Shahidul Alam Denied Bail

Shahidul Alam is still being held in Dhaka Central Jail after his bail plea was denied by the Dhaka Metropolitan Session Judge’s Court. His bail petition had been repeatedly deferred by the High Court of Bangladesh for nearly a month, and and an order to grant him status as “Division 1 Under Trial Prisoner,” filed on August 27th, was implemented only yesterday.

We are in contact with his lawyer, Sara Hossain, to learn of what we can do to help his situation from afar. We are also receiving regular updates on his situation.

Lumay Wang and Padden Murphy

I spent the Rosh HaShana holiday at Three Forks, the headwaters of the Missouri River, in Bozeman, Montana, and in the mountains of the magnificent Big Sky country. Perfect, cool, crystalline days magnificently elevating my spirits, especially at the top of Big Sky Mountain at over seven thousand feet. With its panorama and broad horizon, the perfect setting for reflection for an agnostic pantheist.  I’ve now descended from the mountain, surely without “tablets,” back into this too fraught and demoralizing a world, certain that the Institute has helped mentor a rising new generation of committed ethical activists. 

I was in Three Forks because I had the privilege of officiating as Justice of the Peace for the wedding of two of my former Institute students, who I introduced to one another a decade ago, Padden Murphy and Lumay Wang. Exemplary students, extraordinary educational and professional trajectories, and now wonderful friends. They are also very good friends with my son, Nathaniel, who was a groomsman, and many of their common Tufts friends gathered to celebrate. Amazing youngsters.

Padden was one of my EPIIC students, a Synaptic Scholar, the founding editor of Discourse, a co-founder of our civil-military program, ALLIES, and a member of our human rights photojournalism program, Exposure. Lumay, likewise my EPIIC student, who succeeded Padden as editor-in-chief ofDiscourse, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa, and Summa academic status. 

In one of my marriage remarks, I made note of the integrity and perceptiveness of these young people who in creating Discourse had already a decade ago anticipated the severe political antagonisms now engulfing us, and the dangers of the lack of civility and decency. 
  
It is this generation that hopefully will finally galvanize sufficient others of their Millennial peers to get to the polls in fifty four days.

The letter below was composed by Lumay in 2014, and sent to the Provost of Tufts University, as part of an external review process of the Institute conducted by the university.

Letter Signed by Over 100 Alumni

We write to you today as Tufts alumni who have had the great fortune of being involved with the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) when we were students. The experiences that the IGL opened to us were integral to our Tufts education, and in many cases they influenced our careers and our concepts of active citizenship. We believe the IGL is one of the most unique, innovative, and valuable parts of Tufts University.

Some of us conducted research through various IGL grants; some started new programs such as ALLIES and the Compass Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship; some studied complex problems through EPIIC, the rigorous yearlong class. We have gone on to be public servants, international negotiators, journalists, entrepreneurs, academics and more. All can attribute a strong influence on our careers to the IGL because of the passionate and enthusiastic leadership in Sherman Teichman and Heather Barry. They and the institution help students“make it happen.”

The IGL is one of the few outlets on campus that is willing to take a risk on a student’s idea, to push us to be grounded in reality, and to take a stance on how we want to make a positive impact in the world. It connects what we learn in the classroom and read in books to events happening today and the power of our agency. The achievements and failures of our pursuits are lessons that we will take after our time at Tufts. We appreciate that the IGL nurtured our aspirations but did not hold our hands to achieve them. Nothing prepares you so well for the real world as understanding our limitations and learning to overcome them.

We have many stories of alumni who found a jumping off point into their careers, and it was not in the classroom. It was while talking with guest speakers, conducting research, participating in a workshop, or a student-lead trip, all sponsored and organized by the IGL.

As Tufts moves forward with the ten-year strategic plan (T10), we applaud the emphasis on increasing opportunities for transformational experiences on campus. Without a doubt, the IGL excels at providing those experiences to any student who walks through the creaky door of 96 Packard Ave. Under Sherman’s leadership, the IGL has transformed the lives, perspectives, and careers of countless students. The IGL’s commitment to active learning outside of the classroom is the future of higher education, and will be replicated not just at Tufts but also around the world. The institution represents Tufts’ commitment to active citizenship to the greatest degree.

We are happy to discuss our experiences at Tufts and the IGL at any time, and we appreciate the opportunity to share our perspective.

Sincerely,
Lumay Wang

Solar for Gaza Published

The Solar for Gaza research project that we began in 2009 as a collaboration between the Institute for Global Leadership, the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Institute of Architecture and Planning of the University Liechtenstein, has been published in Urban Energy Transitions 2nd ed, edited by Peter Droege and distributed by Elsevier.

“Solar for Gaza: An Energetic Framework For Renewable Peace and Prosperity for Gaza and Its Greater Region,” is now featured as a chapter 2nd edition of Urban Energy Transition, edited by Peter. We revived and published it as an example of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, penetrating the current self-defeating climate of anti-normalization, with hope in its message of "an alternative to war through alternative energy." My co-author with Peter is Cody Valdes, an Institute alumnus who was instrumental in developing Solar for Gaza at the Institute (Cody was also invaluable in helping me develop The Trebuchet in its infancy).

Also acknowledged is Hannah Flamm, one of my previous wonderful assistants who, as an Institute student in 2010, conducted a Solar for Gaza training workshop, “Assessing Renewable Energy Potential in Palestine,” together with Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed. They convened Palestinian, Israeli, and other international scientists, engineers, professors, and entrepreneurs.

We relied on the insights of Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and renowned Gaza expert, for the chapter introduction framing the current Gazan situation (her daughter Annie Schnitzer was the first LEAP Fellow while a Wellesley undergraduate student).

For more information and to order the book: 

https://www.elsevier.com/books/urban-energy-transition/droege/978-0-08-102074-6

Millennium Fellows Retreat Outcomes

I have received the following reaction from Daniel Bennet about the session of the Millennium Fellows retreat I led at Waterloo in July:

A HUGE thank you to you for coming out to Waterloo to join us. I’m thrilled by the connections you established and the actions that were able to come out of it. This is fantastic and a best-case outcome for any session. At the end of the day, what are all our efforts to “connect” people worth if they don’t yield some sort of synergy that translates to actions afterwards.  I had very positive reviews and the shear number of follow-ups you reference below is evidence of that success. I do think it was a learning experience, and for future iterations there are certainly changes we can make intentionally to structure the session differently, but honestly - it was great. Thank you again. Hopefully I will have a good sense of our funding situation for next year in October/November, at which point I would love to reconnect and discuss further collaboration.

I am very excited to stay in touch with the Fellows, and to create interfaces between them and my community. Here are some of the connections I have begun to make, and will be making:

• Ali Ahmad has written me from Beirut and we will be working together on developing common contacts in the MENA region as I pursue my desire to revive Pugwash chapters and thinking.

• I will introduce Mark Boris Andrijanic to the Council for European Studies, having been asked by him to help create a conference in Ljubljana on "The Future of Europe," with the Trilateral Commission.

• Lauren Bohn turns out to be best friends with my close alum Biz Herman. I hosted Lauren at my home for dinner a few days ago, and met her partner Andrew Gruen, who has asked me to collaborate with on the development of a stronger Gates Fellowship alumni group he has been tasked to create. 

• I introduceed Priyali Sur to Shahidul Alam and George Mathew, who are working with me on Rohingya concerns to help her develop her 2017 Atlantic Council Fellows group initiative on refugee assistance. I am on the Strategy Board of both the VII Foundation and Music for Life International.

• I will help Artemis Seaford in her own refugee work. She highly regards my very good friend and alum Sasha Chanoff. I helped him create his organization RefugePoint and continue to serve as a strategic adviser for RP. 

• I introduced  David Martinez, my alums Matan Chorev and Dan Feldman who will be invaluable allies for the Atlantic Council. 

• I introduced Ben Flatgard to Lucas Kello and his highly regarded work on cyber, The Virtual Weapon

• Maria Lourdes, is close friends with Javier El-Hage, who taught her brother in law school, and is now the Chief Legal Officer of the Human Rights Foundation, for whom I am a Strategic Advisor.

• Laura Klick has just joined the Board of Seeds of Peace. I helped design their initial curriculum, hosted their first cadre of students at Tufts, and mentored their program's first adult leaders at Boston's Outward Bound Thompson Island in 1993.
• Marta Poslad is an Humanity in Action Fellow, a program I helped grow in its earliest days with founder Judy Goldstein. She serves on HIA's Board with my alum and another very close friend, Ben Harburg, who will be one of The Trebuchet’s first funders

Shahidul Alam arrested

Shahidul Alam, the world renowned Bangladeshi photojournalist and founder of Drik Picture Library, who sits with me on the Board of the VII Foundation, has been arrested in Bangladesh, charged with violating a draconian defamation law, after speaking out against the government's crackdown on student protests.

I have reached out to my community of human rights activists and organizations, in hopes that we can develop ideas, and find access and influence where feasible, to assist Shahidul.

Here are the responses I have received: 

- Ken Roth, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, has indicated that HRW is involved in the case. Here is HRW's statement.

- The Human Rights Foundation will be reaching out to Shahidul's family for consent to submit a complaint on his behalf to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

- Irwin Cotler, the Founding Chair of the Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, indicates that they will work closely with the Human Rights Foundation's initiatives, and will alert the Global Affairs Ministry Canada so that Bangladesh knows that it cannot conduct itself with impunity.*

- Alberto Mora is the Associate Director of Global Programs for the American Bar Association's, and will place this on their list of action items.

- Josh Rubenstein, formerly the Executive Director of AI New England, has advised us to reach out to our Congress representatives to encourage the State Department to speak out on Shahidul's behalf.

- Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen made the following public statement:

Freedom of expression, including through photojournalism, is extremely important for democracy. We have good reason to admire the work that Shahidul Alam has been doing with great skill and courage for many years. His work should receive praise and appreciation, rather than being ground for harsh treatment.

Sookrit Malik joins LEAP

My alumnus Sookrit Malik, from the 2013-14 EPIIC year on "The Future of the Middle East and North Africa," and recent Fletcher School graduate, joined LEAP as a young India-based practitioner. 

Here is Sookrit's description of his current venture, Energeia:

"We are working on building smart industrial microgrids which are cleaner, more reliable and cost-effective. I think these microgrids will have a fundamental role to play in India's energy and transportation future, especially, considering the limitations of our transmission infrastructure. We have an opportunity to leapfrog here and bypass the structural and financial limitations posed by aging and inefficient infrastructure. I am also working on collecting and modeling demand level data which could provide important insights for designing these systems in an Indian context. Recently, there has also been a spike in diesel cars, buses, and trucks being converted from Diesel to CNG. I can also delve deeper into these transitions and what challenges the future of the microgrid ecosystem (integrated with e-mobility) may have in store for us."

Strategic Development Board

I have been invited by Executive Director Nicole Shea, and have accepted, to join the Strategic Development Board of the Council for European Studies. 

I am excited to be working on the Board with the President of Elizabethtown College, Carl Strikwerda, and my wonderful alumnus of Synaptic Scholars, CES Treasurer Duncan Pickard.

Odd Arne Westad

Odd Arne Westad is the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard University, where he teaches at the Kennedy School of Government.  A world-renowned expert on what he has termed the “Global Cold War,” he is an analyst of contemporary international history and an expert on the eastern Asian region. Noted for his keen appreciation of global shifts, he has long insisted on the imperative that policy-making be informed by history. Before coming to Harvard in 2015, Westad was School Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he directed LSE IDEAS, a leading center for international affairs, diplomacy and strategy. Professor Westad won the Bancroft Prize for The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. His book, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, won the Asia Society’s book award for 2013. Against the backdrop of Europe’s current political and economic volatility, we asked Professor Westad for his perspective on China’s increasing engagement on the continent. He believes that Europe, as a singular investment region, is of increasing importance to China not only in economic and commercial terms, but also very gradually, in strategic terms.

EuropeNow China’s foreign investment in Europe has increased from one billion euros in 2008 to thirty-five billion euros in 2016. What is behind this?

Odd Arne Westad The change in China’s FDI in Europe reflects the growth of the Chinese economy. It would have happened with any major economy growing at the rate that China’s has been over the past thirty years. But Europe is an interesting area to invest in. Many Chinese, including Chinese companies, see clear opportunities in future commercial development in Europe also understood as a key part of a much larger economic area.

The Chinese government views the world in broad strategic terms. It wants to create an integrated economic area that goes from the Atlantic Coast all the way to Japan, understood as its Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese leaders believe that this economic area will be the future center point of the global economy.

EuropeNow In immediate terms, does Britain’s Brexit pose an opportunity for China?

Odd Arne Westad Without any doubt. If you look at what’s happening today with Chinese economic interest in Europe, a lot of it is in fact centered on Britain, much more than generally recognized. I would not be surprised if, as a result of Brexit, Britain receives the greatest amount of Chinese interest and investment in Europe in the immediate future. On paper, London real estate is of course a very significant part of it. But it also has to do with the relative stability of the UK, despite Brexit. Obviously, the currency fluctuations that have taken place as a result of the Brexit decision has strengthened the Chinese position overall. The UK government has put itself in a much weaker position in economic negotiations relative to where it would have stood as a member of the EU. So, that’s certainly a relationship to watch.

EuropeNow Would you isolate any region, or bilateral relationships, that are particularly intriguing currently for China in Europe?

Odd Arne Westad The big story at the moment is Southeastern Europe.

In Greece, investments in communications, and infrastructure in Piraeus harbor are important. The Piraeus arrangement is interesting, because it’s obviously an economic interaction that has been cleared by the Chinese government. From the Chinese view, in extended Belt and Road terms, you could hardly get a better position than to invest in the biggest harbor in the inner Mediterranean. From the Greek perspective, the lack of foreign investment has been pretty glaring over the last decade because of Greece’s own economic difficulties, and the Piraeus arrangement is a tremendous opportunity.

It is, without a doubt, a strategic investment for the future, far beyond the immediate commercial transaction and interaction. From the Greek side, and similarly for Serbia and Malta with comparable arrangements, it is a safe bet, unless one creates a situation with one’s economic interactions on the global scale where the Chinese become too predominant.

EuropeNow If you were an advisor to the Greek government, would you have advised in favor or against the transaction as it has now transpired?

Odd Arne Westad I’m not too worried about Chinese investment, even in the Greek context, but it’s all a question of balance. Getting into a situation where most Greek ports, and therefore the instruments with which Greece expands its foreign trade, are dominated by China would not be good. That’s not the kind of situation that anyone wants to be in.

I probably would have advised against the form it has taken, because it is borderline in making China too predominant in Greece’s infrastructure. But it is not a question of yes or no – it’s a question of scale and degree. Saying, “No! We don’t want the Chinese taking any stake in Greek infrastructure!” would be a very bad line for Greece to take in terms of its own economic development.

EuropeNow Looking beyond Greece, what do you foresee?

Odd Arne Westad In the longer run, what’s happening between China and Serbia, Bulgaria, and to some extent Hungary and Croatia – although those are slightly different in terms of the actual framework for Chinese activities – may turn out to be more important for Europe.

With Serbia there is a real issue. As an applicant state to the EU, but not yet a member state because of their situation with Kosovo, Serbia presents China with a real opportunity to try to work with a country that is within Europe, but still not a part of the EU. Here China can leverage its political support on the global stage against economic advantages. Again, this is the kind of opportunity, or lucky break, that almost any major country would be looking for elsewhere. It certainly is one to watch from an EU perspective.

EuropeNow How do you understand China’ relationship with Hungary?

Odd Arne Westad I don’t quite know what to read into that. I think, from a Hungarian perspective, building relations with China is a way of showing dissatisfaction with how political directions in Hungary have been seen by major EU countries. From a Chinese perspective, I’m not so sure. There are few potential investments in Hungary that would interest China commercially. In terms of strategic infrastructure, when compared to the Southern parts of Southeastern Europe, Hungary plays a much less significant role. What Chinese companies would be looking for in Hungary, with some support from the Chinese government, are extraordinary opportunities that open up if the relationship between EU Central, let’s call it, Brussels, and Hungary actually deteriorate further. But that deterioration has to go quite a bit further, I think, before people in Beijing or commercial centers in China think to go for this.

In Hungary, and sometimes elsewhere in Europe, the idea prevails that China’s economic influence can somehow balance what they see as the EU, which is of course all other European countries but themselves. I think that this is a pipe dream, so far. It’s not going to happen. Or it might happen with time, but now we are thinking in the very long term, as the Chinese do themselves. The only exception is Southeastern Europe – Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and the smaller countries in that region.

EuropeNow How does conditionality, or quid pro quo in their transactions, work?

Odd Arne Westad The conditionality issue is complex. It appears in some specific cases and is absent in others when it comes to trade and especially to investment. You will see a lot of conditionality, at least proposed, during negotiations with countries that are relatively isolated and weak, where China can have an outsized influence in its economic interaction. That’s not all that different from what you saw in the behavior of Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. So the Chinese haven’t discovered conditionality. You could say that they have rediscovered it, and they are trying to make use of it where they can see it having a benefit.

EuropeNow What is the extent of China’s political leverage in Europe? Can it be obstreperous within the EU over issues it cares about?

Odd Arne Westad I don’t think that we are even close to the stage where it would be possible for China to try to exert predominant leverage against European attitudes on human rights issues, on the South China Sea, or on broader economic issues and world trade arrangements, which are probably even more important.

One needs to watch this going forward. It is very clear that the leverage of the Chinese government within Europe – particularly in ways that EU cannot easily attempt to control, as in the case of Serbia – will increase, allowing China to have more influence in the bigger picture on these kinds of issues. This would happen as the economic interaction between Europe as a whole and China increases, and there is no doubt that it will increase for a whole set of really good reasons that are mutually beneficial to both sides in economic terms. China hasn’t yet achieved this kind of leverage, but I can easily see it developing five to ten years down the road.

EuropeNow Looking more long range, can you explain how the Chinese think about their Belt and Road Initiative?

Odd Arne Westad It goes back to the idea of trying to tie in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia, into one large economic region. The BRI is why, in China’s view, Europe is so closely related with what happens in the Middle East, in Russia, and in Central Asia. The Chinese idea of sending trains from Tianjin to Brussels, even though it’s a stunt, is a sign of how China wants economic integration to work, not least infrastructure-wise. The Chinese are fully aware that this could take one generation, perhaps two.

EuropeNow How do you see its future?

Odd Arne Westad If you want to anticipate the future of the BRI you have to look at China’s infrastructure investments beyond just ports and airports, which have seen a lot of the emphasis so far, and examine rail transport developments, which would be really indicative of how far China is looking to go in spending its own money to tie together the whole region.

Given the relatively low capacity of the EU to invest itself in these kinds of infrastructural developments, I would not be surprised if many people across the EU, including Germany, France, and Italy, began to say that we should welcome what the Chinese put in. That’s the point where I think one has to be very careful in balancing good Chinese investment with the need to diversify the funding sources for bigger projects.

It is very interesting to think about the direction that this seems to have taken. I was in Beijing a few weeks ago discussing it – not just because of who is included, but also because of who is excluded. China doesn’t want to see Southeast Asia as part of the BRI. It wants to have its own separate economic arrangements with Southeast Asia, that are in part influenced by what China wants to do in this broader sense, but also for political reasons. India plays almost no role, because China sees it as a potential political and security problem in the long term.

EuropeNow What is the distinctive Chinese perspective on the Mediterranean?  Why does Malta matter?

Odd Arne Westad Malta is becoming very important. China is investing in Malta as an EU member state that is a relatively small country, but one that holds a key position in the Mediterranean. It is perfect in terms of investment and coordination, interaction, integration, and communications further afield.

EuropeNow Do China’s investments in the Mediterranean have implications beyond trade?

Odd Arne Westad Any kind of investment in harbors elsewhere may have a concrete strategic use in the long run. Of course, it is not accidental that you find China investing in ports in the Mediterranean, particular the inner Mediterranean, just as you find Chinese investments in Djibouti, or building an entirely new port in Gwadar, Pakistan, and in Sri Lanka. All of these activities can be seen from a commercial perspective, but also eventually in a broader strategic sense, as China’s effort to increase its influence. The important thing for me is that we are quite far away from that now, with the exception, perhaps, of Djibouti because China, like everyone else, has had problems with pirates and various other threats to its trade along the East African Coast.

For the other investments, that will depend on what the host country allows China to do, which is where one has to be very careful. Coming back to a European context, it’s particularly important for the EU to think about these things jointly. China has never liked multilateral institutions of any kind, be it the ASEAN, the EU, whatever. China prefers, and there are historical reasons for this, to negotiate with individual countries. Again, one has to be very careful not to make this into a simple power play kind of issue. It’s not just about that. It’s also that China, with its enormous emphasis on sovereignty and the strength of the nation-state, prefers to deal with other countries that see things similarly. They do not want their relations to go through international organizations.

EuropeNow How do Chinese and European visions of the Mediterranean and the Middle East differ?

Odd Arne Westad For China, the Mediterranean and the Middle East form a single region. This is particularly important for Europeans to think about. The idea that the links between Europe and the Middle East are of a purely commercial character, which is very much the European approach, is very different from the Chinese conception, where Southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Black Sea, and the Middle East are all connected into one region.

The importance of this region for China began with oil and energy resources, but has grown far beyond that, especially with the BRI. Its importance now encompasses infrastructure and communications as well. In part, its future will be centered on what happens to the Iran issue, which is probably the only Middle Eastern conflict in which China has a real stake. China relies on Iran as one of its biggest oil suppliers, and its Iranian investments are significant. It would strongly oppose further Western, particularly US, confrontation against Iran. That would be very different from the Iraq conflict, or in the larger Gulf region with Yemen.

China would like to see the current crisis with Iran to blow over and to move back to a perspective where Iran is one “bookend,” with the Mediterranean being the other, of a larger region in which China could play a very significant commercial role.

EuropeNow Ideologically, how does China understand the emerging disdain for liberal democracy and human rights that’s emerging right now in some countries in Europe?

Odd Arne Westad This is one of the biggest problems right now with China in Europe. That is, parts of the Chinese leadership would be looking at these illiberal developments as a sort of justification for an increase in authoritarian tendencies within China itself. This is problematic for the European-Chinese relationship, because, with a few exceptions, the general tendency in Europe is evidently not towards authoritarian government. EU countries tend to strongly emphasize what sets European-style institutions apart from most of the world, namely their focus on inclusion and democracy. This is a problem for China. The perception of China as becoming increasingly authoritarian is not something that is serving China well within Europe.

In overall terms, though, you can get a different impression sometimes when you are in Beijing. The idea that authoritarianism equals efficiency in dealing effectively with big economic problems doesn’t necessarily have that much of a resonance in Europe. This may change over time, but at the moment the general perception, and we have some really good public opinion data on this, of China and authoritarian rule are far more negative in Europe than what they are, for instance, in the United States.

EuropeNow What is the U.S. impact here?

Odd Arne Westad It depends on what the United States does on many of these international issues. If the United States wants to be, as it has been until recently, a leader in international affairs, not least with issues that have to do with international trade, then I think China’s room for maneuvering vis à vis Europe is dramatically reduced. If the United States moves in a direction of gradual withdrawal, then of course China’s leverage will increase.

EuropeNow How has the Trump Administration coming to power affected China’s thinking?

Odd Arne Westad That’s an interesting issue. I think some of the changes that have taken place in the US under the Trump presidency haven’t quite sunk in yet in China. When I was in Beijing a few weeks ago, I still heard the same old litany of complaints about the real problem with US-China relations being American disapproval of China’s form of governance and goal to change China from within. I kept telling them that Donald Trump doesn’t care two cents how China is governed internally. That’s not the issue. Things have changed.

Is that an opportunity for the Chinese government? Probably, in many ways, for dealing with many issues that are more important to them. But it’s also a huge challenge, because I can so easily see how Trump’s open admiration for authoritarian rule could end up intensifying conflict rather than reducing it. If the Chinese authoritarian government acts in ways that the current administration here does not like, the potential for misunderstandings and conflicts of various sorts increases. The idea that strongmen across the world will be in a better position to solve problems among themselves is not how the world has worked in the past. They are much easier to get into some kind of bigger conflict, because there are so few mechanisms that are holding them back.

Click here to read Syllabus: Restless Empire – The Past, Present, and Future of Chinese Power by Odd Arne Westad.

Odd Arne Westad is the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard University.  He teaches at the Kennedy School of Government based at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. He served as general editor for the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War, and is the author of the Penguin History of the World. Professor Westad’s newest book is The Cold War: A World History, a history of the global conflict between capitalism and Communism since the late 19th century, it provides the larger context for how today’s international affairs came into being.

VII Annual Board Meeting

I attended the AGM of the VII Foundation's Board last week, held in part in Harvard's prestigious Porcellian Club. I have joined the Board's Mission, Education, and Projects sub-committees.

I had the pleasure to meet, among others, Kiku Adatto, Ted Nelson, and Shahidul Alam.

I hosted Shahidul, an eminent Bangladeshi photographer, at my home for the weekend, and have introduced him to George Mathew of Music Life International, for whom I am a Strategic Advisor. I hope for Shahidul and George to collaborate on an effort to bring attention to the Rohingya situation through both a photo-documentary exhibition and benefit concert at Carnegie Hall.

Ted is an expert in branding strategy who is interested in helping us develop language for The Trebuchet. His admonition to VII was not to try to "juggle a hundred ping pong balls" - better to catch just one. My vision for The Trebuchet is admittedly the opposite, but can certainly benefit greatly from Ted's disciplining and hard-nosed insights.

Kiku is a sociologist and Scholar in Residence at Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center, and the wife of Michael Sandel. We have begun a warm friendship, and she has invited me into the Mahindra Center’s evening dialogues that she convenes with Michael.

Joachim Koops

The emergence of the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect, R2P, endorsed at the UN’s 2005 World Summit, was intended to buttress international efforts to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Its global impact has unfortunately been uneven, whether currently in Syria or the Ukraine. Africa is no exception.

The current conflicts in Africa are concentrated in specific regions, and involve only a few of Africa’s 54 nation-states, but they are intense, volatile, and some pose great challenges to both regional and global governance and stability.

The repercussions of the 2011 invasion of Libya under UN Security Council Resolution 1973 called for exercising “all necessary means” to protect civilians. The unforeseen consequences of the overthrow of Qaddafi nonetheless have been extreme. The scope and scale of the mission of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) in the seemingly unending war on terror is expanding; the French-led 2014 anti-insurgent Sahel-wide Operation Barkhane is ongoing;  the internal conflicts of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the violence in Sudan are both unrelenting; the consequences of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, with Burundian unrest, are other examples of such challenges.

All have intensified conditions leading to increased numbers of internally displaced peoples, the mass movements of refugees, and even increased slavery. Europe, far from being immune from the impact of these disturbing trends, has in the last years experienced an intensified influx of immigration of people from Africa, seeking safety, asylum, and economic opportunity.

A particularly interesting development has been a recent commitment of European countries to UN Peacekeeping in Africa, particularly in the context of the UN operation in Mali (MINUSMA). This European re-engagement comes at a crucial moment when both the reform of peacekeeping and European-African relations are high on the political agenda.

One renewed European reaction, while sensitive to the tragic imbroglio of Rwanda, and the ongoing consequences and accountability of its colonial and imperial past, has been the imperative to respond, to preempt, prevent, and attempt to mitigate the consequences of conflict This both humane, and self-interested activity, includes a renewed emphasis on peacekeeping.

Professor Joachim Koops, Dean of the Vesalius College of the Free University of Brussels, and Director of the Global Governance Institute, has been an insightful, thoughtful analyst, and critic of peacekeeping. One of the editors of the Oxford Handbook of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, an important and extensive critique by leading experts and practitioners of all UN peacekeeping missions conducted globally between 1948 ad 2013, he is an expert on issues of crisis management, global security and peacebuilding. His most recent publication (European approaches to UN Peacekeeping: Towards Stronger Re-engagement?) provides a systematic overview of the opportunities and challenges of stronger European involvement in UN peacekeeping in Africa.

In this interview, Professor Koops provides an evaluation of the tensions between the responsibility and imperative to protect civilians, with the more long-range, impartial goal of peace-building; insights into the EU-UN-AU relationship, and thoughts about European sensitivity at being asked to resort to force in their peacekeeping engagements.

EuropeNow You focus on European Union and United Nations approaches to peace and security, particularly on the African continent. Why do you deem this to be an important issue?

Joachim Koops First of all, the inter-organizational triangle of the United Nations (UN), European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) is of immense importance for both global and regional security governance. Out of the 15 blue helmet operations currently run by the UN, eight are deployed on the African continent. If we look at the history of UN peacekeeping since 1948, a similar picture emerges – out of the total of 71 UN-led operations, nearly half (namely, 31) have taken place in Africa. If we look at the activities and operations launched by the European Union under its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) banner since 2003, the focus on Africa is even starker: out of the 35 civilian and military operations, 29 have taken place on that continent. In other words 82% of all of the EU’s CSDP operations focused on Africa. Of course, there is a lively and important debate why this may be the case – with reasons that go beyond the nature or urgency of conflicts in Africa themselves. Post-colonial and power-related arguments about sovereignty and permissiveness of accepting international operations should also not be neglected.

EuropeNow What has changed in the composition of peacekeeping forces in Africa?

Joachim Koops I think it is important that we do not only focus on the demand, but also on the supply side of peacekeepers. During the last decade, the participation of troops from African countries in blue helmet operations has risen dramatically, and in January 2016 an African troop contributing country, Ethiopia, topped for the first time the ranking of all contributors with nearly 8,500 military, police and civilian personnel. At the same time, with Rwanda, Egypt, Senegal and Ghana currently also being among the 10 biggest troop contributors, these five African countries now account for a quarter of all the 93, 000 blue helmets currently deployed. If we compare this to the European contributions of 7,350 troops (8%) or the Security Council’s permanent five’s 4,300 troops (less than 5% of all blue helmets), then Africa’s significance on both the demand and supply side becomes clear.

EuropeNow Given these developments, what are the important implications – not only for European and UN approaches and EU-Africa cooperation – but also for the future of peacekeeping and security governance in general?

Joachim Koops While current UN operations, such as the ones in the Central African Republic and Mali, are often also seen, somewhat insensitively, as laboratories for European re-engagements with UN peacekeeping, African troop contributors’ views and demands increasingly influence the debate about the use of force and so-called ‘robust peacekeeping’. It has often been the African Union and African troop contributors who have called for intervening in conflicts and situations that might still be ongoing, and where there might not yet be a peace agreement, rather than the UN’s and Europeans’ more cautious approach, often repeating the mantra that UN blue helmets should only go to areas where ‘there is a peace to keep’. Furthermore, AU operations or AU-endorsed operations, such as in Somalia and the Central African Republic against the Lord’s Resistance Army, have recently deployed lethal force in operations more akin to counterinsurgency or counterterrorism operations. It has also been African countries, such as Uganda, South Africa and Malawi that pushed for a robust ‘Force Intervention Brigade’ in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to use lethal force against the Congolese March 23 Movement (M23) within the context of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO). While this might bring quick results in terms of deterrence, and to some extent protection of civilians, it opens up a wide field of other problems and challenges related to impartiality, long-term peacebuilding and – for some – the very essence of peacekeeping itself.

EuropeNow Is the use of lethal force in UN Peacekeeping always a negative factor?

Joachim Koops It always depends on the circumstances and purpose. But it has clearly become one of the trickiest, but also most persistent questions for the UN to tackle. Not only the question of the use of force, but also the future of UN peacekeeping in high risk environments in general or where there is no peace to keep, but civilians to be protected. The current debate generated by the so-called ‘Cruz Report’ on ‘Improving Security of United Nations Peacekeepers’ authored by the Force Commander of MONUSCO, Brazilian Lieutenant-General Carlos Alberto Dos Santos Cruz, tries to find some answers, particularly concerning issues that the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operationsreport of 2015 shied away from.

EuropeNow What were the vexing issues?

Joachim Koops The perennial questions is what is the right balance between the effective use of force for credibility and deterrence on the one hand and the primacy of politics and civilian approaches to peacekeeping on the other? Yet, in many ways, events already overtake doctrinal debates: the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) has also reignited the debate on whether the UN needs to adapt more rigorously to high-risk environments by deploying the tools and mindsets of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. The use of lethal force is sometimes required in order to protect civilians, defend peace operations and their mandate against attacks and to stop impunity. But we shouldn’t forget that UN Peacekeeping is essentially a political tool and that the use of force can also undermine the UN’s claim to impartiality or can even contribute to the deterioration of the security situation in the mid- and long-term, despite short-term ‘quick wins’.

EuropeNow Where do the Europeans stand on this issue?

Joachim Koops During the two decades before their ‘re-engagement’ with UN peacekeeping since 2014 in the context of MINUSMA, most European countries had drastically reduced their commitment to blue helmet operations. Europeans remained critical of UN peacekeeping and rather invested in NATO-led and EU-led operations – both for military and political reasons. In a project with representatives from ten international think tanks, we tried to explore the challenges, opportunities and ways ahead for European countries to re-engage with UN peacekeeping. We tried to assess the main reasons for committing troops to UN Peacekeeping, as well as core obstacles, inter-organizational rivalries and opportunities. For many troop contributors, even those that were among the ‘founders of UN Peacekeeping’ in the 1950s and 1960s (such as the Nordic countries, but also Austria and Ireland), MINUSMA served as a strategically important mission, but also as a kind laboratory for testing the extent to which UN peacekeeping has developed. Countries that had been rather hesitant since the 1990s (such as The Netherlands and Germany) contributed somewhat surprisingly substantial troops and equipment. The Europeans’ approach is on balance a bit schizophrenic: even though one of the core criticisms in European capitals relates to the UN’s inability to wield effective force, many European troop contributing countries also remained wary of deploying with full force in the riskiest areas.

EuropeNow Were there lessons and tools from European experiences in Afghanistan that could be transferred to MINUSMA?

Joachim Koops It is interesting that some countries in fact sent the same troops to MINUSMA that had already previously cooperated well in Afghanistan. For example, the Dutch and German contingents built up a strong relationship and track-record of cooperation in NATO’s ISAF mission, which was of great help and use for their cooperation in Mali. The use of intelligence (among NATO members in the mission), helicopters, medical evacuation, force protection and high-end equipment was a strong component of the European return to UN peacekeeping. Similarly to the US parallel role to International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, France maintained a robust national operation in parallel to MINUSMA. A core problem was not only the difference in equipment, training and engagement between the different troop contributing countries, but the fact that NATO countries cooperated more closely among each other than with the rest of MINUSMA’s non-Western troop contributors also created frictions. Critics pointed out that there was sometimes a risk that the Europeans created a ‘mission within the mission’ amongst themselves. This is understandable from their perspective and for utilizing the benefits of their past cooperation and interoperability, but it did of course lead to criticism from other troop contributors. On the other hand, some Euroepean contingents also provided effective ‘in-mission capacity-building’ for other countries, for example in establishing and maintaining better medical facilities.

EuropeNow How can EU-African security cooperation be strengthened?

Joachim Koops There has been a flurry of initiatives in recent years in relation to the so-called strategic partnership between the European Union and the African Union, which in previous years has become somewhat stale. As mentioned earlier, European engagement in Africa of course goes beyond UN peacekeeping and even EU-led CSDP operations. The 2017 Joint Communication “for a renewed impetus of the Africa-EU Partnership” seeks to re-launch political, economic, security and education-related relations between both continents as well as a strong trilateral EU-UN-AU approach. Yet, the Europeans’ current political priorities, that focus too much on the migration “crisis” risk marginalizing other important topics and policies for a more long-term and sustainable approach. Relations between the Europeans and Africans remain strained, but is also a continuing story of untapped potential. With other crisis hotspots emerging in the Middle East and other neighbouring regions of the EU, attention – at least in the security field – is now more divided. Yet, it’s a crucial moment for a proper and balanced partnership.

EuropeNow What is your outlook on the future of a UN Peacekeeping and EU-UN-AU triangle?

Joachim Koops In the past, there have been strong, yet uncoordinated, efforts in peacekeeping partnerships and capacity-building. It is clear that both the Europeans and the UN look to the African Union and the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) for becoming first responders in high risk environments. Yet, the European Union and the UN will themselves remain extensively involved in peacekeeping, crisis management and training missions on the African continent. Several mechanisms, particularly at the inter-secretariat levels, have been promoted for more institutionalised partnerships of EU-UN, EU-AU and UN-AU formats, but more work remains to be done at the truly integrated trilateral level. Preparations and advancements have only begun in 2015. Again, the overemphasis of the EU and European member states on the migration crisis, and particularly its questionable policies towards Libya, threatens a more long-term and value-based approach. On the other hand, it has reignited strategic interest in African security issues among European decision-makers and the wider public. In the realm of peacekeeping, ongoing calls for UN reform, the build-up of APSA and the reorientation of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy also remain moving parts of the wider puzzle.

There is some renewed momentum for closer cooperation, but differences in interests, priorities and commitment will unfortunately make it very difficult to make quick gains in the process towards a coherent EU-AU-UN vision for peacekeeping. However, European experiences from MINUSMA will feed into wider debates on the future of UN peacekeeping and the wider lessons learned process that has only just begun will be an important opportunity for crafting a joint strategy for more effective and sustainable peacekeeping and a strong EU-AUUN partnership.

Joachim Koops is Dean of Vesalius College of the Free University of Brussels (VUB), Research Professor of International Security at the VUB’s Institute for European Studies and Director of the Global Governance Institute (GGI). His research focuses on European Union, NATO and United Nations approaches to crisis management, peacekeeping and diplomacy. He is currently directing an international research project on ‘European Approaches to UN Peacekeeping with a particular emphasis on Sub-Saharan Africa. Recent publications include the Oxford Handbook of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (Oxford University Press, 2017, co-edited with Norrie MacQueen, Thierry Tardy and Paul D. Williams), European Approaches to UN Peacekeeping: Towards Stronger Re-engagement? (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Giulia Tercovich), The Palgrave Handbook of Inter-organizational Relations in World Politics (Palgrave, 2017, co-edited with Giulia Tercovich) and Germany and UN peacekeeping: The Cautiously Evolving Contributor, in International Peacekeeping, 2016. Joachim has served as the Advisor of the Chief of Staff of the Standby High Readiness Brigade for UN Operations (SHIRBRIG), the Head of the Partnership Team of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, New York and theHead of the UN Liaison Office for Peace and Security (UNLOPS) in Brussels.

John Shattuck

There is much discussion about how liberal democracies perish, alleged victims of “radicalized individualism,” and ruthless meritocracies. It is further argued that their deficiencies and fundamental flaws exacerbate extreme inequality, rampant corruption, depraved popular culture, and disintegration of social order, making authoritarianism alluring. At such times, the distinctive voices of seasoned, experienced individuals need to be heard.

Ambassador John Shattuck has an extraordinary background with which to address the transatlantic threat of “illiberal democracy.” His tenure as the fourth President and Rector of the Central European University in Budapest coincided with an extraordinarily turbulent seven years, marked by the rising influence of Jobbik and the rule Fidesz, and with remarkable upheavals in Europe—be it challenges to the integrity of the European Union, unprecedented migrant flows, or secessionist movements. He is uniquely positioned in this discourse over the virtues of liberal democracy and the threats to the most humane aspects of global civil society. In his distinguished career as an international human rights lawyer and advocate, he represented Morton Halperin, the director of policy planning on Nixon’s National Security Council, in an unprecedented illegal wiretapping case at the height of the Watergate Scandal when serving as litigator for the ACLU. As the Assistant US Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, he was among the first to investigate the massacre at Srebrenica by interviewing fleeing survivors on the ground in Tuzla. His report back to Washington resulted in the CIA aerial photographs of the execution sites being discovered and shown at the UN Security Council. He subsequently helped to negotiate the Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia, and was instrumental in the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. From 1998 to 2000, he served as US Ambassador to the Czech Republic.

He is currently developing his research on the resilience of liberal democracy at the Institute for International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and has created a joint Master’s program in Transatlantic affairs, the first of its kind, between the Fletcher School and the College of Europe in Bruges.

EuropeNow Liberal democracy is questioned and challenged on both sides of the Atlantic. How would you describe the challenge of “illiberal democracy?”

John Shattuck Illiberal governance and illiberal democracy are a form of neo-authoritarianism.

Liberal democracy has been the bulwark against authoritarianism, ever since the end of World War II. It is defined in terms of democratic elections, but also institutions – media, freedom of speech, and the various checks and balances against authoritarianism, an independent judiciary, minority rights and civil society.

Hungary’s current Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, himself coined the term “illiberal democracy” when he was reelected in 2014. He was overt that he was establishing a new form of democracy that would resist all the elements of liberal checks and balances, and rely entirely on elections. Hold an election, and everything else thereafter can be centrally controlled by the government, a hollow democracy.

EuropeNow There are attacks on liberal democracy as having betrayed its promises, that its institutions have disproportionately encouraged self-interest and corruption. What did you mean when you described the conditions of liberal democracy, whether in the United States or in Europe, that allow for this to occur as “neurological?”

John Shattuck The current populist rebellion we are witnessing has benefited from the internal flaws of liberal democracy itself, given the ways in which elites have disproportionately benefited from the workings of both economic and political systems.

Now we have a populist backlash, which is really both economic, in terms of people feeling left behind through the loss of jobs, the shutting down of industries, the rusting out of industrial strength—certainly in the United States but also largely in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. The new technologies of production, the forces of globalization, automation, etc., all of this is creating a grave economic anxiety, and as a result, we see what used to be understood as blue collar workers shifting from the moderate left to the extreme right, and joining the populist forces of reaction.

EuropeNow Can you further explain this in terms of potential societal and cultural decay?

John Shattuck Economics is the first of three forms of rebellion, but the second is cultural rebellion, which is essentially that groups of people in the United States and Europe, who were previously dominant, are feeling excluded from what is, certainly in the United States, a civil rights culture that has intended, and has succeeded in some ways, to rectify centuries of racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination. So you get white males in particular that are pushing back against that, and feeling culturally threatened.

The third element of this populist rebellion I call a “security rebellion,” people whose fears of terrorism and crime can be stimulated and fanned by politicians into great hostility towards minorities, refugees, migrants, and foreigners, developing virulent xenophobia.

We see these common areas of rebellion in a transatlantic context in both the United States and in Europe. This was manifested in Hungary earlier than anywhere else in Europe, which is what makes Viktor Orban’s rise so interesting.

EuropeNow Why Hungary?

John Shattuck First of all, Hungary has a long history of feeling isolated and trapped in Central Europe, and of being victimized by outside sources, whether it’s the Mongols, the Russians, the Turks, the Germans, and then obviously the Fascists – although Hungary itself participated in many respects in the rise of fascism in the 1930’s – and then Soviet Communism. So, Hungarians have always felt vulnerable to these dominant forces trying to control their lives.

Then, you certainly have to put personality near the top of the list. Orban is a quite brilliant politician, who saw and capitalized on these trends.

Hungary is also in somewhat of a language prison, in that nobody speaks Hungarian outside of Hungary, and very few Hungarians speak other languages. Orban had a captive audience among the Hungarians as he pushed forward the kind of nationalist populism that he succeeded in developing as a way of centralizing his own power and consolidating his ability through elections, and claiming the mantle of legitimacy.

EuropeNow You led a unique educational institution. Why was the Central European University (CEU) established?

John Shattuck We should look at this within the broad historical trend of what happened in 1989 and the years following. That period was nothing short of virtually an ideological revolution, albeit a peaceful revolution, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Authoritarianism, at least for the moment, seemed to be very much pushed back. CEU was established in 1991, by George Soros and others, including major leaders in the new political movements of Eastern Europe – Vaclav Havel, and other people of similar stature. It was established to introduce the principles of freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech, and to revive forms of education that had been repressed, not only by communism but also by fascism.

We have to remember that Central Europe – and here I mean not only Hungary, but also Poland and Czechoslovakia at the time – was victimized not just by communism but also fascism. And they are in the only part of the world that had a series of governing authoritarian structures representing the two principal forms of totalitarianism in the 20thcentury.

EuropeNow What is CEU’s mission and influence?

John Shattuck Effectively, the CEU brought back the principles of inquiry and academic freedom, and particularly study of the social sciences. There was also an emphasis on the economic sciences, involving business and the new open and free market economics that were dominant after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

CEU has been successfully doing this for now almost a quarter of a century. In the early days of the Orban administration, there was no effort to try to push CEU out or otherwise restrict its activity. Even today, CEU continues to be a beacon of academic freedom. It just happens to be operating inside of a governing system that we’ve characterized as illiberal democracy.

EuropeNow What is Orban’s strategy for the upcoming election of spring 2018?

John Shattuck Orban previously attacked the refugee flows coming into Europe from the Middle East. Hungary became the leader of the resistance to any form of refugee resettlement in Europe, which helped his popularity. Under his leadership these attacks have intensified. There are ongoing severe cutbacks on the independence of the judiciary, freedom of the media, and now efforts to control civil society by branding it as foreign-dominated and foreign agent-controlled. Orban is constantly looking for scapegoats that he can attack as a way of continuing to aggrandize his power.

In this current election cycle, he has personalized this, shifting his focus to George Soros – because Soros promotes liberal democracy and freedom by supporting all of the institutions of liberal democracy in Europe and in Hungary, as contrary to the propositions that are being pushed forth by Orban’s ruling party, Fidez. He specifically attacks Soros – in a very spurious way, because there’s no truth to this whatsoever – for stimulating the refugee flows into Europe.

EuropeNow How does that affect CEU?

John Shattuck It’s been politically convenient for Orban to tie Soros and CEU together to put more pressure on CEU through regulatory measures, impinging on its academic freedom that have been adopted by the Hungarian parliament, which is dominated and largely controlled by Fidesz. CEU is not in any way governed by Soros. He’s on the board of trustees, but he’s otherwise not a major factor in terms of the academic decision-making of the university. And while Soros is the principle source of CEU’s endowment, the university has now diversified its sources of funding.

EuropeNow Is Soros’ stigmatization and personal vilification tied to the revival of Hungarian anti-semitism?

John Shattuck There’s a lot of concern that this is in fact anti-semitism. That’s certainly being denied, particularly by the Fidesz government and Orban himself. It’s reminiscent of the way in which financiers who happened to be Jewish were attacked in the 1930’s and earlier. While I think anti-semitism is a very major current backdrop, I don’t see this as a direct manifestation of anti-semitism, but as an appeal to the latent and long-time anti-semitic elements manifested in Central Europe, and particularly in Hungary. Of course, the Hungarian Holocaust was one of the major elements of the Holocaust, and, as history has clearly demonstrated, Hungarians themselves participated.

EuropeNow In this context, how is the question of the distortion of Hungarian historical memory understood?

John Shattuck This is part of a larger theme of the disintegration of factual and historical accuracy, and the manipulation of historical narrative by political forces that are trying to aggrandize their power. We’re seeing some of that in the United States with the attack on “fake news.” But in Hungary, very particularly, as Orban has looked for models for Hungarians to relate to, he has looked to the Horthy regime of the 1930s.

The Horthy regime was allied with Germany, partly to restore Hungarian lands that had been taken away by the international community after World War I. But it was still a proto-fascist regime, and certainly had strong anti-semitic and restrictive laws. The so-called numerus clausus restricted Jewish participation in various aspects of society.

Orban’s appeal to Horthy relates directly to the effort to reclaim history, and to airbrush out its unattractive aspects. The most dramatic example is a memorial in the middle of Budapest’s Szabadság tér, or Freedom Square, which is a monument to the victims of German occupation of Hungary. The monument makes only very passing reference to the Jewish victims of the Hungarian Holocaust, and looks at all of Hungarians as being victimized by Germany, which is totally contrary to the historical record of Hungarian participation in the Holocaust.

EuropeNow How else has Orban manipulated Hungary’s political landscape?

John Shattuck Centralization under Orban has been very advantageous for the development of a new oligarchic system – certainly a better example is what is going on further to the east in Russia with Putin, and also to a large extent in Turkey with Erdogan – but the growth of an oligarchic economy is very much part of, and at the center of the new illiberal regime that has developed in Hungary.

EuropeNow What is the impact of corruption inherent in such oligarchic systems?

John Shattuck There is vulnerability there. Corruption can be quite tangible, it becomes quite visible, and oligarchies become a target for popular dissent and dissatisfaction. Early in 2017, a quarter of a million Hungarians protested the government’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics, knowing that public resources would divert to government cronies. The bid was withdrawn. I understand this as civil society critically sifting through the cracks of authoritarianism. Similarly, in February of 2017, five hundred thousand people took to the streets in Romania, to prevent the passage of a new law weakening existing anti-corruption standards.

EuropeNow Are these illiberal political and economic tendencies spreading? How have the actions of these illiberal governments contradicted the European Union’s founding principles of “democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights.”

John Shattuck In Austria, a right-wing government has been elected, when only six years ago a similar right-wing candidate, who was elected, Haider, had to relinquish power because he was pilloried for contradicting Austria’s democratic principles. Similarly, the Czech Republic – while it is uncertain where the new government is going –  has some of the same elements of Orban, and Donald Trump for that matter, in the election of a business mogul who otherwise has no particular political claim on power. In Poland, we also see similar tendencies to crack down on civil society, and on independence of the judiciary and the media.

These trends of illiberal governments and attacks on the principles of liberal democracy are manifested elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, the political party of the far right received almost fourteen percent of the vote, putting a dent in Angela Merkel’s governing potential. In France, there was a final contest, and it was won by the liberal democratic forces of Macron, who pushed back Marine Le Pen and her far right party.

All of this is present throughout Europe in different modes, and to make it very clear, this is also very much part of what the dangers are right now of liberal democracy in America in the neo-populism and dangerous authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration.

EuropeNow How sensitive or dangerous are the political circumstances that you are describing?

John Shattuck It’s very uncertain where we’re going at this point. This is definitely a transatlantic phenomenon. There are two centrifugal forces at work in both European and American liberal democracy. In the US, the danger is what I would call deconsolidation, which predates in some ways the Trump election, and is decreasing participation in elections and increasing polarization. Polarization in the US is a result of the populist tendencies, including the manipulation of the media, particularly with the rise of the right-wing media, and decreasing support for democratic institutions. The US Congress, of course, is way at the bottom of the list, and democratic government itself is increasingly seen by Americans to be not performing the way they would like, and in some cases with outright hostility.

In the EU, I would say the danger is the possibility that the EU itself could disintegrate. Brexit is the primary example, and the recent Catalan vote is another example, as are the rise of Euro-skepticism, the growing regional division between East and West and North and South parts of Europe. The failure to reform particularly financial institutions, and what is widely perceived in Europe as a “democratic deficit,” which is that people don’t feel connected to decisions that are made in their name in Brussels and elsewhere, is threatening.

These are the centrifugal forces that are at work, and I think that the greatest potential threats to liberal democratic governance on both sides of the Atlantic are economic inequality, resulting from the structural aspects of globalization and the market deregulation. The tax legislation that was just enacted in the United States is a very powerful example of the growing inequality.

There is also the unresponsiveness and the lack of vision of the mainstream political parties. In the US, the Democratic Party hasn’t done anything remotely representing a vision that responds to the new populism.

Probably the largest threat, but the most distant one, is the possibility of what I call a Reichstag event, which is the spectre of another major terrorist attack, or a nuclear conflict such as with North Korea, and the threat that as a result of that there would be a strong neo-authoritarian crackdown on democracy on either side of the Atlantic.

So, there are big dangers out there, and some of them are very real, obviously not just theoretical.

EuropeNow Are there indications of resilience in Europe?

John Shattuck The election results in France and Germany and the Netherlands show that it is possible to defeat illiberal democracy and anti-liberal populism.

We have a very realistic kind of leadership, with a French president in Emmanuel Macron, and a German chancellor in Angela Merkel, even though her election was marred somewhat by the surge of the far right. I think if Merkel develops a secure coalition with the Social Democrats, which seems to be in the offing, and the Franco-German central powers of Europe look toward reform of the EU, there is room for some optimism.

Click here to view John Shattuck’s course syllabus US-EU Relations in the 21st Century: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of Transatlantic Affairs at the Fletcher School.

Nikos Passas

A renowned expert on corruption, illicit flows, UN sanctions, informal fund transfers, terrorism, white-collar crime, financial regulation, and organized international crime, Professor Passas is a scholar whose criminological research in the area of human rights is globally respected. The Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Crime, Law and Social Change, he is the Chair of the Academic Council of the Anti-Corruption Academy in India; and the Organized Crime Observatory Representative to the UN. He has more than 220 publications in 14 languages, regularly serves as expert witness on all continents and consults with international organizations such as OECD, OSCE, the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, the European Union, and FinCEN. 

Nikos is also a member of the Athens Bar. An intellectual, and a dedicated academic activist, he cares deeply about Greece.  He is convinced there are strong indications that facts and reality are at odds with what is depicted by media and talking heads influencing public opinion and public policy in Europe and beyond. 

He argues that the handling of the Greek debt, and the best way out of the downward spiral for Greece, is to analyze the crisis in terms of violations of human rights, and through the prism of the role of institutional corruption.

EuropeNow How did Greece arrive at this moment?

Nikos Passas The European Monetary Union’s structural flaws played an important role, as this was a political project lacking a well-considered economic architecture and strategy. Hurriedly bringing together asymmetric economies without a plan for convergence and violations of the rules by the biggest economies widened the gaps and planted the seeds of crises.

But there was far more. Oft-cited sources of the Greek collapse include tax evasion, corruption, and an oversized civil service fed by nepotism practiced by conservative and socialist governments over many years. Yet, these undeniable problems cannot account for the bulk of the debt nor its steady growth from 1980 up to this day. The Greek government actually spent less than other Eurozone countries and was not alone in violating fiscal rules, which were openly breached by the biggest economies such as Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. German, French, and other banks knew the risks but jumped into a supply driven frenzy: while domestic banks held 85 percent of the debt in 1994, foreign banks had 75 percent of it in 2007. Greek military spending was excessive and partly fueled by bribes for orders to mainly German and French companies. Billions were allocated to tanks (without ammunition) and submarines (occasionally defective), which were needless as the country has been a member of NATO and was not in conflict. Finally, illicit financial outflows added to tax revenue losses.

EuropeNow What allowed this to happen?

Nikos Passas In 2001, Greece entered the Eurozone, even though it did not meet the essential economic criteria. The practical non-compliance with Eurozone entry requirements was known and accepted in Brussels. Some legal but questionable debt-obscuring transactions offered by Goldman Sachs were approved as consistent with Eurostat rules. Goldman Sachs created loans at fictitious exchange rates and made hundreds of millions not only out of this deal but also by selling the debt short. Other countries and financial institutions played similar games. Questionable and inaccurate accounting kept things going in several countries until the financial crisis in 2009.

EuropeNow How was this treated? Who benefited, and who lost?

Nikos Passas These problems were swept under the carpet until no space was left between the carpet and the ceiling. The global crisis led to a transfer of risk from private banks to states. This could be handled by the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank for some countries. But the weakest links buckled and Greece reached the edge of bankruptcy. The response to the crisis by the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund, the Troika, was wrongly described by media and official discourses as a “bailout.” The truth is that about 90 percent of the new loans went to pay interest and the private financial institutions (primarily French and German banks) that had knowingly assumed that risk, while Greek bondholding pensioners lost about three quarters of their investment.[1] The German Treasury also made 100 billion euro out of the Greek crisis, because its bonds were in higher demand and the interest rates dropped substantially.[2]

EuropeNow What factors exacerbated this crisis?

Nikos Passas Allowing populist myths about hard working Northern Europeans paying for lazy Southerners to proliferate in the media has been divisive, and ended up painting politicians into corners that constrained rational policy-making. What is lost in public discussions is that leaked documents published by the Wall Street Journal revealed the IMF’s awareness in 2010 that the debt was unsustainable – as the IMF can only participate in sustainable programs, it apparently violated its own rules by going along with the Troika plan. Another leak revealed that the real objective was to save the euro currency rather than help out the Greek economy.[3]

New loans that came with strict austerity measures and the essential surrender of national sovereignty represent practices that fit the concept of “lawful but awful” practices: the effects of Troika’s “remedies” have been massive unemployment (more than 60 percent of the 19-25 age group), continuous drop in GDP, growth of debt ratio, brain drain, severe cuts in education, public health and other services and an unprecedented humanitarian disaster made worse by capital flight and lack of foreign direct investment.[4]

Pressures on the Greek government to raise more revenues have been inconsistent and criminogenic on their own. A Greek study found that higher tax rates have led to lower revenue collected, so the point of diminishing returns has been reached long ago. The creditors insisted that unnecessary military orders and payments to creditor countries continue to be honored, while squeezing pensioners and minimum wage earners. The blanket prohibition to hire civil servants made it impossible to get people to use a software program the government had introduced to redflag tax and duty evasion. Also, anyone appearing on the “Lagarde list” is treated as a tax cheat even if s/he migrated long ago to countries with dual taxation treaties, leading to new abuses.

EuropeNow Who has been most affected by this crisis, by the policies of austerity?

Nikos Passas The effects of austerity have been particularly severe for the older and youngest parts of the population. 43 percent of pensioners live on $778.00 per month, less than half that of the income of people over 65 in other Eurozone countries; many of them also have to support other unemployed family members, whose benefits have been cut drastically. Public health and education budget have been cut to nearly a third of the euro area.

The rate of Greeks unable to meet medical needs has risen to more than double that of the other 27 EU Member States.

EuropeNow What schisms have appeared?

Nikos Passas A (DiaNeosis) think-tank study found that 15% of the population (1.647.703 people) in 2015 earned below the extreme poverty threshold. By contrast, in 2009 that number was lower than 2.2 percent. Bank of Greece data show that the net wealth of Greek households fell by 40 percent in the same period, with many households becoming severely deprived.

According to Eurostat, 35.6 percent of the population (3.8 million) are at risk of poverty, up from 28 percent in 2008.

Unemployment is still around 22 percent, by far the highest in the EU. The figures for those under twenty-five years has risen to catastrophic levels (reaching above 65 percent)!

Additional measures made economic conditions even worse for young workers. For example, the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR), the main monitoring body to the European Social Charter, has found that legislation implementing austerity measures during the 2010-2014 period violated several articles of the European Social Charter protecting

• the right of workers to earn their living;

• to provide reasonable daily and weekly working hours, and the working week to be progressively reduced;

• the right of workers to remuneration affording them and their families a decent standard of living;

• the right of workers to a reasonable period for notice of termination of employment;

• the right of employed persons under 18 years of age to at least four weeks’ annual holiday with pay; and

• the right of workers and their representatives to determine and improve their working conditions

To make things worse, the austerity measures imposed on Greece by the creditors reduced the minimum wage for workers under twenty-five. The ECSR has found this measure to be “excessive,” “discrimination on grounds of age” and contrary to the Council of Europe’s European Social Charter.

EuropeNow What have been the core repercussions?

Nikos Passas As a consequence, the youngest and most talented Greeks have turned elsewhere for a decent education, career and life. Unsurprisingly, Greece’s Central Bank (BoG) data suggest that 427,000 Greeks, mostly the young and educated, have emigrated in the 2008-2015 period. This out of a total population of about 11 million.

The problem is that the pain imposed on the Greek society has neither reduced the debt burden (debt as percentage of GDP) nor stabilized the economy:

Rather, the economy shrunk by 26 percent:

EuropeNow And the human and societal consequences?

Nikos Passas The humanitarian crisis produced and aggravated by the austerity, did not do much to address the debt and grow the economy. On the other hand, it has stripped people of their dignity, demoralized and deprived them of hope, thereby undercutting the future of the economy and society. Disaffecting the youth and removing the most promising members of the society effectively condemns Greece to a much longer period of crisis and recovery. Brain-drain must be reversed on the basis of evidence-based hope; facts and data showing sign of better governance, sustainable economic growth, higher quality of life and a promise of a better future through meritocracy and hard work.

Even if the Troika did not know the program was flawed at the start, they know it after seven years of great depression. Rejecting democracy and functional alternatives or reforms for economic growth is bad enough. The austerity and micro-management of Greece has now exceeded any known precedent. Anyone in disbelief at what has become of European solidarity and integration concerns should also read the MoUs and the terms of reference. Take note, for example, of a 2010 clause about complete control of current and future resources, such as discoverable offshore oil and gas energy reserves that studies estimate at hundreds of billions of euro. This kind of explicit and disproportionate deprivation of national rights takes us back to conditions reminiscent of the East India Company times.

Some may argue there are laws and conventions that must be observed. The first difficulty with this argument is that laws and conventions did not prevent the inaccurate statistics and pretense of compliance regarding countries’ economic conditions and eligibility to join the Eurozone. Secondly, and much more importantly, when laws and policies allow or impose such outcomes, these laws and policies must be changed. Dogmatically insisting on them amounts to regulatory fundamentalism that engenders security risks. Intentionally or not, humiliating the people that created the term “democracy” is perilous. The EU integration project must transcend the current asymmetric patchwork stitched together with ideals of democracy, respect for human rights, solidarity and peace. Because of the widening inequalities and deeper gaps between countries in crisis and stronger economies, European integration is undermined as some of these political threads are being pulled apart in ways that might prove too costly.

EuropeNow What is your objective at this moment?

Nikos Passas At this stage, my research cannot conclusively answer all of the questions raised above, but findings so far point to inconvenient truths about how manageable-at-first problems have been turned into a multi-generational humanitarian crisis victimizing millions of innocents. I am pursuing my scholarly duty to collect data, provide context and analysis, warn about likely consequences, remove plausible deniability, demand accountability and advocate for harm reduction and prevention. Contemporary Greece is victimized by disastrous measures, corruption and dogmatism calling for better policies and restorative justice. We need to find an alternative way of preventing and handling such crises. If the ideal of European integration and security are to be pursued pragmatically and seriously, the European Union can and must do better than this.

Nikos Passas is a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. He is also Director of Corruption and Leadership Courses at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and Distinguished Practitioner in Financial Integrity at Case Western Reserve Law School. He is the author of Informal Value Transfer Systems (IVTS) and Criminal Activities; Legislative Guides for the Implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption, and Implementation of the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime; and co-author of Migrant Labor Remittances in South Asia. His next book is entitled Trade-Based Financial Crime and Illicit Flows. His degrees are from the Univ. of Athens (LL.B.), the University of Paris-II (D.E.A.) and the University of Edinburgh Faculty of Law (Ph.D.). In 2017, he was honored with the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award bestowed by the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. 

     

References:

[1] Rocholl, Jörg, & Stahmer, Axel. (2016). Where did the Greek Bailout Money Go? Berlin: European School of Management and Technology; White Paper No. WP–16–02.

[2] Research, Leibniz Institute of Economic. (2015). Germany’s Benefit from the Greek Crisis. Leibniz: Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle.

[3] IMF. (2013). Greece: Ex Post Evaluation of Exceptional Access under the 2010 Stand-By Arrangement. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.

[4] Passas, Nikos. (2005). Lawful but Awful: “Legal Corporate Crimes”. Journal of Socio-Economics, 34(6), 771-786.

Annie Schnitzer Joins LEAP

Annie Schnitzer, a wonderful Wellesley junior, was the first member of LEAP. Annie studied German language and culture at Wellesley and investigated the German coal industry as Germany undergoes the transition to fully renewable energy resources.

The internship this summer taught me to think critically and analytically, offering me an experience that cannot be found in the classroom. With Dr. Droege’s support and guidance, I even had the chance to learn about various masters programs in the field of sustainable development and urban design. It was truly a wonderful summer and I am deeply grateful for each and every moment, they are ones I will never forget.”

Peter Droege

Peter Droege is acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost pioneers on the development of international urban sustainability and the creation of intelligent cities. His years of dedication, challenging complacency with innovative thinking on critical environmental concerns have stimulated tangible and highly successful results globally. He was instrumental in precedent-setting sustainable energy, settlement design, and urban development efforts in Australia, China, Japan, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Vietnam.

Professor Droege is the award-winning author of many path-breaking works on city futures, resilience, regenerative design, energy, and climate, including his seminal work, The Renewable City: A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution (2006).
He is deeply committed as an educator, policy expert, and activist to supporting those, who in his words, seek to “liberate human civilization from its fossil fuel drip and to defeating the Sword of Damocles that is nuclear energy.”

Droege has recently expanded the scope of his work to consider and implement regional and global ecological strategies to refine footprint measurement and enhance energy reduction. For his recent European project “Lake Constance Energy Region,” Droege initiated and led an EU-funded five-university, four-country urban, and regional energy autonomy study, focused on a transition to renewable energy and mobility based on local resources. The results were published as the  “Regenerative Region: Energy and Climate Atlas.”

In this interview, Droege provides an informed exhortation about the role of cities, about what he believes is the urgency and feasibility of attaining “100% Renewable Energy.”

EuropeNow What do you think is the biggest challenge of our times?

Peter Droege Failed investment. Over a trillion dollars in fossil and nuclear energy subsidies, and a good portion of the two trillion dollars in global military budgets dedicated to protecting petroleum sources and markets, are essentially applied to make Earth uninhabitable to humans, as quickly and effectively as possible. Sadly, the project of ending life on earth is working.

Yet never has a path of emergency response been clearer. To a growing community around the world, the answer is to end reliance on fossil and nuclear energy and embrace 100% renewable resources: we at the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development teach what we practice and we practice what we preach. And at Eurosolar we have promoted this path since our inception in 1988. Yet today, in 2017, progress is still lagging so far behind that we have to even go beyond 100% renewable.

EuropeNow What does 100% renewable energy mean, and what does “beyond” signify?

Peter Droege It means absolute zero fossil or nuclear fuel content in operational or embodied energy, in stationary use or transport. “Beyond” refers to the urgent need to boost the removal of free greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, by enhancing the ability of soils, forests, wetlands, and water bodies to sequester and manage carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. “Beyond” also means the need for cities and communities to improve efficiency, lower consumption, and increase renewable energy production to generate an excess of non-polluting power for parts of the community and economy that need it to escape the fossil fuel trap. Above all, “beyond” means focus on poverty reduction, health, education, and social empowerment at the very base of the global society without which an energy transformation would at best be incomplete.

EuropeNow Is this a dream, or can it be reality?

Peter Droege Given global dependence on conventional fuels this may seem to many to be a utopian aim. Indeed, when “100%” is used today it describes specific and narrowly defined examples of abstinence from non-renewable fuel. 100% renewable electricity, for example; or 100% solar thermal heat; or fully renewable building operational energy, based on a high degree of design and construction efficiency. But there is nothing utopian about the ultimate goal: cities can use these individual 100% aims and partial strategies to (over time and in parallel) assemble a fully renewable reality. This is a far more direct and transparent approach than the largely symbolic and partial target setting exercises of the past.

EuropeNow Why set a 100% target?

Peter Droege Only an absolute and unequivocal renewable energy target can help in the guidance of urban strategies. Ideally, this will cover all electricity and thermal consumption, transport energy—and also include consumed energy, embodied in the goods and services procured. Most fractional target setting exercises— say, a reduction of 20% by 2020— today are aimed at the direct use of emissions derived from operational energy only.

This approach is problematic because the targets are typically set arbitrarily and for political purposes; they are set too low, even when they are attached to a specific implementation commitment; and they cover only a small fraction of actual energy consumption. Household energy embodied and consumed in goods and services comprises some 60-70% of total energy use— while the smaller rest, direct and transport energy use is typically elevated to represent the “total” energy use in municipal statistics. Lifestyle and personal consumption of imported fossil energy embodied in consumed goods and services are typically ignored: this can blow out the energy budget of an inner-city dweller to twice that of a rural citizen existing at a lower living cost.

EuropeNow How can excess greenhouse gas be removed from the atmosphere?

Peter Droege The fostering of climate-stabilizing regions is the most advanced frontier of renewable city planning and development. Many industries pride themselves on fostering carbon sink projects in Amazonia and other distant places, as short-term attempts at making up for their fossil fuel addictions— the emissions trading regime was based on this idea. In principle this is aimed at good and beneficial outcomes, although continued reliance on fossil fuel emissions makes it an unsustainable model.

What about our own regional and local ecosystems? How can they become  “carbon negative” –capable of absorbing emissions? Land use planning, open space, and waterway management, forestry and agriculture practices are relevant to the carbon and nitrogen cycle, and usually involve methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. But also construction materials are important: wood, biochar, and also carbon fiber, properly produced, can store atmospheric carbon in cities.

EuropeNow Where is the limit of what cities can do?

Peter Droege Some cities can more easily manage the energy performance of their own building stock, while others see themselves also able to control private and commercial building or even industrial activities. The nature of the local car fleet depends on global automobile suppliers and a typically large share of commuters or through-traffic from elsewhere—and yet, larger cities and city-regional alliances in partnership with new and post-carbon transport businesses and services can work to make substantial improvements over time. This includes efficiency programs, renewably powered electric public transport, renewable cogeneration plants, transformation of the building stock, urban energy infrastructure upgrades and regional wind, wave/tidal and solar farms to power electric vehicles—and, last not least, massive support for autonomous and traditional people driven car-share initiatives.

EuropeNow What must national governments do to support the turn from fossil and nuclear to renewable cities?

Peter Droege National governments do not need to embrace new urban policies—they just have to not stand in the way of progress, i.e. not engage in policies that harm cities’ quest for 100% renewable status—remove fossil fuel subsidies at the national level; embrace renewable energy feed-in legislation, the most powerful and proven path to quick and market based local renewable energy uptake; and enact legislation supporting renewable energy geared storage and network systems at regional and national levels for stationary and transport use, to supplement urban efforts.

EuropeNow This sounds like far more than a green sustainability drive.

Peter Droege This is an emergency. As a bare minimum, and first step, National Renewable Energy Emergency Frameworks should be formed to assess conditions and propose effective and timely urban agendas and funding programs.

U.S. federal agencies from FEMA to the CIA have long known that renewable energy is a basic ingredient of any resilience strategy—whether in terms of national defense or climate change: distributed renewable energy also resists attack and systemic collapse. Emergency Presidential, prime ministerial or other cross- or inter-ministerial bodies need to be established at national levels to monitor, prompt and enable. Local and state-based city-oriented governance structures are to be supported and boosted in this effort.

Unlike the broad urban social and development agendas of the second half of the twentieth century, today’s needs lie in the urgent building of urban renewable energy infrastructures, in efficiency improvement programs, and in the crafting of regional development efforts for the resilient supply of central cities with energy and food crops, as well as ecosystem goods and services: flood control, ambient heat mitigation, and cyclical water management.

EuropeNow How would you formulate a guide to local 100% and beyond, as an optimistic vision?

Peter Droege People come to realize that the most hopeful vision for cities is to become fully renewable energy based. Energy-intelligent building design, bio-energy, wind, water, solar electricity, solar thermal, and geothermal sources can support a leaner and healthier, but also more prosperous and equitable urban civilization. But these compelling arguments are only a diplomatic aside: time has run out; what may have been a quaint call for “sustainability” today has become a rude wake-up call to face the existential question of urban and human survivability.

There is no real alternative to a path that offers this exceptional combination of effectively mitigating the root causes of climate change, lowering urban vulnerability to the effects of climate change and conventional fuel peaking, reducing local and global environmental pollution levels, improving human health, and slowing the depletion of natural resources, freshwater and minerals, and halting and reversing the catastrophic collapse in biodiversity if this is even possible.

A locally appropriate range of renewable energy systems and an abiding focus on efficiency and demand management can meet all human energy needs anywhere on this planet. Independent energy islands can coexist with smart power grids and distributed storage systems—mechanical, electric, chemical or thermal. Such energy storage takes the form of fixed infrastructure but is also mobile: vehicle based. In this way the various energy sectors power, thermal energy, storage, and mobility can be coupled, networked and in the electric domain even traded via blockchain technology, inaugurating an entirely new and people-oriented, prosperity building energy economy.

EuropeNow What are the development benefits of a renewable path?

Peter Droege The local, regional, and global health benefits of “going renewable” are abundantly documented in human and ecological health and systemic stability. But because of the inherent potential for cities to generate and manage their own energy supply, there is also the great potential to liberate and internalize an extraordinary financial income stream—the enormous funds currently exiting and draining communities to fund oil exploration and processing, sustain distant coal mines and uranium quarries, and shore up the fragile balance sheets of astronomically risky and costly nuclear power plants.

By investing this massive monetary stream into renewable power systems, reduced demand through efficiency and conservation and regional and a range of renewable sources external to the city boundaries. And here, in the localization and regionalization of basic resource reliance and in the capturing of local economic value just may lie the future of cities.

EuropeNow What are some of the successful, hopeful examples?

Peter Droege The great total community renewable energy autonomy veteran of Guessing in Austria, but also the geothermally endowed Reijkjavik, current civic leader Vancouver, led by Gregor Robertson since 2008 as 39th mayor, the first major 100% renewable Australian urban center of Canberra / the Australian Capital Territories (ACT), Burlington VT and Aspen CO in the United States, even Davos, Switzerland—to name just a few, all serve as models for good practice, and have shown various important initiatives and civic leadership over the years. The aspiration has grown over the years as well, although these champions are still in the minority.

More than half of Germany’s national territory is said to be covered by cities, towns, and regions aspiring to be what we call “energy autonomous.” Indeed, cities have powerful reasons to enhance the quality, strength, and depth of their governance responsibilities, and to boldly expand their influence as energy leaders. Pioneering examples for this new role, often successfully supplementing existing policies and programs—or even spawning new state and national initiatives and partnerships, include the cities of Barcelona and its famed solar ordinance innovation of some twenty years ago, and San Francisco’s wide range of measures, from issuing solar bonds to finance public solar installations, to its erstwhile arrangement with the now defunct Better Place alliance of companies, to implement private renewable-energy based e-mobility systems throughout the greater Bay Area.

Key to this is strong civic and administrative leadership, like San Francisco’s long line of committed mayors—was epitomized in then-pioneers like Gavin Newsom, the 42nd mayor of the city and current and more embattled Lieutenant Governor of California. Newsom also had rallied the support of neighboring cities Oakland and San José in partnering with the then active commercial renewable electric car initiative Better Place, a predecessor of Tesla, and pursued regional food production and urban gardening initiatives, mapping unused spaces from rooftops to surplus public land. Today, these initiatives are eclipsed by the efforts of a number of other cities but continue the by now historical struggle towards urban energy autonomy. It is also no coincidence that San Francisco, like others, also recently decided to maintain its Sanctuary City status against the threat of losing Federal funding for protecting migrants and their families.

Peter Droege is a renowned expert in urban design and development, renewable energy, energy autonomy research and development and urban energy transition strategies. He holds a number of influential and international development designs and strategies, as well as advanced energy research and policy positions. His academic background includes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (School of Architecture and Planning), Tokyo University (Endowed Chair Program, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology) and the University of Sydney. He is the CEO of Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development, the President of Eurosolar, European Association for Renewable Energy, and a General Chairman for World Council for Renewable Energy.

See the links below for more of Peter Droege’s works:

Droege, P. Ed. 2014. Regenerative Region – energy and climate atlas. Oekom Publishers

Droege, P. Ed. 1997. Intelligent Environments: spatial aspects of the information revolution. Elsevier 

Droege, P. Ed. 2008. Urban Energy Transition – from fossil fuels to renewable power. Elsevier

Droege, P. 2009/2011. 100% Renewable – energy autonomy in action. Earthscan / Routledge

Droege, P. 2008. Renewable City – a comprehensive guide to an urban revolution. Wiley

Droege, P. 2010. Climate Design. ORO Publications

Dacia Viejo Rose

What follows is the correspondence I conducted with Dacia in early 2017, prior to an interview that was published in EuropeNow on her research regarding historical memory. The final interview itself can be found at the end of this exchange. It was redacted for the editorial purposes of the publication, and I am now sharing the entirety of the warm and human interaction preceding it for Convisero.

Sherman, February 1st, 2017

Dearest Dacia,

This is a long overdue email. You are remembered fondly. I hope you are doing wonderfully. Congratulations on your academic trajectory - stunning! Not surprising!

I wish you had been able to participate in the last formal EPIIC under my aegis, Europe in Turmoil, and its symposium.

You would have been, in so many ways, ideal.

I do not know if the news has reached you. After thirty years, I am now happily Emeritus! Hardly retired. Rather, new vistas! As one enterprise, I have joined the Advisory Board of the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, and I am engaged in a number
of initiatives with them.

Their latest /EuropeNow/ issue's special theme, on “Forced Migration, Cultural Identity, and Trauma,” was put together by my alum, your peer, (from 1985!) Turhan Canli, after I introduced him to Nicole Shea, CES's Executive Director.

I have also joined the board of Turhan's new center, the Mind/BrainCenter on War and Humanity. In the issue, I interview another superb alum, Mike Niconchuk (EPIIC 2011), who is using his expertise in social cognition, behavioral science, and neurobiology to help refugees in the Za’atari camp in Jordan.

Now I would like to interview you for the April edition of /EuropeNow. The theme of the April /EuropeNow/ issue will be “Cultural Heritage, Memory, and Politics of the Past.” How’s that for serendipity! I will soon have an abstract that I can send you.

I have already received approval to feature you in an interview similar to the one I conducted with Mike. Here my objective is to regularly interview young scholars
for their monthly publication.

My "style" of interviewing is to be as minimalist and recessive as possible, wanting only to prompt you to expose what you most wish to reveal and offer the CES community. I believe that there are as of now fifty thousand "subscribers." Would this be desirable from your
perspective? I truly hope so!

As you can see by my tagline below, I have an Oxford appointment in their Department of Politics and International Relations. While it is happily non-resident, I will be in England at least several times a year. I therefore have hopes of visiting you, should you wish it. Yet
that will not happen before the deadline for the April /EuropeNow/ issue, which is March 10th. So this most likely will have to be done remotely. I would love to talk with you. A number of thoughts are rumbling around in my mind. Do you Skype?

You have heard me refer frequently to the concept of and IGL community. Now, I want to more intentionally “ignite” it, as an extraterritorial reality. Much of what I am intent on doing into the future is integrating our Institute community, an extraordinary bounty
of wonderful alumni who have gone on to extraordinary careers. As I knit this community together, I am trying to find all the alumni I can. Who are you still in touch with that you think would like to hear from me?

Do update me on your life. I surely hope all is well.
Warmest regards

Dacia, February 2nd

Dear Sherman,

How wonderful to hear from you! I read your e-mail on my phone while half asleep this morning and had to remind myself now that I did not dream it.

I would really have loved to participate in that last EPIIC under your command, and in the many celebrations that there have been in your honour. Since graduating from Tufts and coming back to Europe it really does take a lot to get me back across the Atlantic and all the more so in the past two years. The good and the bad all seem to come in clusters and for me the Lectureship position and getting pregnant coincided, so I have been juggling being a single Mom (by choice) to a fantastically feisty little girl, Lyra, who turned 22 months today while at the same time taking on all the responsibilities, and trying to meet expectations, of the new post. It has been exhilarating and exhausting in equal parts.

Your e-mail reaches me at a moment when I am working on setting up two institutional projects here (a Heritage Research and Policy Centre at the Department and a comprehensive scheme revolving around professional photojournalists coming as fellows to Selwyn College). It would be great to run these ideas by you and get your thoughts. In both instances I want to try to create platforms for practitioners and academics to establish firm working relationships and regular exchanges.

How great that you are involved with Columbia. One of my current MPhil students, Alicia Stevens, worked in their global outreach programmes for many years - you would like her, even if she isn't an EPIIC alum. I see that you are keeping busy and making connections as only you can. When I have a calm moment I will follow up on all of the links that you sent. I do not know if I can do you/it justice but of course I would be delighted to contribute to the issue on “Cultural Heritage, Memory, and Politics of the Past", especially if it involves is being able to have a good conversation with you! Even if remotely. And absolutely the next time that you are in the country and at 'the other place' you should definitely come to Cambridge. I can find a room for you either at Selwyn or Darwin Colleges and introduce you around to a few people here, if you'd like. It would be fantastic to see you here.

I'm on skype at daciaviejo . I will read your interview with Mike Niconchuk. With motherhood and the lectureship I have been doing less research and 'proper' thinking in the last few years but hopefully your prompts will fire my brain cells and get me back into it and not schpieling platitudes.

Ignite indeed. I'm all for it. Tufts was a strange period for me of feeling very out of place in many ways and only two friendships have withstood. Of those one participated in EPIIC the year after I did but was a bit less involved, I think: Kyra Miller. We are still in touch occasionally and she jet sets between Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Shanghai. She's at kyra.miller@gmail.com It was also a strange period in her life but I am sure that she would be happy to hear from you.

All my best

Dacia,

Dacia , March 8th

Dear Sherman,

Yesterday after our chat I sat down to try to write up some material for you for the interview, the peace lasted about 10 minutes before student matters intervened and I had to see to one thing and another before going to teach and then to a meeting at the museum here, the evening (after Lyra was in bed) was taken up by trying to make my way through 130 fellowship applications that I need to rank by Monday. Unfortunately, the rest of this week is no clearer and the weekends are happily consumed by Lyra who is reluctant to miss a moment of our time together by napping...

So, in order to get something to you by next week's deadline, coming as it does at the intensely busy period of the last legs of the Lent teaching term here: we need a strategy.

Could I suggest that you e-mail me one question each day which I answer that day and send it back to you? This would provide me with bite-sized pieces which is probably all that I can manage right now and should give us the results we need.

It also strikes me as a nice Platonic/Voltairian/Rilke-ian way to go about our conversation.
I can start off today replying to your prompts for the preface and the impact of the Institute and we could take it from there.

Sherman, March 8th

Dearest Dacia,

Agreed! Love this sensibility - Platonic/Voltairian/Rilke-ian dialogue - perhaps at a Goethe-Institut

Prompts for the preface - I would actually do that last together with you - let's see what happens in the substance of the interview itself.

Essential first question for me - What drew you to this pursuit? An extended answer which we might cut into several sections. Your autobiographical sequence - experiential and intellectual evolution...

Another core question - What is the essence of your interdisciplinary approach...

Re the impact of the Institute, that might be the penultimate question - with the final question asking you what are the intellectual challenges ahead for you

Thanks for your introduction to your friend on Terezin! Thanks for describing me as you did. Humbling when I see what you have and are creating. I will write him today.

VERY EXCITED about all of this! Cannot get the photojournalist initiative out of my head as well.

Dacia, March 9th

Attached is what I have managed today, I realise that it is probably not what you were after and far too personal but it was what I needed perhaps to get going.

More tomorrow, further questions and a tough steer welcomed.

Like many of my students I can trace the origins of my academic interests back to my childhood although it did take me a while to fully identify what it was that was driving my interest. I grew up in Spain as the Franco regime took it last breath and in the midst of the ensuing transition, my father worked as a journalist though much of his energy was really taken up with clandestine resistance work with the Unions and the Communist party. We soon left Spain however, as he became enormously disappointed with the compromises made during the transition process which felt to many who had been active in the resistance like a betrayal of what they had fought for. We moved to my mother’s home town, New York, where he began to work as a translator in the UN and that building soon became my preferred playground, security was more lax at the time, darting between offices until I found an empty one and slipping in to write ‘coded’ messages on peoples typewriters.

Going to the UN international school also opened a whole world to me in terms of international awareness, not only on ‘wear your national dress to school’ days when I would swish in decked in a flamenco dress, the woman who taught me English was Nigerian, my home-room teacher was from India and both wore the traditional dress daily, but also because of the occasional bomb threats when we were evacuated from the school and the yearly ritual of collecting funds for UNICEF. It was also living in New York when I began to get hooked on to my mother’s passion, she was finishing her art history PhD when we first arrived and I would play under her desk as she typed away, but once that was in we would roam the city on weekends going to museums and galleries and so the Whitney and MOMA’s sculpture garden became favoured urban playgrounds.  As an only child I have ever since been trying to combine do justice to and pay my respects to the interests of booth my parents in politics- heavily imbued with a sense of social justice and responsibility on the one hand, and the arts, history, museums, and heritage on the other. We then moved to Geneva and the end of my high-school years in Geneva were marked by the invasion of Iraq because there were children in my school whose family members were leading actors on the different sides of the conflict.

When making a decision about what to study at university I was adamant that I wanted to study international relations and psychology in order to understand why people go to war and how to stop them, it was this youthful ideal that lead me to Tufts. For various reasons I was not quite able to bring these two together in the way that I had hoped - psychology was very much approached through experimental and statistical means and I probably needed someone to introduce me to Lacan!

During my undergraduate studies at Tufts the best thing that I did by far was to participate in the EPIIC programme (Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship). It provided everything that I was looking for and expecting from a university education: passionate debate, asking difficult questions, trying to solve big problems, challenging myself in all kinds of ways to do more than I thought I could do. The year that I participated our theme was “2020 Visions of the Future: Anticipating the year 2020” we took on board and explored a vast array of issues. To this day I cherish the memory of a serendipitous conversation that I had with one of our key-notes Murray Gell Man about quarks, poetry, when, hearing that I wanted to work in peace building but was frustrated by the UN mechanisms as I understood them, he said ‘well get in there and change it!’

My time at Tufts also coincided with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and that affected me quite profoundly. The first thing I did after graduating from Tufts was to do an internship at the, then named, United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affaires (summer and fall of 1996), among the issues that they were then trying to cope with was the end of the war in Bosnia, the fall out of the Rwandan genocide with continuing, and disastrous floods in Cambodia.  It was this experience that sparked the start of my interest in disasters and their aftermaths but I also became further disillusioned with the UN system, a disillusionment which if I had to pinpoint it might be with how the ideals of the organisation are translated into the nitty-gritty of every-day functioning. As a result I switched to pursue my interests in culture instead, interning at an auction house and an association dedicated to the protection of artists’ rights in Spain before going to graduate school. While a graduate student in Paris I began interning at UNESCO on a project dedicated to cultural policies for development, the internship turned to contracts and I ended up spending nearly three years working there.

It was while I was at UNESCO that the strands of my interests came together and I found my ‘thing’. I was there at an exciting moment, the organization had a mandate for implementing the Dayton Peace Accords in terms of its specialist areas – so cooperation between the countries of South East Europe on areas of culture, science, and education –, and the first drafts of what would become the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) were being hammered out. Perhaps because of my earlier experiences or because in Paris I stumbled into a community of ‘former Yugoslavs’ who became my friends I became particularly obsessed with what UNESCO was doing in the region. I did all the horse trading I could with my then boss so that in exchange for doing some dreary work I was sent to sit in on meetings between representatives  – ministers and ambassadors – of these countries and to read through the projects being developed by the Culture Sector in this regard. This is how I cam to learn about the project for the reconstruction of the Mostar bridge, among many others. It was that bridge, and the project to rebuild it, that became a pivotal moment.

On paper the project was everything that I had hoped for and thrilled me as here was a way to bring use culture, cultural heritage, as an instrument in peace-building and recovery. Not only did the project aim to rebuild the bridge itself as materially authentically as possible, but in doing so, and drawing on the strong bridging metaphor, it aimed to reconstruct the links between the communities of the town that had been severed by the war. The use of such a symbolic heritage site to motor peace and recovery through the celebration of its universal values was irresistibly seductive to me. Then I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Sarajevo to see how the reconstruction of the town’s multicultural and religious heritage was being rebuilt, to Mostar to see the final stages of the bridge’s reconstruction, and from there to Serbia and Belgrade to see how cultural heritage institutions were faring there.

What I found on the ground came to me as a rude awakening. In Sarajevo each of the reconstruction projects of the main sites of worship of the different religious groups had large signs posted at their entry thanking the funding bodies involved: for instance, the Orthodox church rebuilt with particular thanks to the Government of Greece, the Catholic Church rebuilt with particular thanks to the Governments of Poland and the Vatican, Mosques rebuilt with thanks to the governments of Indonesia and Turkey. They also had the logos of the international agencies involved be it the UN or the European Union. This struck me as a cementing rather than an erasure of the divisions that the war had deepened if not created. In Mostar I found the most divided town in the entire country including segregated schooling such that children had to take turns using the same school building in order not to be taught together, with two football teams, and with a festering resentment around who had been consulted and who had benefited from the reconstruction of the bridge.

From the conversations that I had on the ground, at best, the project for the reconstruction of the bridge had failed in its peace-building aims; at worst it had actually contributed to festering tensions and feelings of resentment. This was patently clear in the built landscape that emerged around the bridge with an enormous bell tower going up on one side of the river, and minarets on the other each filling the town’s sound-scape at regular intervals throughout the day in this mutually defiant clang. With this cacophony of impressions still ringing in my ears, I returned to UNESCO and told anyone who would listen about it. Of the various responses that I got the most constructive one was: we are doing the best that we can with good intentions but there is no research on this.

The idea of heritage has expanded tremendously since the 1972 World Heritage convention.   

In 2016 the University of Cambridge created a Lectureship in Heritage and the Politics of the Past based in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology which I now hold. This is testament to the growing recognition of the centrality of heritage to so many pressing issues facing society and the urgency of research on heritage. My aim is to use this Lectureship as a springboard to develop our work in three directions: 1) integrated teaching, 2) research synergies across disciplines, and 3) dialogue with communities of practice and policymaking.  

The graduate programme in heritage, developed by Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, here approached the subject from what is still a unique angle that has two core strands one focusing on the socio-politics of the past and another on the management of heritage - by which is meant the decisions, agents, and above all values that shape thinking and action. This backbone can then be complemented with additional options specifically dedicated to museums or to different aspect of archaeology.

Sherman, March 10th

Dearest Dacia,

I am very touched by your vivid personal and intellectual diary essay. Thank you for sharing as you are. Blaze away. Love what you are doing! I truly hope this experience will be valuable for you in human terms. Do not worry about it being too personal at this point. Go for it! You will refine it, and Nicole and her editors will refine it further.*

Some of what you have written has tugged at my own heart strings! Excuse me for this rambling, but one of the things I am trying to do as I age, is to remember my own background. Jerome knows this too well - he is reconstructing the first formal CV I really ever had! They are nonsense squibs of information, but the guts that lies behind them is revealing.

MOMA was also my playground went I traveled in 1955 by foot across the 59th Street Bridge from my tough housing project in Long Island City to visit the Donnell Library and I discovered MOMA across the street, and Picasso's /Guernica/! This at the advice of my wonderful junior high school social studies teacher Mrs. Witzling - teachers do have an impact! You have chosen a wonderful career!

The alleged "Good Fight" and the Spanish Civil War became one of my intellectual and human obsession. Still is, I'm about to read Paul Preston's /The Spanish Holocaust. /

Yeah, the passionate counterfactual of what would have happened if Hitler had only been opposed early, and spared the Spanish people, my family and millions of others. The nuanced complexity of politics and betrayal, Koestler Orwell. etc. Made me the radical centrist that I am. Immunized me against ideologies.

MOMA... they displayed/Guernica /isolated in one room, with his many sketches surrounding his ultimate brilliant canvas - and it led me into my first sensibility of how one might actually dare to create anything - that you could make "mistakes" that things evolved. That "editing" and patience was critical. I actually drew my own /Guernica/ - and what I thought was a fastidious copy - and I was convinced that there was a hidden elephant in the painting, and I had the silly audacity to try and get a letter to him via a publisher, thinking he had intended to somehow conjure up Hannibal Barca's crossing of the Alps. Never heard back of course. (Thinking of Barca FC - what "lightning" indeed!...an amazing classic game for the ages!! - They became my team and I passionately hated Real Madrid for their Francoist past!)

One of the first symposia I did outside of EPIIC, was when I was named Special Advisor for Undergraduate Intellectual Life at Tufts in 1986 (a bizarre title not of my choosing) was on the on the politics and culture of the Civil War , and I actually brought to Tufts, Rudolph Arnheim, the famed art historian whose book/, Guernica: The Genesis of A Painting,/ was so important to me as an undergraduate. It intellectually confirmed the creative process that I felt as a 12 year old!

So 1955 was also the time I went to see the extraordinary /Family of Man/ photographic exhibition with my parents - and that too totally stunned me. It was displayed in a meandering tunnel - and it began my love affair with photography!

Ah Lacan! Provocation! I too remember my frustrating intro psychology course at Johns Hopkins 1962? when what I thought was going to be psychology, given my introduction to Frankl by my Dad, turned out to be Skinnerian rat mazes. I actually was asked to participate in Milgram's experiment. I remember protesting to the Professor, Dr. James Deese - he understood my qualms and released me. An expert in learning cognition he co-authored the classic book - How to Study.

I am touched that EPIIC had the effect on you that it did. Loved your anecdote of Murray Gell-Mann's injunction. You got Nobel Laureate Advice! He told us, in your year'skeynote, 1995 - our tenth anniversary that:

/"Much mischief has been done in the world by trying to fit human beings into some neat scientific or mathematical idea, extrapolated beyond its validity. Nevertheless, it is worth making models of the future, but we have to regard them as 'prostheses for the imagination.' That's one of the theses emphasized here at EPIIC, and I couldn't be happier with this experiment in education." /Murray Gell-Mann Nobel Laureate in Physics; Founder, Santa Fe Institute.

Remember this!?
http://www.tuftsgloballeadership.org/1995-darwinism-and-artificial-intelligence

I just was in Santa Fe/Los Alamos for a nuclear conference linked to my Pugwashian revival efforts, and when I tried to see him, I sadly learned Murray is suffering from Alzheimers. Seize every day!

So proud to be working with you. So excited for this, and our future collaborations. Keep writing!

Dacia, March 11th

Dear Sherman,

Thank you so much for your own thoughtful and generous response.

Yes, Guernica made an equally important early impression on me when it was there in MOMA. The way it was displayed on its own on the wall and with the dramatic lighting turned it into almost a sacred space. How wonderful that you saw and elephant in there! The best recent work on the painting that I know of is Gijs van Hensbergen's "Guernica. The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon".

Paul Preston was one of my PhD examiners. We met at a conference marking 70 years since the start of the war in July 2006, I didn't dare speak to him as I was in the first year of my PhD and was in awe of him but we coincided at a pub on the first night of the conference. He is extraordinarily generous with his time and support of young scholars, especially considering what a prolific writer he is and how much in demand from the press, in Spain especially. In December I took Lyra to London and had lunch with Paul and Carmen Negrin (the grand-daughter of the last President of the Spanish Republic whom I had coincided with at UNESCO where we became friends). Being her usual social and adventurous self Lyra spent much of the time rearranging chairs in the restaurant and being busy-busy with people at other tables who all commented on her lovely grandparents - imagine! Luckily they both have grandchildren and were very sweet with her. Carmen still lives in Paris and the main topic of conversation revolved around concerns with the up-coming French elections. I have read parts of "The Spanish Holocaust", I can't quite bring myself to read it all yet, but have found myself in the surreal situations of defending Paul and his choice of the word in numerous public debates; having to explain, as he states from the onset, that the choice of words is in part to emphasize that the Spanish war was the start of what was to come, not a separate episode and thus has to be understood in the continuum of atrocities that was the Holocaust, and in part to highlight the ambitions of extermination, the ideology of racial purity, the scale of the violence that was waged in Spain.

My counter-factual has always been more along the lines of what would have happened if the French, Malreaux, had kept their word and the Allies had ousted Franco from power but by the end of the the Second World War the fear of the Soviet Union and communism was too rife I suppose; a weak fascist dictatorship was seen as less of a threat than a leftist democracy.

Yes, I've always preferred Barca over Real Madrid for the same reason, especially when Guardiola was there.

I quite like the "Special Advisor for Undergraduate Intellectual Life" even if it sounds like something out of "A Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

The VII Foundation and The Peace Project both look amazing. I see that Lebanon is tbc, do you need any contacts there? I know this fantastic kick-ass woman, Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, who trained as an archaeologist but has been working as a journalist for the past twenty years or so covering Iraq, Syria... She also set up an NGO to try and reconnect children - Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian - with their heritage. We met ten years ago at a conference in London where Donny George spoke about his experience as Director of the National Museum of Iraq during the 2003 invasion, we then coincided at the first meeting on the International Committee of the Blue Shield (the Hague Convention's attempt at establishing a Red Cross for culture) in Seoul of all places. [Did you mention that you were going to South Korea, my former student and current friend there is Hyun Kyung Lee (http://snu-kr.academia.edu/HLee).] You can tell Gary of my conversation with Marcus
Bleasdale by all means, not quite formal plans yet, I promised him that I'd sit down and write out a revised plan based on our conversation and send it to him once term was over and I had a chance to catch my breath. I also have to do this for the Development Officer here who wants to put something together to present to the Fellows, the Master is Roger Mosey, soonish.

Yes, it was all Skinner in Tufts in 1993 also, with SPSS thrown in. My most memorable moment from that failed course of study was when my professor in social psychology said, in the very first lecture and in a deadpan tone: De-nile isn't just a river in Africa!

I had forgotten that 'prostheses for the imagination', wonderful.

Yes, I absolutely remember that Darwinism and Artificial Life session, Dennett, Minsky, and Mazlish in particular made impressions on me. One for his God-like appearance, the other for his Frankenstein-esque persona, and the third for his kindness. But I also still remember the debate and the images that Minsky showed of algorithms where different shapes evolved through competition and cooperation. I actually requested a meeting with Dennett and took my existential crisis about psychology to him but when he heard that I already had a major in IR he said not to worry and do whatever I wanted with the rest, so I combined philosophy and art history instead and took lots of classes with Robert Devigne because they were so much fun.

So sorry to hear about Murray Gell-Mann, I remember our conversation quite vividly still, he was grumpy because there had been some mix up about picking him up from the airport and he had been waiting around for a long time so he arrived late as we were all having dinner, you walked in with him in his huff, saw me sitting by myself and placed him in front of me, before his backside even hit the chair he was looking at my name-tag and asking why I was named after an ancient province of Romania - or something along those lines. The look of surprise on my face must have so pleased him - it was the first time in my life that a stranger recognised the origins of my name - that he instantly became jolly and told me all about how inspiring his wife's poetry was to his astrophysics thinking and how wonderful it was to, at his age, have a young son even if everyone at nursery thought he was the grandfather.

Yes, I caught the booth on re-reading, not the worst of my errors by any means, past or yet to come.

I am going to try to finish the biographical writing in the next hour and send that along to you so that we can use it as a base for going in what ever direction you want to take the conversation. I've gotten as far as the PhD in Cambridge but just have to run through the ten years since then.

Sherman, March 11th

Dear D! Running late. Wonderful serendipitous stuff. Will respond to your points later - Just enuf time to say how deeply appreciative I am that I found you again! Fun to both reminisce and move the ball of life forward towards what end I am not certain! I recall that Minsky opened up the AI workshop with this sentence "Before we begin, can we all agree that death is a waste of time" Deadpanned it - serious as heck. Went on to publish his remarks in Scientific American on the scientific basis for immortality! I had the temerity to ask him where lust factored into the equation.

Good thinking! We are going to exceed the word limit by thousands of words - I do not fear that, but I am concerned for your time!! Unless this is a wonderful exercise for you - tighten up the bio - *though I LOVE reading it* and get to the "scholarly" meat.

Sherman, March 13th

My weekend unexpectedly got away from me - in a good way - family time. My Terezin reflection will have to wait. Have not contacted Gary yet either. Uggh!! Will do so.

I hope you know that I love what you have been writing- doing! Nothing "generous" in my response - simply put - you are admirable.

Amazing that Picasso's Guernica was woven into both our lives. Yeah (Mal)raux...So much to think about together.

Bruce Mazlish has sadly passed away - he was the husband of Neva Goodwin, a good friend, and one of David Rockefeller's daughters. She is an environmental economist - "externalities" expert... Founder of GDAE at Tufts - Suing Exxon - Life is so ironic at times. ...

Looking forward to your penultimate? version.

Sherman, April 4th

Here it is!

It is great to see you in print here - given the importance of what you do, and who you are, I am very pleased to have done this with you! And it appears the EuropeNow is getting the recognition it deserves. See below from Nicole.

Love to think next about whatever you and Marcus conjure up - and the "PNDPish vision you have. Marcus's work was a core part of our exhibition IGL "Questions without Answers" exhibition celebrating 25th Anniversary effort I never met him, but respect his work greatly!

And yes to a symposium forum on these issues at Selwyn in the years ahead would be very gratifying to assist you with.

For Convisero I am thinking of reprinting the original larger interview with your permission. Please review that, and might I include the sentences about EPIIC's impact? And your Mostar picture as well?

Dacia, April 4th

Great, thank you. I hope it helps us to rally some support in terms of raising funds for the heritage research centre.

I'm just getting a first draft of the proposal for Selwyn together to send to the development officer and then we'll see how to transform it into a project that is meaningful to us (Marcus and I) and attractive/feasible to the College.

For the Convisero piece, perhaps the long version of the interview/conversation was a bit too personal - it was largely intended as a catch up with you. But of course you are welcome to include the part about EPIIC's impact and the picture from Mostar.

The Published Interview

In this interview, Dr. Viejo-Rose talks about disputed memory and the socio-politics of the past, explaining why she is deeply concerned with how “cultural heritage is used and abused during armed conflicts and in their aftermath, to divide, exclude, and intimidate.”

Unravelling contested histories, probing the complexity and contradictions of the politics of remembrance, and the contested material and psychological landscapes of our lives, Dacia is committed to examining “ways of ‘disarming’ heritage, so that it can be a tool for constructive dialogue, dignity, and respect.”

Dacia grew up in Spain in the waning days of the Franco regime. Her father, a journalist engaged in clandestine resistance against Franco, eventually emigrated to the US and became a translator for the UN. Her mother earned her doctorate in art history. Dacia’s work is heavily imbued with both a profound sense of social justice and responsibility and respect for the arts, history, museums, and heritage, reflecting, as she acknowledges, her efforts “to do justice to and pay her respects to the interests of both her parents.”

Upon graduating college, while interning at the United Nations Department for Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva, she was exposed to the aftermath of the war in Bosnia, the fallout of the Rwandan genocide, and disastrous floods in Cambodia; an experience that sparked her interest in the violence and aftermaths of man-made and natural disasters.

Subsequently, at UNESCO, she observed the diplomatic wrangling and eventual drafting of what would become the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005).

Bringing these two worlds of crisis and culture together, Dacia’s on-going research interests lie at the nexus between cultural heritage and the politics of the past. She sensitively understands the fluidity, complexity and contradictions of her subject, describing how “heritage has come to resemble a protean creature.”

EuropeNow What drew you to this pursuit?

Dacia Viejo-Rose It was while I was at UNESCO that the strands of my interests came together and I found my “thing.” I was there at an exciting moment; the organization had a mandate for implementing the Dayton Peace Accords in terms of its specialist areas—so, cooperation between the countries of the former Yugoslavia on areas of culture, science, and education—and the first drafts of what would become the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) were being hammered out. In relation to the first of these, I was able to sit in on meetings between representatives—ministers and ambassadors—of these countries, and to read through the projects being developed by the Culture Sector in this regard. This is how I came to learn about the project for the reconstruction of the Mostar Bridge, among many others. It was that bridge, and the project to rebuild it, that became a pivotal moment for me

On paper, the project was everything that I had hoped for and thrilled me, as here was a way to use culture, cultural heritage, as an instrument in peace-building and recovery. Not only did the project aim to rebuild the bridge itself as materially authentically as possible, but in doing so, and drawing on the strong bridging metaphor, it aimed to reconstruct the links between the communities of the town that had been severed by the war. The use of such a symbolic heritage site to motor peace and recovery through the celebration of its universal values was irresistibly seductive to me. Then, I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Sarajevo to see how the reconstruction of the town’s multicultural and religious heritage was being rebuilt, to Mostar to see the final stages of the bridge’s reconstruction, and from there to Serbia and Belgrade to see how cultural heritage institutions were faring there. What I found on the ground came to me as a rude awakening.

In Mostar, I found the most divided town in the entire country, including segregated schooling such that children had to take turns using the same school building in order not to be taught together, with two football teams, and with a festering resentment around who had been consulted and who had benefited from the reconstruction of the bridge. From the conversations that I had on the ground, at best, the project for the reconstruction of the bridge had failed in its peace-building aims; at worst it had actually contributed to festering tensions and feelings of resentment. This was patently clear in the built landscape that emerged around the bridge with an enormous bell tower going up on one side of the river, and minarets on the other, competing visually, but also each filling the town’s sound-scape at regular intervals throughout the day in a mutually defiant clang-call. With this cacophony of impressions still ringing in my ears, I returned to UNESCO and told anyone who would listen about it. Of the various responses that I got, the most constructive one was this: we are doing the best that we can with good intentions but there is no research on this. So I left to do some of that missing research.

In this bout of research, I worked on how cultural heritage was being used in reconstruction and recovery projects in Bosnia with the aim of seeing what worked or not and why. This research convinced me that one of the problems with the way that the protection of cultural heritage was being approached was the assumption made that it has an inherently positive dimension—inclusive, celebratory of universal values, rallying and inducing of social cohesion – and as such a natural peace builder. But this assumption, upheld by the utopian vision and ideals of international heritage bodies and their attractive discourse, does not pan out on the ground. Cultural heritage can just as easily be used to exclude, intimidate, divide, and legitimize factional and fundamentalist aims. This realization lead to a further focus in my research on the (ab)uses of cultural heritage, and this began with trying to get a better understanding of the functions of heritage beyond its aesthetic or historic value.

EuropeNow So, what is heritage?

Dacia Viejo-Rose The idea of heritage has expanded tremendously since the 1972 World Heritage Convention. There, you see a categorization of heritage sites, with the natural and cultural sites running in parallel: monuments, groups of monuments, and monuments in a context/landscape. But since then, our understanding of heritage has been transformed; heritage has gone from being celebrated for its “thingyness” and historicity, and the authenticity and value thereof, to being appreciated as a process that uses the past as a resource to construct meaning in the present (Smith, Harvey). There is an alliteration of Ps that illustrates this semantic evolution: from heritage as property, to place, product, performance, project, and finally process. At the center of this transformation has been the shift in focus from protection, to interpretation.

On a practical level, heritage is increasingly asked to be delivered by policy-makers and politicians keen to justify their public spending, and by practitioners angling for recognition and resources for their work. As a result, high expectations have been put on heritage to contribute quantifiable outcomes to a vast field of issues, including urban renewal, job creation, sustainable development, peace and reconciliation, climate change mitigation, and tourist industry growth. These often unrealistic expectations have led to frustration among stakeholders, causing tensions between local communities, national governments, the private sector, and international organizations.

The result has been disillusionment with heritage as a cure-all that has resulted in the centrality of heritage to some of the very core issues being faced today being overlooked. For heritage is central to understanding some of the most pressing societal issues: responses to and consequences of crisis moments, the rise of fundamentalism and xenophobia, the future of cities, the increasingly fragile social contract, tensions between universal and local visions, developing strategies towards climate change, unpacking the ever more numerous claims over historical injustices, and rebuilding fractured societies.

EuropeNow Tell me more about how you understand the relationship between cultural heritage and violence.

Dacia Viejo-Rose The destruction of cultural heritage during armed conflicts has recently received much media attention. The explanations most often heard for what motivates these actions are along the lines of “hitting the other where it most hurts” or “terrorizing.” The difficulty in discovering the actual motivations is to a large extent the result of the dense nebulous mass of propaganda. And while it is possible to find responsibilities for those acts of destruction, even find the person or persons who ultimately gave the order and/or carried out the destruction, this will not necessarily reveal the motivations. In order to discover the dynamics that underlie this destruction, we have to develop more sophisticated analytical tools. And there is a great urgency to do this. For one thing, the research has shown clearly that cultural heritage, its destruction and subsequent reconstruction, plays a part in cycles of conflict; in the same way it can foster dialogue and a sense of community, it can also perpetuate violence, fomenting a sense of alienation, exacerbating exclusion, and accentuating rifts that prolong narratives of injustice and feed desires for retribution. To this end, I have developed a typology of destruction and a protocol setting out key dynamics of reconstruction (Viejo Rose 2013).

One of the issues that concerns me the most is the violent dimensions of cultural heritage, as I found in my PhD research on Spain and earlier on Bosnia, cultural heritage can be used as an instrument of war to intimidate, exclude, and wound, that is to say it can be weaponized. What I also learned in this research is that the post-war reconstruction of cultural heritage can set off a ticking time bomb when that reconstruction cements divisions and perpetuates a sense of injustice. The question then is how to disarm heritage, how to diffuse that bomb. The direction that I am moving towards in this is one of multivocality and polysemy. This means undoing the powerful, yet false perception that a heritage site represents one group, one narrative, one meaning, evokes one emotion. Undoing its singularity. Armatya Sen (2006) and Amin Maalouf (1998/2000) have both written powerfully and convincingly about the violence of singular identities that do not allow for our multiple selves. What I have found is that in the same way that this multiplicity makes individuals more resilient, if one of their multiple identities is threatened they have others to fall back on so that threat is not mortal and can be defended against but not to the death as it were, it also makes heritage sites more resilient.

EuropeNow Tell me about your teaching.

Dacia Viejo-Rose The Cambridge University graduate programe in heritage, situated within the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, was created and developed by Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and was one of the first in the world. It approaches the subject from a unique angle that has two core strands, one focusing on the socio-politics of the past and another on the management of heritage—by which is meant the decisions, agents, and above all values that shape thinking and action. This structure can then be complemented with additional options dedicated to museums or to different specializations within archaeology.

Currently we are embarking on a revamp of the MPhils offered at the Department. For heritage this will mean new options including a course to be entitled “Special Topics in Heritage Studies,” which will be seminar-based with rotating themes drawing on the expertise of researchers here. The heritage research community here works on a vast range of topics, ranging from the use of digital printing and virtual technology for reaching wider audiences and testing notions of authenticity, to exploring the ideological underpinnings of the way we value heritage and project it into the future. We are increasingly moving towards developing integrated teaching that offers practical experience, various ways of learning and being assessed, as well as a solid grounding in critical thinking.

I have also been charged with developing an undergraduate strand with heritage elements to be called “The Present in the Past,” which will be directed at third year undergraduate students. The aim of this is to get undergraduates thinking about the impact of their work and their responsibility towards how it might be interpreted. So, for instance, how projects investigating the ways in which societies responded in the aftermath of natural disasters over a thousand years ago might help inform mitigation and adaptation strategies today.

In 2016, the University of Cambridge created the first ever Lectureship in Heritage and the Politics of the Past based in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology that I now hold. This is a testimony to the growing recognition of the centrality of heritage to so many pressing issues facing society and the urgency of research on heritage. In terms of teaching, my aim is to use this Lectureship as a springboard to develop integrated teaching that stimulates research synergies across disciplines, and includes a strong practical dimension in the shape of collaborations with communities of practice and policymakers.

EuropeNow What are you researching now?

Dacia Viejo-Rose My current line of research, building on the work that I have done on violence, conflict and its aftermath, is three-pronged: risk, reparations, and displacement.

Risk interests me for two reasons. First, because during crises of existential risk we turn to cultural heritage in very explicit ways, as though it were an anchor, providing a certain grounding and security, why is this the case? Second, because the idea of protection is at the core of much heritage policy and practice and my argument is that the other side of that coin is a sense of endangerment and threat: protection from what exactly? These two dimensions to the heritage and risk relationship are of course linked, for it is largely protection from disappearing, which reverts to the sense of existential risk. Since cultural heritage cannot be understood from any one angle, building a holistic approach is, to me, the single most important factor in designing methods of risk assessments that will actually provide a full picture. To this end. I am collaborating with colleagues to develop tools for assessment with which to, through an interdisciplinary lens, chart out socio-cultural ecosystems and help make decisions that are as informed as possible.

On the reparations side of things, I am working together with colleagues from the Law Faculty at Queen’s University Belfast to explore what form reparations to the destruction of cultural heritage might take. The trial of Al Mahdi at the International Criminal Court has sparked this initiative—this case has been especially important, as it is the first time that someone has been tried in an international court only for crimes against culture. Now that he has been found guilty of the destruction of shrines in Timbuktu, the challenge is to come up with reparations. Some precedent exists for this type of reparation, but it is often resolved in monetary terms and that is not a very satisfying solution when the value of heritage is understood to lie primarily in its network of meanings, memories, emotions, narratives, and references. The results of this research will be important for informing not only what happens in the case of Mali, but also in Syria.

My interest in displacement stems in part from my own background of growing in different places, partly from my own students increasingly responding to the question “where are you from?” with narratives of movement, and from witnessing the impact of war and natural disasters on populations forced to leave their homes and familiar environments. At the heart of this is what I see as another shift in the focus of heritage narratives: from roots to routes. In this shift, the intangible dimensions of heritage naturally come to the fore because it is the heritage that people take with them—the recipes, music, stories, poems, languages, celebrations, dances. The first loss that many Syrian refugees refer to when asked what they most miss of their culture and heritage, what they most mourn, it is not the arc at Palmyra that comes to mind but rather the tradition of regular social gatherings amongst neighbours, friends, and family.

EuropeNow What do you see as the challenges for action?

Dacia Viejo-Rose One of the biggest challenges for this type of academic research is how then to communicate results so that assumptions are dismantled, policies begin to change, and practice on the ground is improved. So far I have tried to do this by feeding the results of this research back to UNESCO and participating in the meetings of the International Committee of the Blue Shield (an instrument of the 1964 Hague Convention which seeks to, as far as possible given the differences, be a Red Cross for culture).

My experience working in the field and presenting at numerous venues indicates that there is an urgent need for strong collaborative connections linking researchers, cultural heritage managers, civil society, teachers, policy-makers, and politicians together with the military, police, and security forces. These professional networks have to be international so that they are firmly in place and can be activated in potentially precarious situations, such as those in Mali and Egypt. Initiative on the part of ICOM, ICCROM, ICOMOS, and the Blue Shield national commissions represent important efforts towards this end; however, we need to deepen these avenues of communication so that they are built into stable working relationships and do not only get remembered in moments of crisis when mitigating damage. Not preventing it is the only option remaining.

My aim is to develop a regular mechanism for communication between the various communities of practice. I absolutely want to do what I can to avoid the mistakes made in the post-war reconstruction of cultural heritage in Bosnia being repeated in Syria.

EuropeNow And the challenges for scholarship and teaching?

Dacia Viejo-Rose The intellectual and academic challenges lie in reining in the concept, grounding it and continuing to develop methodological tools (Sørensen and Carman) that are specifically tailored to the needs of this type of research that often involves a combination of disciplinary approaches that include the legal, historical, ethnographic, sociological and psychological.

In addition to the need for deepening our understanding of these processes, there are two more avenues that require further exploration. The first is the imperative of developing a greater critical awareness and identifying exactly when cultural heritage is being instrumentalized symbolically and rhetorically at different stages in armed conflicts: run-up, fighting, negotiations, post-conflict reconstruction. The second is the need to fully appreciate the implications of the realization that armed conflict not only destroys cultural heritage; it also has deep transformative effects on it as sites are interfered with and re-interpreted or become the location of critical events in the fighting. Guernica, Coventry, Dresden, and Hiroshima, are but a few examples; all of these cities became signifiers for new sets of symbolic meanings after their respective bombings.

Dacia Viejo-Rose is a Lecturer in Heritage and the Politics of the Past at the University of Cambridge, where she takes part in coordinating the postgraduate degree program in heritage and museum studies. She is also a Director of Studies in Archaeology at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  She was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2012–2014) based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge on a research project exploring cultural violence and violence against culture, and a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict – EU FP7 (CRIC) project. She is the author of Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (SAP, 2011) and co-edited War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place (CUP, 2015) as well as numerous articles.

This interview with Dacia Viejo-Rose is part of our special feature Memory and the Politics of the Past: New Research and Innovation.
Read Dacia’s syllabus for Archaeological Heritage and Museums here.

References:

Harvey, D.C. 2008. “The History of Heritage,” in The Ashgate Companion to Heritage and Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp 19-36.

Maalouf, Amin. 2003. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. London: Penguin Books.

Sen, Amartya. 2007. Identity and Violence. London: Penguin Books.

Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge.

Sørensen & Carman. 2009. Heritage Studies. Methods and Approaches. Abingdon: Routledge.

Viejo Rose, D. 2013. “Reconstructing Heritage in the Aftermath of Civil War: Re-visioning the Nation and the Implications of International Involvement” in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, vol. 7/ issue 2, 2013, pp.125-148.

Mike Niconchuk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EuropeNow What are you trying to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EuropeNow Is healing possible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

[3] Ehlers, A., Hackmann, A., Steil, R., Clohessy, S., Wenninger, K., & Winter, H. (2002). The nature of intrusive memories after trauma: The warning signal hypothesis. Behaviour research and therapy, 40(9), 995-1002.

[4] Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine, 48(10), 1449-1462.

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

[7] Kawachi, I., & Berkman, L. F. (2001). Social ties and mental health. Journal of Urban health, 78(3), 458-467.
[6] van Ommeren, M., Saxena, S. and Saraceno, B. 2005. Mental and social health during and after acute emergencies: emerging consensus?. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 83(1), pp. 71-75.

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

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

[10] Hayes, J. P., VanElzakker, M. B., & Shin, L. M. (2012). Emotion and cognition interactions in PTSD: a review of neurocognitive and neuroimaging studies. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 6, 89.

[11] Breslau, N., Davis, G. C., Andreski, P., & Peterson, E. (1991). Traumatic events and posttraumatic stress disorder in an urban population of young adults. Archives of general psychiatry, 48(3), 216-222.

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

Trump, Rabin, and the Danger of Indecency

My first public “debut” as the director of the Trebuchet occurred when I published this Boston Globe op-eded, decrying the dangerous tone and warning of the impact of Roy Cohn and Trump’s candidacy.

OUR FRAUGHT ELECTORAL contest with its vicious personalized attacks is devoid of decency.

This reached a fever pitch recently at the Republican National Convention where Hillary Clinton was condemned as a murderer and a traitor, deserving of execution. Supporters of Donald Trump, recently joined by elements of Bernie Sanders’ supporters in Philadelphia, insisted that Clinton be “locked up.” This month, Trump abandoned any pretense: “She’s the devil,” he told a crowd in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, a video of Trump supporters spewing violent profanities has raced across the internet.

As the final 100 days tick away, it’s important to appreciate the possible consequences of this type of toxic discourse. It’s sobering and instructive to look to another pivotal political moment, in another fractious and imperfect democracy, Israel.

In September 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government announced its intention to fulfill the Oslo II agreements with the Palestinian Authority, giving the Palestinian Authority control of West Bank cities. It provoked vehement protests over whether this would compromise Israeli security and whether the ceding of territory many considered sacred betrayed core religious imperatives. The protests were marked by a drum beat of venomous personal attacks directed at Rabin. Zealous and frenzied protesters chanted “Death to Rabin” and brandished posters of him in the cross-hairs of a rifle scope. They called Rabin a murderer and depicted him in a Nazi uniform.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition Likud party and Rabin’s main political rival, vigorously denounced the Oslo initiatives at a series of large rallies, which some warned him would lead to violence.

On Nov. 4, Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Orthodox Jewish Israeli law student, shot and killed Rabin in a Tel Aviv parking lot. Rabin had just finished addressing a rally. Inspired by his extreme religious beliefs, and reinforced by a zeitgeist of hatred and personal denigration, Amir was convinced that Rabin’s extrajudicial killing was justified.

Before his death, Rabin accused Netanyahu of incitement, but Netanyahu rejected appeals to restrain his supporters. Fearing he’d lose their support, Netanyahu refused to repudiate their invective and offered no denunciation of their violent speech and actions. He never distanced himself directly and only offered a mild rebuke of just “let’s defeat” him.

Trump’s comments, in the face of his supporters charging Clinton with treason and shouts to “lock her up,” are eerily reminiscent of Netanyahu’s pallid arm’s length comments in the face of his supporters’ rage. Trump, too, said in response, “let’s defeat” her, but he never denounced the extreme language, including the comments to execute his political opponent.

Incendiary language cannot only provoke and provide rationalization for extreme outcomes, but it also has less dramatic, long-term deleterious impact. It diminishes respect and trust, destroying efforts at compromise. It fosters deep resentments and separates us, subverting the search for common ground and any hope of consensus.

We are currently witnessing the cynical stoking of an ugly environment of hatred and fear. Dog whistle disavowals of the Ku Klux Klan and white power endorsements, the refusal to reject anti-Semitic symbols, and enduring calls for expulsions of millions of people, that at minimum would demand extraordinary invasive methods.

During the anti-Communist hunts of the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious chief counsel was Roy Cohn. He later became Trump’s valued personal counsel for many years. Trump has said of Cohn, “If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy.” He also praised Cohn. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” he told journalist Timothy O’Brien. “He brutalized for you.” Trump seems to have absorbed Cohn’s methods.

In 1954, during a heated exchange with Senator McCarthy, Joseph Welch, the Army’s chief counsel, effectively confronted the senator and exposed his nature as a demagogic bully when he famously asked, “Have you no sense of decency?”

Today, we urgently need to honor that concept, to control the crudeness, cruelty, and reckless language of the extremists in our midst. We need to deny the politics of fear-mongering that banishes reason and civility for political advantage.

And we may need to ask again and again, “Have you no sense of decency?” And then, insist on it.