O’Malley is the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies of UMass Boston. 

There are few people who over thirty years have had a more intricate and direct relationship with the Institute for Global Leadership.

Padraig is an award-winning facilitator and convener, author and expert, on democratic transitions and divided societies, with special expertise on Northern Ireland, South Africa, Iraq, and Israel. His unique fifteen-year documentation of the transition from Apartheid to democracy in South Africa, “The Heart of Hope,” is available at through the website of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

During the very first EPIIC colloquium, on International Terrorism, I assigned Padraig’s 1983 book The Uncivil Wars: Ireland Today, which I admired, and invited to speak at our symposium.

Since, we became involved in many of his research projects and publications, and he in numerous Institute projects. 

Padraig is the founding editor of the New England Journal of Public Policy, a publication of the McCormack Graduate School. Several Journal volumes were collaborations with our Institute – including a ceremonial bound set of journals WAR 20/20, with NEJPP and EPIIC celebrating both of our twenty-year anniversaries. Many of the articles were derived from presentations given at the EPIIC 2003 Sovereignty and Intervention symposium, and the EPIIC 2004 Dilemmas of Empire and Nation building.

On that occasion, Padraig said of us: The EPIIC program is truly an inspirational educational achievement. The students who participate in it are provided with the tools to play active roles in their communities, whether at the local, national or global level. Its graduates can be found in Kosovo, Iraq, Sri Lanka – wherever there is the need for man to reach out to his fellow man.”

Our Institute’s our first immersive experiential research effort occurred in 1986, the first of several thousand, when Padraig took one of our EPIIC International Terrorism symposium program chairs to Belfast to interview the families of the IRA hunger strikers seeking status as political, and not criminal, prisoners. He was acknowledged in O’Malley’s book Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair, a New York Book Review Top 10 Book of 1990. 

When Padraig published Sticks and Stones: Living with Uncertain Wars in 2006, many of the chapters were contributed by EPIIC participants – and he acknowledged EPIIC this way: for it is certainly through their long-term acquaintance and friendship with many of our authors that we were able to proceed. Among them were Jonathan Moore, Brian Urquhart, Michael Glennon, Cornelio Sommaruga, Stanley Heginbotham, Romeo Dallaire, Robert Jackson, Gwyn Prins, Alfred McCoy, and John Shattuck.

His Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj & the Struggle for South Africa (with a 15,000 word introduction by Nelson Mandela) came alive when together we brought Mac to discourse with Hentjie Botha, a Durban South Africa police torturer, at the EPIIC Politics of Fear symposium in 2006. It was an extraordinary confrontation of reconciliation, as Mac was identified by Mandela in his forward as the most tortured man in the Anti-Apartheid struggle.

Deliberate, thoughtful, and determined in his efforts over many years, Padraig is an extraordinary courageous facilitator/convener. 

From the mid 1970’s onwards, he brought significant leaders across all sectarian lines, including Irish paramilitaries and British Ministers, and facilitated the landmark Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving the Republic of Ireland a say in how Northern Ireland was to be administered. He also brought senior Irish figures and members of the African National Congress (ANC) constitutional committee to Boston to discuss “The Role of a Bill of Rights in a Divided Society.” 

Padraig carefully established connections between key individuals from divided societies deep in conflict, relationships which continued to result in follow-up conferences in each of their jurisdictions. 

He brought chief negotiators Cyril Ramaphosa (ANC) and Roelf Meyer (former National Party’s Apartheid government), who had successfully concluded a historic settlement in South Africa (SA) two years earlier, to Northern Ireland to meet with leaders of all political parties, including leading members of the paramilitary militias, helping to facilitate the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and bring peace to Northern Ireland.

In 2007, I asked Padraig to head our Institute’s track-two diplomatic project Iraq: Moving Forward, which we constructed with The Project on Justice in Times of Transition and ultimately with the Crisis Management Initiative (an NGO established by former president of Finland and Nobel Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari). Beginning at Tufts with a major multi-day forum including representatives from Bosnia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and South Africa, we secured the confidence of senior Iraqi officials, including Iraqi National Security advisors, and a future President of Iraq. We convened in Helsinki, bringing together Iraqi officials and chief negotiators from Northern Ireland and South Africa to share experiences of conflict and the processes of peace negotiations and reconciliation. 

Participants included 16 senior officials from all Sunni and Shia parties, the Minister of National Reconciliation Akram al Hakim, former chief of staff of the IRA Martin McGuinness, and Nelson Mandela’s chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa. The result was an extraordinary agreement – The Helsinki Principles - which was submitted to Iraqi political leaders for ratification. Padraig then orchestrated a follow up conference in Helsinki attended by 37 of the most senior leaders in Iraq, representing all political factions, parties, and tribal sheikhs, including the Awakening 5 Councils. “The Helsinki II Conference on Iraq,” the product of six weeks of intensive work in Iraq facilitating the final framework for future inclusive negotiations, was signed by all 37 political leaders and tribal sheikhs. Its principles, outlining the code of political behavior for participation in future negotiations, as well 15 implementation mechanisms to ensure compliance, were announced in Baghdad on July 5, 2008. Throughout, Institute students were engaged in creating forums, background research, policy papers, and traveling to Helsinki and Iraq to facilitate and record the proceedings.

Padraig was always innovative. In April of 2009, following the EPIIC Global Cities symposium,  he worked with our students to convene a three-day conference, Forum for Cities in Transition from Conflict, at UMass Boston. Participants included representatives from four participating cities: Derry and Londonderry, Northern Ireland; Mitrovica, Kosovo; Nicosia, Cyprus; and Kirkuk, Iraq. This program grew to include Mostar, Beirut, Jerusalem and Haifa, Ramallah, Mitte, Kaduna, Tripoli, and Baghdad. The concerns discussed included ways to assist each other in areas such as policing, water infrastructure, and business development, and talks on power sharing among the political parties and the public sector.

Padraig has garnered many significant awards, including the Peacemaker’s Award of Association of Dispute Resolution, and the Liberal International Freedom Prize of the European Union, and is the protagonist of the documentary film on his life, The Peacemaker. 

We have talked, conferred and collaborated innumerable times over the years. At his last formal presentation for the Institute, on his prescient book, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives, we presented him with our Dr. Jean Mayer Award. 

Given this intimate background, I asked Padraig O’Malley to present at our 30th Anniversary Gala.

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

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

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

 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

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?

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

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.