Ron Haviv

Ron Haviv is an award-winning photojournalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and co-founder of the photo agency VII, who has been dedicated to documenting conflict and raising awareness about human rights issues around the globe.

In the last three decades, Ron has covered more than twenty-five conflicts and worked in over one hundred countries. He has produced an unflinching record of the injustices of war and his photography has had singular impact. His work in the Balkans, which spanned over a decade of conflict, was used as evidence to indict and convict war criminals at the international tribunal in The Hague. President George H.W. Bush cited Haviv’s chilling photographs documenting paramilitary violence in Panama as one of the reasons for the 1989 American intervention. 

His work has been featured in numerous museums and galleries, including the Louvre, the United Nations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His photographs are in the collections at The Houston Museum of Fine Arts and George Eastman House amongst others as well as numerous private collections.

His film work has appeared on PBS’s Need to Know and Frontline as well as NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight. He has directed short films for ESPN, People Magazine, Doctors Without Borders, Asia Society and American Photography. Haviv’s music videos have been on the MTV Europe and Sol Musica channels in Spain.

His first photography book, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, was called “One of the best non-fiction books of the year,” by The Los Angeles Times and “A chilling but vastly important record of a people’s suffering,” by Newsweek. His two other monographs are Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul and Haiti: 12 January 2010.

Ron has helped create multi-platform projects for Doctors Without Borders' DR Congo: The Forgotten War and Starved for Attention, Unicef's Child Alert for Darfur and Sri Lanka and the International Committee of the Red Cross's World at War.

Ron is the central character in six documentary films, including National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk, in which he speaks about the dangers of combat photography, including his numerous detentions and close calls. He has provided expert analysis and commentary on ABC World News, BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America and The Charlie Rose Show.

Ron has been an inspiration to our students for years. As part of my last year on The Future of Europe, commemorating 10 years of VII and IGL collaboration and the 30th anniversary of the Institute for Global Leadership he joined he colleagues, the world’s leading photojournalists from the VII Photo Agency to explore their coverage of the continuing migration and merging of societies and cultures through a series of presentations and panels featuring recent work from the Syrian refugee crisis and discussion with academic experts followed by a day of hands on workshops.

For the Institute’s 20th Anniversary Ron help orchestrate and participated in:

Questions without Answers
A Photographic Prism of World Events, 1985-2010
Photographs by VII

Questions without Answers, a major exhibition co-organized by the Tufts University Art Gallery, Tufts’ Institute for Global Leadership, and VII Photo Agency, presents a wide range of photographs that portray defining moments of the post-Cold War period and their aftermaths. From the Fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11, 2001, to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and Congo, Chechnya and Gaza, among other conflict zones, this timely, landmark exhibition features 125 photographs by 16 photographers affiliated with the renowned VII Photo Agency, newly printed for the occasion, many displayed for the first time. Also included is one Oscar-nominated short docudrama by Antonin Kratochvil.

Responding to the earthquake which devastated Haiti in 2010 we organized this effort with Ron on behalf of Partners in Health who have an extraordinary history of aiding the people of Haiti.

By Kanupriya Tewari

13 January 2010. As darkness envelops Haiti’s people, a community’s songs filter through the air. Moving though the capital city, a photographer comes upon a small medical clinic tucked within the shadows. The bodies of the dead are piled outside the health care center. A number of people are trying to sleep in the building’s congested courtyard despite their evident pain—they lack medicine, food, and supplies. Drawing closer, amidst the dirt and debris, a Haitian woman wrapped in a blue bed sheet extends an outstretched hand in a desperate plea for help. Her pain touches the photographer, who immortalizes the scene.

“Great photography demands questioning,” says Sherman Teichman, Director of the Institute of Global Leadership (IGL) at Tufts University.

From the small inquiries—who is this woman? What has she suffered? —to the larger, more thought provoking questions—where are the medical supplies? What can I do to help her? How can I lift her up and onto her feet once again?

This philosophy, one that pushes people to question the causes behind images, guided collaborators from the IGL and de.Mo Design Company as they compiled photographs and words for Haiti: 12 January 2010, a striking sixteen page folio publication. More than six months after the Haitian earthquake, as media attention slowly shifts to new stories, it becomes easier for people to forget about Haiti’s suffering. This folio provides a needed reminder; it compels people to continue to think about Haiti.

Because all proceeds from folio sales are donated to Partners In Health (PIH), people who purchase the work are not only continuing to think about Haiti, they’re committing to action. Get the folio of Haiti: 12 January 2010.

Photographer Ron Haviv, a co-founder of VII Photo Agency humanizes Haiti’s tragedy through images like the woman in blue reaching out for help. “They allow you to absorb the overwhelming aspect of the disaster as well as relate on a one-on-one level,” says Haviv. “Images are potent because they are immediate and urgent, but they also require context,” Teichman adds. Simon Winchester’s introduction, “Catastrophe, Nature, God and Understanding” provides context, shaping the folio’s powerful narrative.

Though this innovative effort was initiated immediately in response to the earthquake in Haiti, the story behind the folio’s production actually precedes the disaster.

Human rights are central to the IGL’s mission. The Institute challenges students to look beyond traditional humanitarian models that focus on giving impoverished people only food, water, and shelter, and instead to explore the broader social frameworks behind poverty. With this focus on global inequities and iniquities, each year the IGL’s EPIIC (Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship) program explores one central global dilemma: a broad theme that provides the intellectual space for students to explore complex issues. In 2004-2005, EPIIC chose the theme of Oil and Water—it was in December 2004 that the earthquake in the Indian Ocean struck, triggering a tsunami that killed around 230,000 in the region. The parallelism between the theme and tragedy were evident, as were the effects of the disaster itself, leading the IGL to leap into action and produce its first collaborative folio. As the Institute was preparing for this year’s 2010 EPIIC program, Haiti was leveled by a devastating earthquake. The collaborators reacted with a similar sense of urgency.

Ron Haviv landed in Haiti less than 24 hours after the quake. The folio offers a visual testimony to Haviv’s experience; it captures the trauma of January 12 in sixteen unbound posters (36 x 54cm each). Its unique format, as designed by Giorgio Baravalle, founder of the de.Mo Design Company, allows the viewer to absorb each page individually or to hang the entire project on the wall, creating a powerful document that spotlights the earthquake’s aftermath. It is ideally suited for galleries, high schools and universities, and people with a strong appreciation for world-class photojournalism or design.

Choosing PIH as the organization to receive all of the folio’s proceeds demonstrates the collaborators’ commitment to maintaining a long-term partnership with PIH—in 2002, the IGL began this partnership by awarding its Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award to PIH co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer. Part of the award entails that the Institute continue to partner with its recipient over the coming years. “We chose PIH because we have tremendous admiration for the fact that PIH works with its sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, in Haiti in such a sustainable way, and has been committed to Haiti for so long,” Teichman adds.

Understanding that the Haitian earthquake is a long-term crisis, the collaborators want to focus their fundraising efforts on an area where less attention might be centered. Folio proceeds support PIH’s mental health and psychosocial services initiatives, which attend to the Haitian people’s inner, invisible wounds.

This unique picture essay ultimately compels us to question, and to remember January 12, even as time elapses. As Teichman says, it is “of-the-moment, yet also timeless.” 

Ron is currently photographing the war in Ukraine. We will be providing periodic updates of his work.

• March 2, 2022: “A Brief History of Ukrainian Heroes.”

Sarah Arkin

Sarah Arkin is the Policy Director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democratic staff, where she also covers the Middle East and North Africa. Previously, she was Foreign Policy Advisor to U.S. Senator Bob Menendez. Prior to that she was U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Senior Policy Advisor, covering foreign policy and associate staff of the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee. Previously, Sarah served in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, covering a range of issues including human rights, religious freedom and women's rights. Sarah worked as a research assistant at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University and the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University and received a Boren National Security Education Program Fellowship in Cairo in 2012 studying Arab and researching the effectiveness of civic education initiatives in post-Mubarak Egypt

Before all that, she worked as a journalist and photojournalist, winning a Virginia Press Association Breaking News Award in 2009. She has lived in Israel, Kenya, and Uganda. She has a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from Tufts University and an M.A. in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University.

At the Institute she was a wonderful member of the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) program: Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. 

She was one of the talented founders of EXPOSURE, our Institute project for documentary studies dedicated to the advancement of human rights.

Peter Droege

Peter Droege directs the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development (LISD), the global advisory and research organization for the rapid transition to regenerative communities, cities, regions and infrastructure. Professor Droege serves also as President of Eurosolar, the European Association for Renewable Energy, and as General Chairman, World Council for Renewable Energy. A recipient of the European Solar Prize in Education, Peter initiated the Chair for Sustainable Spatial Development at the University of Liechtenstein while holding a Conjoint Professorship at the Faculty of Engineering, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Newcastle, Australia. An inaugural member of the Zayed Future Energy Prize jury and Expert Commissioner for Cities and Climate Change for the World Future Council he also served on the Steering Committee of the Urban Climate Change Research Network hosted at Columbia University's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and CUNY. He has taught and researched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and Planning, at Tokyo University as Endowed Chair in Urban Engineering at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, and as Lend Lease Chair of Urban Design at the University of Sydney. Professor Droege has authored or edited numerous books, including Intelligent Environments (Elsevier 1997), Urban Energy Transition, 1st Edition: From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power (Elsevier 2008), The Renewable City (Wiley 2006), 100% Renewable - Energy Autonomy in Action (Earthscan 2009 and Routledge 2014), Climate Design (ORO Editions 2010), Regenerative Region: Lake Constance Energy and Climate Atlas (oekom verlag 2014), co-editing Regenerative Räume (oekom verlag 2017).

I have known Peter for decades, initially attracted to discourse on ideas and on martial arts (he’s a black belt in judo). We worked together in the early 1980’s in a symposium on Secrecy and Disclosure. He was the Institute’s outward bound guest and INSPIRE fellow on the EPIIC’s 20th anniversary year, on “Oil and Water.” While in residence at the institute, he wrote his first book “Renewable City: A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution” in 04’. The dedication of that book reads as follows “this guide is dedicated to all who work on a more advanced human habitat - as a means of sustaining human life fairly, without eroding this fragile earth’s natural support basis on which it is founded, but in helping nurture it back from the brink.” Peter was the first person to really help me understand the concept of sustainability of sustainability and the fragility of our ecosystem. He mentored many of our students. I joined LISD as a Senior Fellow upon becoming Emeritus, in charge of developing LEAP, the LISD Embedded Action and Practitioner Program. Together, we are engaged in developing curriculum with Harvard’s International Relations Council.  

Nick Birnback

Nick Birnback is currently the Director of Strategic Communications for United Nations Peacekeeping at the UN Headquarters in New York City  He was previously the Chief of Public Affairs for the Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support, in addition to serving as the Chief of Public information and Chief of Staff for the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS).

He began his career with the UNDP as a public information officer for the United Nations observer mission in Liberia, starting a 25 year journey with UN peace operations. He has worked in a number of capacities, both in the field and at Headquarters, including as Special Assistant to the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General at the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea, an Information Officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone, a Civil Affairs Officer and Special Assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of the UN Mission’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.and an information Officer and Acting Spokesman for the United Nations Mission in East Timor. He has also worked as an External Relations Officer for the UN Department of Political Affairs’ Electoral Assistance Division. Among his areas of expertise are peacekeeping, strategic communications and military affairs. 

Nick has received a number of awards and commendations throughout his career, including the UN medal, which he was awarded in 1998 for his actions during a riot in the Hercegovci town of Drvar.   

In his typical pithy manner, Nick has characterized the Peacekeepers' jobs as "the last stop before hell," and has made it explicit that the Peacekeeper's role is not fighting wars, but rather assisting in building institutions in troubled countries and protecting the population in the transition.

Nick studied at Tufts with me as a very thoughtful, inquisitive, and challenging member of my EPIIC, Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship colloquium on “Confronting Political and Social Evil.” He was a superb student, graduating Magna Cum Laude, with Summa Cum Laude for his thesis in History and international relations which he accomplished in an unusual short amount of time. He was also a scholar-athlete. A Tufts Varsity baseball player, he was also a sabre fencer, my fencing weapon, and some of the our more delightful email exchanges often included simulated bouts of attacks, ripostes, and counter-attacks. 

But we fused over ideas. His honed his intellect, continued his formal education, earning a Masters in Public Policy from Princeton University. 

After graduation Nick was awarded a prestigious Herbert Scoville Jr Peace Fellowship providing him an opportunity to gain a Washington perspective on key issues of peace and security (His accepting this award was particularly pleasing for me. “Pete” Scoville was an ally and core participant in the MX missile citizens action forum that I created and held at MIT in 1981).

We communicated often. One day a terse email came in my in-box from East Timor,  “Pray for me. They are shooting at us” His UN headquarters in Dili, East Timor was under siege by pro-government militias. It was soon followed by a jarring email from his mother, who informed me that he had never heard of the place until he took a course with me. I ruefully remembered assigning an article by Noam Chomsky.

His mission, UNAMET, was awarded the 2000 Elie Wiesel award for Humanitarianism for Nick’s, Ian Martin’s, and other senior UN staff’s courageous intervention during the siege, refusing to be evacuated to Darwin, Australia, until all the Timorese people under their protection were airlifted out as well. Two of his emails back to New York Headquarters during the tense negotiations he shared read, “This is not Schindler’s List,” and “This is not Darwinian survival of the fittest.” Nick’s response stayed true to his typical honest, blunt, understated persona. 

I had the honor of successfully nominating Nick for the highest alumni recognition from Tufts University, the Light on the Hill Award    I also brought Nick back to Tufts as an invaluable member of our Institute’s Voices from the Field gathering in 2012, and to award him the Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award, in the presence of General Romeo Dallaire.

He surprised me in turn, presenting me with his heavy personal distinctive Blue Helmet, lugged all the way from Somalia. Chillingly for me, his blood type is written on the back. (I will send this picture later)

Nick and I have a fun relationship and I would be remiss to post this without a sense of his singular, irreverent  verve – he wrote this about himself when I asked for his bio:

Growing up in the independent and sovereign republic of Brooklyn, Nick’s real passion is writing about food and New York, the city that sent him out into the world with a chip on his shoulder and the belief that he belongs in any room and a sense that anything is possible with the right amount of hustle.

Chief of Staff, MINURSO - Mission for the UN Referendum in Western Sahara

Sasha Chanoff

Sasha Chanoff is the founder and executive director of RefugePoint, a humanitarian organization that finds lasting solutions for the world’s most at-risk refugees and supports the humanitarian community to do the same. He is the co-author of From Crisis to Calling: Finding Your Moral Center in the Toughest Decisions, with a foreword by David Gergen. He is a recipient of the Schwab Foundation / World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Harvard Center for Public Leadership Gleitsman International Activist Award, the Charles Bronfman Humanitarian Prize, and is an Obama White House Champion of Change. He has received social entrepreneur fellowships from the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Ashoka, and Echoing Green. He is a member of New England International Donors, and is an advisor to The Good Lie Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Warner Bros. film The Good Lie about the resettlement of the South Sudanese Lost Boys and Girls. He is a Goodwill Ambassador for the Aurora Forum, which includes the Million dollar Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. Prior to launching RefugePoint in 2005, Sasha consulted with the UN Refugee Agency and worked for the International Organization for Migration. He holds an M.A. in Humanitarian Assistance from The Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition, Science, and Policy, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.

RefugePoint is recognized for creating new models for humanitarian response and influencing the field to expand solutions for refugees. In addition to the important work of improving the lives of individual refugees, RefugePoint works strategically to influence global refugee policy and practice. To accomplish this, they partner closely with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), governments, NGOs, and community-based organizations to build capacity and improve systems related to refugee resettlement and self-reliance. RefugePoint has capitalized on opportunities to disseminate best practices and led and joined global policy dialogues as well as training staff of other NGOs and UNHCR on RefugePoint’s resettlement and child protection methods. 

RefugePoint has helped more than 80,000 refugees to resettle to the US, Canada, Australia and over a dozen countries around the world from more than 200 locations across Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and contributed to the 1.4 million refugees resettled since its founding in 2005. The organization also provides life-stabilizing and self-reliance services to thousands of refugees in Nairobi and has helped over 2,000 to “graduate” from needing humanitarian aid. Based on this success, RefugePoint has helped to lead a global effort, The Refugee Self Reliance Initiative, to advance refugee self-reliance globally.

I first met Sasha when in 1997, at a soccer tournament for refugees in the Boston area. More than 100 players, dozens of volunteers, and hundreds of spectators descended on Cambridge’s Danehy Park for a tournament that Sasha said enabled refugees to exhibit their strengths.

“He’s a remarkably engaging, charismatic young man, completely passionate and decisive about what he wants to do,’’ I said of him at the time. “He’s a wonderful fusion between a person who has a vision and someone who has the ability to enact the vision. 

Brazilian, Haitian, Iraqi, Russian, Somalian, Sudanese, and Vietnamese soccer players came together last April to form the "World Citizens" and play the Tufts University soccer team as part of the "Game of Nations" day that concluded EPIIC's year on refugees, migration, and global security. Co-sponsored by EPIIC and Jewish Vocational Service, with support from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, this day brought together Tufts students, members of the greater Boston community and refugees and immigrants in the region for a day-long international festival of sport and music.

I had the honor of nominating Sasha successfully for the Bronfman Humanitarianism Award.

“Rather than simply building Mapendo’s own operations, Sasha is using his organization’s partnership relations with the US and UN Refugee Agency to affect fundamental change in the way refugee resettlement is handled altogether. This past fall, Mapendo and the UN Refugee Agency co-hosted a resettlement training for NGOs working across Africa, a landmark collaboration that intends to increase and broaden life-saving opportunities for refugees who live in perilous situations. In addition, Mapendo’s work with the UN Refugee Agency at the Geneva level aims to strengthen refugee resettlement and protection globally through enhancing and supporting NGO and UNHCR collaboration. What all this means is that Mapendo International is now recognized as a model for how resettlement can be done and is exerting a multiplier effect on the process. This is the essence of social entrepreneurship.”

We actually together conceptualized Mapendo International’s mission on a napkin in a pizzeria in Somerville’s Teele Square We helped seed Mapendo, and happily a few years later I introduced Sasha to Rick Wayne, one of my Board members at a Susan Sarandon soiree to benefit Sasha, and Rick became the Chairman of the Board of Refuge Point. 

Sasha took on as his first employee Institute alumnus Matt Edmunson, who had created a significant Kakuma  project with us.

Sasha and his wonderful wife Marni are close friends, and I take responsibility for encouraging their welcoming a pup into their family!

I have recently nominated Sacha and his wonderful organization, RefugePoint, to the Tallberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize. My nomination can be found below:

SECTION 1: CONTACT INFORMATION

First name of nominator: Sherman

Surname of nominator: Teichman

PLEASE TELL US IN YOUR WORDS WHY YOU ARE NOMINATING THIS PERSON.

The critical experience that shaped Sasha Chanoff’s life occurred in 2000 while on a refugee evacuation mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He and a colleague from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) had been sent to evacuate 112 massacre survivors from a compound outside Kinshasa, with orders to take only those on the list approved by the Congolese regime. At the compound, though, they found a group of 32 widows and orphans not on the list. Sasha and his colleague were confronted with a life and death moral dilemma- attempt to take the additional people and risk everyone’s chances at evacuation and survival or stick to IOM’s directive and leave the widow and orphan group to their fate. Despite his boss’ strict instructions that any deviation from the list would jeopardize the entire mission, Sasha and his colleague decided to attempt evacuating everyone. Against the odds, their effort succeeded. Sasha found his life calling in that experience, which led to his founding RefugePoint, an NGO dedicated to creating solutions for refugee communities in extreme danger. Under Sasha’s leadership, RefugePoint has made a reputation for devising and carrying out innovative resettlement and self-reliance programs that have reshaped humanitarian action and advanced solutions for refugees who would otherwise be stuck in limbo for years or decades. Sasha’s commitment to building solutions to the global migration crisis is sorely needed in the broken international resettlement system. Tens of thousands of life-saving resettlement slots went unused annually (250K in total between 2000-2014). Sasha’s vision for a re-imagined, more equitable and robust system has mobilized other NGOs, international agencies and national governments to carry out new programs enabling the most vulnerable refugees to resettle to another country if they could not otherwise survive safely. Today RefugePoint deploys staff across Africa and the world to identify refugees in need of resettlement and works closely with others to expand access. RefugePoint has directly helped resettle over 120,000 refugees, tripled refugee resettlement from Africa, and through training and influencing other organizations, UNHCR, and governments, contributed to 1.5 million resettled since RefugePoint began. In addition to reshaping refugee resettlement, RefugePoint focuses on shifting the traditional care-and-maintenance paradigm of refugee response to one of facilitating socio-economic inclusion and self-reliance. RefugePoint developed an innovative, holistic program in Nairobi, Kenya, to enable refugees to stabilize, build social and economic capital, and engage in dignified livelihoods. The program reaches approximately 10,000 refugees per year and has graduated more than 3,000 from dependence on assistance to sustainable livelihoods, a first-of-its-kind effort. Recognizing that the majority of refugees are stuck for decades in a host country and that 30 billion plus annually is spent on short emergency aid, RefugePoint then spearheaded, in partnership with others, the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI)—a global collaborative made up of practitioners, refugee-led organizations, and governmental, UN, philanthropic, academic and private sector actors. The Initiative aims to reach five million refugees in five years, build an evidence base of best practices, and spark a global shift in humanitarian response. Today the initiative has 100+ partners in 26 countries creating and measuring programs to advance self-reliance, is influencing the use of tens of millions of dollars in foundation and government funding, and has reached nearly 2 million individuals with self-reliance programming. The RSRI is leading the Global Refugee Forum pledging process to bring together global development actors such as the U.S. State Department and UNHCR in a unified effort to advance self-reliance opportunities for refugees. This is a unique catalyst role in the world for refugee self-reliance. RefugePoint’s method of program creation includes three phases: innovation to start a new program, demonstration and evaluation, and finally uptake by governments, UN and other actors to scale. RefugePoint has built new pivotal resettlement-related programs in recent years to respond to unprecedented displacement, including: 1) a labor mobility pilot project with the Canadian government, which is influencing other governments. 2) a family reunion project with the UN Refugee Agency and IRAP to reunite unaccompanied children and parents in the EU and other countries. According to the UN, these programs could reach two million people in the next decade. 3) the Afghan Sponsor Circle Program in the US, which contributed to other sponsorship models such as the U.S. Welcome Corp. At this unprecedented moment in history, with forced displacement at an all-time high, RefugePoint is building programs that re-think humanitarian action to help meet challenges greater than any since World War Two.

NOMINEES CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

Career history and employment experience (250 words) Sasha’s career as a social entrepreneur focused on working with the most vulnerable people began with the Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) as a refugee job developer. Sasha then moved to Kenya to work with the International Organization for Migration and consult with the UN Refugee Agency. Seeing that competition among agencies limited collaboration, he spearheaded an effort at JVS to share job leads and resources, which led to higher placements all around. The insight that supporting others leads to better outcomes for refugees has guided RefugePoint. Sasha’s collaborative approach has led RefugePoint to support locally-led organizations with funding, work with diverse stakeholders to improve refugee-response systems, build coalitions such as the RSRI, and play a distinct connector role between humanitarian action and philanthropy. Sasha has held a number of leadership roles in humanitarian philanthropy. He advised the Warner Bros. Film The Good Lie and worked with the producers to create The Good Lie Fund, which raised more than $750K for South Sudanese-led organizations. Sasha is also a Board Member of Network of Engaged International Donors Global, a philanthropic initiative of nearly 200 members to galvanize funding for international causes. Sasha’s career has also focused on centering refugee leadership and funding refugee-led organizations. He has introduced a number of refugee leaders to former U.S. Presidents, brought in refugees to serve as RefugePoint Board Members, created a pass-through funding mechanism at RefugePoint, and elevated voices and leadership of refugees in other ways. (237 words) Education and credentials (250 words) Sasha Chanoff is the Founder and CEO of RefugePoint. The organization has grown from a small program in Nairobi serving the most at-risk refugees into a global response organization working across the globe to build new pathways to resettlement and self-reliance. At RefugePoint, Sasha has convened a leadership team and built mechanisms committed to progressively improving how the organization operationalizes the value of being refugee-centered, by fostering a refugee-centered service delivery approach, supporting refugee leadership and solutions, shifting power dynamics towards refugees, and elevating visibility of refugee perspectives. Over half of RefugePoint’s Board of Directors are former refugees themselves or persons with proximate and lived experience. Furthermore, the organization established an Oversight and Accountability committee in Kenya and a Steering Committee for the Refugee Self Reliance Initiative that includes refugee leaders to help design and provide feedback on programming. As someone who plays a leadership role in the philanthropy and humanitarian space, Sasha regularly offers advice and guidance to philanthropists and other non-profit and business leaders, including taking on a role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the million dollar Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. Sasha has a M.A. in Humanitarian Assistance from the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition, Science and Policy. He served as the commencement class speaker and centered his master’s thesis on “A New Paradigm for Refugee Group Resettlement: The Somali Bantu Case in Point.” Sasha also holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University. (246 words) Awards, recognitions, major publications (250 words) Sasha Chanoff is the co-author of From Crisis to Calling: Finding Your Moral Center in the Toughest Decisions, a leadership book about moral decision points that shape our lives, with a foreword by David Gergen. The lead story in the book is about the life and death decision he and a colleague faced in the Congo. Sasha has also shared that story at The Moth Mainstage events and on the NPR Moth Radio Hour. He is a recipient of the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Harvard Center for Public Leadership Gleitsman International Activist Award, the Charles Bronfman Humanitarian Prize, and is a White House Champion of Change. He has received social entrepreneur fellowships from the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Ashoka, and Echoing Green. Sasha has also written many op-eds and articles published in various media outlets such as the Washington Post, USA Today, and others, and regularly appears in media. Sasha continually looks for ways to elevate other staff and refugee leaders themselves. Amy Slaughter, the Senior Strategy Officer, received the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award. Marty Anderson, the Geneva Representative, received the Child 10 Award on behalf of RefugePoint for its groundbreaking work to reunite unaccompanied children with their parents and build a new global program to do so. RefugePoint has had opportunities to bring refugee women leaders to the White House and to introduce them to President and Michelle Obama.

SECTION 4: ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

1. An Impossible Choice Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3WxFGr7720

The Congo evacuation operation mini-documentary and RefugePoint’s founding story.

2. https://twitter.com/NBCNewsNow/status/1453345113204215810

Interview on NBC Morning News about the Sponsor Circle Program for Afghans Based on the success of the Afghan Sponsor Circle Program, the U.S. later launched the Welcome Corp, a private sponsorship program through which Americans can sponsor refugees from around the world to come to US. Over the past year Sasha has been interviewed by the New York Times, NPR, AP news, and appeared in dozens of media outlets speaking about the Welcome Corp and refugee sponsorship. I’ve selected this NBC News clip to give you a sense of how Sasha speaks about refugee sponsorship in the media.

3. World Economic Forum (WEF) refugee labor mobility video, https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/946692529660000/

(This video highlights RefugePoint’s role, in collaboration with the Canadian government, to build a new refugee labor mobility program. Bahati Ernestine, a former refugee from Rwanda, is the featured speaker in this video alongside Sasha. Bahati is one of the first people to arrive in Canada through the program RefugePoint has built. RefugePoint has now hired Bahati to represent refugee labor mobility efforts on a global stage. She speaks alongside government ministers, the UNHCR High Commissioner for Refugees, and other leaders to ensure that refugee voices are represented in building labor mobility efforts. A short documentary about Bahati was just accepted into the Cannes Film Festival. Bahati’s growing prominence is another example of how RefugePoint works to elevate refugee voices and leadership in the sector. In addition to the WEF video, RefugePoint’s labor mobility work has been featured across Canada on CBC News, The National, and others recently.)

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a professor and South African National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma at Stellenbosch University, focuses her research on trauma in the aftermath of gross human rights violations and on remorse and forgiveness that emerge in victim-perpetrator dialogues. Her work explores the transgenerational repercussions of apartheid and considers, in the wake of recent nationwide students’ protests in South Africa, whether notions of forgiveness and reconciliation carry the same meaning for the post-apartheid generation as they did during the transition after apartheid.

At Radcliffe, Pumla returns to the archive of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to think through the horrific violence in contemporary South Africa. Is this violence a reflection of “ghosts” from the past, the death of hope in the present, or a combination of both? 

Looking at the possibility of repair and “healing” of what remains of violent histories and what continues transgenerationally, she will explore ways in which a sense of solidarity and responsible citizenship might be restored through what she terms “reparative humanism.” The project will culminate in a book titled “Aesthetics of Memory and Narratives of Repair.”

Pumla earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Cape Town. Among her honors are an honorary doctorate of theology from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, an honorary doctorate of law from Rhodes University, and a Christopher Award and the Alan Paton Award for her first book, A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

Pumla was an incredible INSPIRE Fellow (Institute Scholar/Practitioner In Residence) in 2000 at the Institute. She taught the Institute's first summer course on the Politics of Reconciliation and Forgiveness. She mentored our students, hosted them in South Africa, and was the stimulus for a significant senior honors thesis in history “

Pumla’s integrity, sensitivity, ethical clarity, embrace of complexity and boldness of vision was inspiring for me in my own wrestling to transcend the impact of the Holocaust on my family.  She was a wonderfully worthy recipient of our Dr. Jean Mayer Award for Global Citizenship.

Twenty years later we have renewed our friendship. She told me her Mayer plaque hangs proudly in her office, and we are presently working on a Convisero webinar on resilience and trauma with her, and another Convisero Mentor, Justine Hardy.  We will be looking at ways to identify and prepare research interns for her, 

In 2001 Pumla had written me: 

I would like to explore ways in which we could replicate the approach you use at EPIIC. I have always been inspired by your idea of bringing people together from diverse academic, cultural, and political backgrounds to engage in vigorous discussions. I have no doubt getting black and white students at Stellenbosch, where I’ll be based next year to work on intellectually stimulating projects, that also have emotional and political implications would be such an amazing project. 

Pumla has invited me to South Africa, and we are discussing ways in which the Trebuchet/Convisero approach might be brought to Stellenbosch University, especially given recent nationwide students’ protests in South Africa. 

 Pumla recently wrote a reflection on Desmond Tutu’s legacy, which was published in the Daily Maverick in January of 2022.

Pandemic Ethics: Where Do We Go from Here?

Penn's Professor Jonathan D. Moreno discusses some of the pandemic's effects on national security and describes the dangers of the type of polarization that ...

The pandemic has made us all shockingly aware of the way that a highly infectious disease exposes the moral frailties of our social systems. In this virtual event, leading ethicists and historians will discuss their work, how it has been affected by the pandemic, and what lessons we may take away from this global crisis.

Nita A. Farahany is Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at Duke Law School. She is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies. She is Founding Director of Duke Science & Society, Chair of the Duke MA in Bioethics & Science Policy, and principal investigator of SLAP Lab. In 2010, she was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and served until 2017.

Jonathan Moreno is David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) professor. . He has been called “the quietly most interesting bioethicist of our time” by the American Journal of Bioethics. At Penn he is also Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, of History and Sociology of Science, and of Philosophy. He is the co-author of Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But Nobody Wants to Die: Bioethics and the Transformation of Health Care in America.    

Ulf Schmidt is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and professor at the University of Hamburg. His work is embedded in the historiographical tradition of social and political historians, historians of medicine and medical humanities as well as scholars of cultural history and history of science. His work has looked at the history of European eugenics and racial hygiene, especially in relation to Germany and Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the history of the Nazi 'euthanasia' programme, the killing of mentally and handicapped patients during the Third Reich.

Jason L. Schwartz is assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Yale School of Public Health. He has written widely on vaccines and vaccination policy, decision-making in medical regulation and public health policy, and the structure and function of scientific expert advice to government. His general research interest is in the ways in which evidence is interpreted, evaluated, and translated into regulation and policy in medicine and public health.

Wendell Wallach is a Carnegie-Uehiro Fellow and co-director of the Carnegie AI & Equality Initiative. He is a consultant, ethicist, and scholar at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. He is also a scholar with the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, a fellow at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technology, and a senior advisor to The Hastings Center.Wallach is the author of A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control.

This event is hosted by Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, with whom we have begun a co-sponsorship series. See the recording of our first event with the Council, Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms our Ethics.

Amitai Abouzaglo

How did we first meet? 

By means of serendipity, or mazal. 

I first met Sherman and his longtime friend Tamar Miller at a small Cambridge gathering of activists dedicated to peace and justice in Israel-Palestine. That same gathering marks the initial moment in which I publicly articulated the idea that eventually bloomed into Embodying Peace. At the gathering’s conclusion, I walked up Sherman and commented that his attire was peculiarly similar to what I had been accustomed to see as Professor Homi Bhaba’s style. He then gifted me two invitations, one to become an Oslo scholar and the other, to continue the conversation about supporting Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding at his home. That same year I travelled to Oslo and clicked into the network I would later hear described as the Trebuchet. The story blossoms until this day.  

What we have done together: 

We have built a cluster of student-initiated, entrepreneurial-activist initiatives that grew out of the establishment of Embodying Peace, an international Fellowship of learning, volunteering, and innovating in support of civil society peacebuilding efforts in Israel-Palestine. 

Our brainchildren include Jewish Movement for Uyghur Freedom and Embodying Justice. These efforts are driven by a commitment to forge relationship-based activism which break paths for action-centered solidarity, especially in the face of intractable challenges. Our language is Constructive Solidarity. 

After connecting Sherman and Jerome to Harvard’s undergraduate International Relations Council in Fall 2018, we brought the Oslo Scholars program to Harvard. In spring 2019, we hosted a College Freedom Forum which connected Harvard students and faculty to HRF’s stunning community of human rights activists and supporters. 

Michael Fischer

Michael M.J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, as well as Lecturer in Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School.  He trained at Johns Hopkins, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago (PhD).  He has taught at Chicago, Harvard, Rice, and MIT, serving as Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Rice, and Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT.  He has done fieldwork in the Caribbean, Iran, India, and currently in Southeast Asia on new initiatives in the biosciences and biotechnologies

He works in four primary areas:

(1) The anthropology of the biomedical sciences and technologies  He has worked with the Genome Institute of Singapore and the Human Geonome Organization (HUGO) on social and ethical issues associated with genomics and with capacity building in the Asia-Pacific region; and with the MIT- Indian Department of Biotechnology project to establish a Translational Medicine Institute in New Delhi on the MIT Health Science and Technology (HST) model.  He has also helped the National University of Singapore to establish an STS cluster, and is engaged at the new Singapore University of Technology and Design to do the same.  He co-edited A Reader in Medical Anthropology:  Theoretical Trajectories and Emergent Realities (with Byron Good, Mary Jo Good, and Sarah Willen). 

(2)  The anthropology of media circuits, with foci of regional attention to the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia.  He has authored three books on Iran (Iran from Religious Dispute to Revolution, on the training of religious leaders in the seminary town of Qum; Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues between Postmodernity and Tradition (with Mehdi Abedi) on oral, literate and visual media in Iran; and Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges in the Transnational Circuitry (2004) on interpretations of the national epic, the Shahnameh, and the films of social repair after the Iran-Iraq war. More recently he has been tracking the explosion of arts and media in Singapore and Asia.

(3) Anthropological methods for the contemporary world with specially attention to the interface between science and technology and anthropology.   He has publishedAnthropology in the Meantime (2018), Anthropological Futures (2009), Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (2003), and (with George Marcus)Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986, 2nd ed. 1999). He edits a book series (with Joe Dumit) on Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, and Anthropological Voices, which has 42 volumes out as of fall 2020    

(4) Anthropology of comparative religions: stratification and Protestants in Jamaica (“Value Assertion and Stratification: Religion and Marriage in Rural Jamaica”); Zoroastrians, Shi’ites, Jews and Baha’is in Iran (Zoroastrian Iran: Between Myth and Praxis); class-linked religiosities in Iran (Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution) and the Muslim world (“Islam and the Revolt of the Petite Bourgeoisie”); interpretive debate and cultural critique in Shi’ism and Iran (Debating Muslims); autobiographical genres of religious leaders in Islam, Judaism, Jainism (“Portrait of a Mullah”; “Imam Khomeini: Four Ways of Understanding”; "Autobiographical Voices (1,2,3) and Mosaic Memory: Experimental Sondage in the (Post)Modern World” [al-Hallaj and Massignon; R. Nachman of Breslau and Arthur Green; Shabbatai Zvi and Gershom Scholem; Jain social worker Santabalji and Minister of State Navalbahi Shah).  

Michael has been a wonderful friend since our undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins University in the mid-60’s. He advised me on many matters while I directed the Institute, from the applicability of the IRB process to the social sciences when we prepared our students for research abroad to helping to prepare and lead two distinctive, unique student delegation trips, one to Iran, another to Israel and the West Bank.

Mort Rosenblum

Mort Rosenblum, former chief international correspondent for the Associated Press and editor of the International Herald Tribune, now defines himself as “Reporter. Desert Rat/River Rat. Errant Quixote.” He runs the Mort Report: Non-Prophet Journalism, dividing his time among Paris, Provence, Tucson and reporting trips.

Rosenblum printed his first newspaper at six – “a pathetic biweekly,” he recalls -- on a toy press in his bedroom in Tucson. He edited his high school paper and, at 19, left the University of Arizona to work on the Mexico City Times and the Caracas Daily Journal. He returned to finish his degree and work on the Arizona Daily Star. He joined AP in Newark in 1965 and two years later, at 23, went to cover a mercenary war in the Congo. Since then, he ran AP bureaus in Kinshasa, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Paris.

He has written from seven continents on subjects ranging from war to tango dancing by the Seine. He covered the Biafra secession from Nigeria, Vietnam, the violent birth of Bangladesh, Central American mayhem, Israeli wars, the Iron Curtain collapse, Bosnia and Kosovo, and two Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and Somalia, among other conflicts. In Argentina in the 1970s, he broke the first stories on the Dirty War. He wrote the first African famine stories in 1984. In 1989, he won an Overseas Press Club award and was short-listed for a Pulitzer for the fall of Romania. He danced on Red Square the night Communism died.

He edited the International Herald Tribune from 1979 to 1981 but returned to AP as a special correspondent, based in Paris, winning AP’s top reporting award three times. He left AP in 2005 and launched the quarterly, dispatches, with co-editor Gary Knight and publisher Simba Gill, then led an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists team on ocean plunder.

In summers, he worked with the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, taking exceptional students to such places as Cambodia and Kashmir. For part of each winter he taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is now professor emeritus.

Rosenblum has written 14 books and contributed to Foreign Affairs, Harpers, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, Le Nouvel Observateur, Monocle, Travel & Leisure, and Bon Appetit, among others. His honors include a 2001 Harry Chapin Award for a series on water, a Mencken Award for African Famine, a James Beard Award for OLIVES, and an IACP Cookbook Award for CHOCOLATE. He was the 1980 Council on Foreign Relations Edward R. Murrow fellow.

His French and Spanish are fluent; his Italian is passable, and his Portuguese is hysterical. He can say, “Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist,” in a lot of other languages. (Not that it helps.) He is married to Jeannette Hermann, world-class ambiance director and astrology writer. Their cat, Streak, is a neurotic but noble.

One of my first“ dates” with my wife Iris, was in the early 80’s when she accepted a ride on my motorcycle to sit in one my lectures at Emerson College where I was teaching a journalism course on covering international affairs. The book I had assigned and discussing was - Coups and Earthquakes (Harper Colophon Books)  

At the Institute Mort was a powerful contributor to the development of our Exposure human rights photojournalism program. He was a superb teacher and mentored our students in our Exposure  seminars including on site in Kosovo, Argentina, and Kashmir.

Since I had a great respect for Mort’s powers of observation I was chagrined when he described me in our Exposure publication Rebuild: Kosovo Six Years Later as appearing to have a “grizzly bear exterior,” but, he assures me, that was meant to contrast interior warmth … It has been a fun element of our enduing conversations.  

 Mort is the ideal person for a Convisero mentor. In his acknowledgments to one of  his books, is  Escaping Plato’s Cave: How America’s Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival  (2007) He had the audacity to dedicate it to me in this manner:

My focus these days is on young people who care about a world they will have to manage and a noble old profession (journalism) they want to pursue.

He kindly added -  In this regard, I am particularly grateful to a pair of committed world – savers, Jacqueline Sharkey of the University of Arizona and  Sherman Teichman of Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership.

Our survival these days may loom as acutely from domestic threats, but Mort’s passion remains the same. 

David Cuttino

David D. Cuttino served as Dean of Admissions, Enrollment and External Affairs at Tufts University.  He was responsible of undergraduate admissions, financial aid policy, and the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership.  He initiated the Tufts Institute for Leadership and International Perspective and a number of scholar programs including the Balfour Scholars Program for minority students and the Neubauer Scholars Program for students who reflect the capacity for “transforming intellectual leadership”.  He also was Interim Dean of the College of Special Studies. He continues to serve on the External Advisory Board of the Institute for Global Leadership.

Prior to coming to Tufts, he was Associate Dean of Admissions at Georgetown University where he chaired the committees directing admission to the School of Foreign Service and the School of Business Administration. He developed and coordinated a Board of Advisors for an alumni admissions network and developed a successful scholarship program.  Working with an educational foundation he instituted programs on foreign policy and the judiciary at Georgetown for approximately 10,000 high school students each spring involving national and international leaders.

He has developed a variety of unique programs including an Appalachian Semester program and a science seminar for high school teachers and students. He served as a trustee for the Henry David Thoreau Foundation encouraging undergraduates for leadership in confronting complex environmental issues and also served on the board of Opportunity Homes building and restoring homes for low-income families. 

" Shortly after arriving at Tufts to lead the admissions effort, I began working with Sherman Teichman recognizing that the programs he was directing were uncommon among leading universities and offered a distinguishing university signature and the opportunity to make an important difference in the quality of education.   We worked together to build ties to international universities, organizations and foundations and to expand and support unique university efforts in scholarly and pragmatic engagement to involve and prepare students to manage and direct insightful change.  As the number of programs grew The Institute for Global Leadership was created and provides unique and intensive intellectual and experiential educational experiences across disciplines that are effective in preparing students to meaningfully and ethically confront complex global issues. He has continued to build bridges and bring people together across perspectives, disciplines and endeavors"

Together with fellow Board member Fred Berger, who we miss tremendously, we created Engineers Without Borders. Its first trip went to Tibet.

David’s qualities are hard to encapsulate - they are deep, meaningful and broad. A man of tremendous integrity, intellect, curiosity, vision, open-mindedness, an adventurous spirit combined with a courtly demeanor and impeccable appearance :). I was honored to work with him and report to him for years in admissions when he also held the portfolio as supervisor or director of special projects and admissions, of which the Institute was deemed one. 

We traveled together to secure the “yield” of students the university really wanted to admit, across a broad spectrum of socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. David was to me the precursor of DEI with a sense of justice and fair-mindedness that one could only hope for in a dean of admissions. His staff loved him and most importantly admired him. 

I was honored when he agreed to join the Institute board. He certainly knew about us almost from day one of his coming to Tufts, and I believe appreciated our maverick spirit and our distinctive sense of breaking boundaries and willingness to innovate along with him. I had the privilege of directing the Newbauer Scholars initiative, whose first class included Ben Harburg and others, including a student who accompanied the NSA’s Thomas Blanton to Cuba to record the first uncensored Russian documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Balfour program which enabled me to meet and mentor remarkable young scholars from relatively underprivileged, rural and urban highschools across the country. We had many interesting experiences together, but perhaps none more unique than meeting with Allan Goodman, the head of the International Institute of Education in New York City in Manhattan, opposite the United Nations the very moment the planes hit the World Trade Center, and we watched them crash on the IIE’s TV monitors. We were hustled out of the building by UN security and fled the city in one of the last rental cars as the convoys of the National Guard were passing us on the highway.  David was a confidant, a sage advisor, always able to find silver linings and renew my optimism. We were in New York to discuss a novel program, Passport to Leadership, that would provide Tufts rising sophomores who had never had a passport, and therefore never been outside the confines of the US, to link with IIE schools around the world on a specific, unified theme (we chose the world’s rivers) to bond and research together and present at symposia around the world. We could never raise the funding in a post-911 world where funding went elsewhere and isolationism took hold. David, who was also a minister, encouraged me to invite theological students to the EPIIC Nuclear Era year as many clergy had outspoken views on proliferation and mankind’s survival.

Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics

Many shifts in the right vs. wrong pendulum are affected by advances in technology. In "Right/Wrong," Juan Enriquez reflects on the evolution of ethics in a ...

Tuesday January 26th, 12:00pm ET

Many shifts in the right vs. wrong pendulum are affected by advances in technology. In Right/Wrong, Juan Enriquez reflects on the evolution of ethics in a technological age.

How will accelerating technology challenge and flip your ideas of right and wrong? What are we doing today that will be considered abhorrent tomorrow because of tech change?

Juan Enriquez is an author, speaker, and research affiliate at MIT’s Synthetic Neurobiology Lab. He is Managing Director of Excel Venture Management, a life sciences VC firm, and also the author of Evolving Ourselves, As the Future Catches You, and The Untied States of America. We are privileged to have him as a Convisero mentor.

Kit McDonnell is a biologist-turned-communicator operating at the intersection of biotech, design, and sustainability. She is currently director of corporate affairs at the agtech start-up Enko Chem. Kit was a member of the Synaptic Scholars Program of the Institute for Global Leadership.

Wendell Wallach is a Carnegie-Uehiro Fellow and co-director of the Carnegie AI & Equality Initiative. He is the author of A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control.

This event is hosted by Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, thanks to the intervention of Wendell, a Carnegie-Uehiro Fellow with the Council. We have begun an exciting event partnership - our next webinar co-sponsored with them will be with Professor Jonathan Moreno on his new book Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die: Bioethics and the Transformation of Health Care in America.

Ina Breuer

Ina Breuer is Executive Director of New England International Donors, which is a unique peer-to-peer learning community of global donors, grant-makers, social investors and family foundations. NEID’s mission is to convene and empower donors to help address the world’s big problems and does so through approximately 35 events per year, two simultaneously run Giving Circles, and a bi-annual skill building Symposium. NEID offers its members an on-going learning journey that helps them learn, connect, inspire, and act as a community. This journey entails providing members access to leading experts in international development and philanthropy, to other donor peers and to safe spaces to learn from each other. 

Previously Ina was the Executive Director of Beyond Conflict, where she worked for 17 years to help leaders in Middle East, Central America, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, South Africa and Sri Lanka address difficult challenges relating to reconciliation, conflict resolution and change. 

Beyond Conflict was originally The Program on Justice in Times of Transition (PJTT) and was formally affiliated with the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University from 2006 to 2011. During that period Ina integrated over 60 students into the work of BC.

The PJTT’s association with the IGL actually goes back to the early 1990s, during which both organizations worked closely with the original practitioners and leaders that shaped the truth commissions and retributive justice institutions in Latin America and Eastern Europe.  

One of the core efforts of PJTT while at the Institute was to create ACCESS, a joint mentorship program to mentor and foster a new generation of leaders in international diplomacy.

Another important collaboration was in the Institute’s unique Iraq Moving Forward Track II diplomatic effort. 

The impact of this highly productive relationship continues. At Beyond Conflict Ina launched the Neuroscience and Social Conflict Initiative in 2008, which now forms the core of Beyond Conflict’s work and has led to a new area of inquiry at the intersection of brain science and conflict.  This inquiry was inspired and led by an Institute for Global Leadership alumnus, and core member Trebuchet, Mike Niconchuk.

Prior to her work on conflict resolution, Ina was the Assistant Director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at the New School for Social Research in New York.  In the early 1990s TCDS was a hub for dissident activity from countries in the former Eastern Block and was focused on helping universities rebuild social science departments throughout East and Central Europe, the former Soviet Union and Central Asia.  Ina began her career at the Foundation for Civil Society in New York, where she was involved in educational, economic and environmental programming supporting civil society development in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the collapse of the Cold War. Ina is a German/US national that was born and raised in India and South Korea. 

Ina is one of the most ethical, accomplished administrators and innovators. She enhanced our students' lives while at the Institute. 

She was responsible for the suggestion and enactment of the expansion of the TILIP program, helping me redirect its energy from participation solely of Chinese universities in Beijing and Hong Kong to a wide array of university students coming from places as distinctive as Brazil, Canada, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iraqi-Kurdistan, Israel, Rwanda, Singapore, South Africa, and South Korea. We did this with the intervention of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition (PJTT), linking us as a program to the Clinton Global Initiative. We did this with the intervention of one of the first INSPIRE fellows, Tim Phillips.

Likewise, she helped us develop ACCESS, a program that integrated very distinguished global diplomats, including Nobel Prize winner, Jose Ramos Horta of East Timor, and an academic-credit course led by former US Ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia William Luers. 

She was extraordinarily important in revealing the bias and corruption of unfortunate administrative decisions. The first was to require the PJTT to leave our building and disassociate as allegedly a non-Tufts entity, whereas previous Tufts administrations had welcomed and embraced the program for 7 years. 

Ina was responsible for this acknowledgement in the volume Beyond Conflict: “From 1999 to 2004, the Project on Justice in Times of Transition was based at Harvard University as a university-wide initiative affiliated with the Harvard Law School, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the John F. Kennedy School for Government and thanks, Phil Heymann for that incredible opportunity and wonderful partnership. The project was also lucky, thanks to the remarkable Sherman Teichman, to have a close, intellectually vibrant, and enormously supportive strategic partnership with the IGL at Tufts University from 2006 to 2013.”

Amir Soltani

Amir Soltani is an Iranian-American writer, journalist and activist.  

Amir has worked in media, nonprofits, business and philanthropy, most recently as Executive Director of the Semnani Family Foundation, a foundation focused on poverty, health and human rights. His Iran work includes "Zahra's Paradise," a real-time online graphic novel about Iran's 2009 protests. It was recognized as a first in publishing, dissent and human rights activism, featured as part of "The Graphic Novel Renaissance" by Newsweek, nominated for two Eisner awards.  Zahra's Paradise has been translated into 16 languages, and covered by news outlets around the world. In 2013, Zahra ran as a virtual presidential candidate in Iran's 2013 elections.  She was the only female candidate  to run on a human rights platform calling for an end to executions, equality for women and freedoms of speech, assembly and religion.  

Amir's other publications include directing the research for the Ayatollah's Nuclear Gamble, a study on the human costs of military strikes on Iran's nuclear sites, as part of a campaign against an Iran war, and directing a study titled "Where is My Oil?" On Corruption in Iran's Oil and Gas Industry, part of a campaign against corruption in the Islamic Republic.  His latest publication "The Keys to Paradise: Children, Martyrdom and War" appeared in the LA Review of Books.  More recently, as a former board member of PEN Center, Amir has been working with PEN on international collaborations to secure the freedom of Nasrin Sotoudeh and other political prisoners in Iran.   

Amir's film work includes DOGTOWN REDEMPTION, an Emmy-nominated ITVS documentary film about poverty in West Oakland honored with a Congressional Commendation.  Amir is a producer on "Hold Your Fire," Stefan Forbes' acclaimed documentary film on racism and police violence in the United States, winner of the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns prize.  He is a co-producer on Skin of Glass, Denise Zmekhol's documentary on Sao Paolo's tallest high rise favella; a co-producer on Delnaz Abadi's the Secret Fatwa, a documentary on the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran; and consulting producer on Jeff Kaufman and Marcia Ross's Nasrin, a feature documentary about Nasrin Sotoudeh  

Amir studied history and international relations at Tufts University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Harvard University. He has a mutt named Louie.    

Amir’s personal statement:

I trace my roots in human rights activism back to an encounter with Sherman Teichman, an educational visionary and entrepreneur who has since become a lifelong friend and mentor.  I was amongst the first batch of students at Tufts to participate in an EPIIC course and symposium on International Terrorism in 1985. Sherman created the space in which I found my voice as an activist, a space where the intellectual, emotional and artistic could fuse as one," he says.  "In a way, I joined Convisero--a radically new model for education 35 years ago.  Education was not packaged by semester, discipline or even college.  It was a lifelong quest that linked the generations. I did not know it then but I had become part of a community that dared to breathe life into the idea of a global citizenship."   

Amir was selected by his peers, my students, to introduce the first symposium I conducted at Tufts in 1986, on International Terrorism. It was notable for many reasons. He was a freshman, and the majority of the students were seniors. Far more significantly he knew, and poignantly articulated the important distinction between terrorism and political violence, and thus the critical different ways to confront such violence, this from the personal experience of his family who had suffered under Khomeini and his conversion of Islam into a revolutionary ideology for purging his political opponents and purifying Iranian culture.

Our friendship endured over decades. He worked with me as an aide, mentored my students as a graduate TA, critiqued and influenced the evolution and growth of the Institute. Our contacts were many. We consulted over the years on human rights initiatives. He worked closely with our mutual friend Geralyn White Dreyfous on his documentary on race, class and poverty and I had the honor of being invited by Amir to accompany him to the Emmy ceremony at Lincoln Center, when I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting his wonderful family again.  Most recently we collaborated closely over the Convisero webinar for Nasrin Soutedeh.

Jamshed Bharucha

Jamshed Bharucha is a prominent cognitive neuroscientist and innovative educator who has served in prominent leadership roles in higher education in the United States and abroad.

Currently he is Vice Chancellor of Sai University (SaiU), in Chennai, India’s youngest University, He previously was the inaugural Vice Chancellor of SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, India.

 He is President Emeritus of Cooper Union, having served as its 12th President of Cooper Union from July 2011 through June 2015. After spending 2015-2016 at Harvard, Bharucha was appointed Distinguished Fellow at Dartmouth, where he taught in two departments: Education and Psychological & Brain Science

Previously Bharucha was Provost and Senior Vice President of Tufts University and Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Music and in the Medical School's Department of Neuroscience. Prior to Tufts he was the John Wentworth Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College. His research is in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, focusing on the cognitive and neural basis of the perception of music. He was editor of the interdisciplinary journal Music Perception and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

SaiU’s stated mission, is to “equip students with advanced skills to prepare them for the present and the future. Combining the academic rigour of traditional learning models with the pace and disruptive potential of technology, SaiU aims to accelerate pedagogic innovation and usher in a new era of learning in India.”

I will be joining Vice Chancellor Bharucha as SaiU’s Professor of Practice in International Relations, serving on SaiU’s International Advisory Board and advising in the creation of its Synaptic Institute of Interdisciplinarity. This initiative will resonate Synaptic Scholars, a program I created with Jamshed’s support and engagement at the Institute for Global Leadership when Jamshed was the Tufts University Provost.

The Institute created many innovative programs with his encouragement and involvement, Professor Turhan Canli’s workshop, Neuroethics and Homeland Security; our Track II diplomatic effort, “Iraq Moving Forward;” and of course, Tufts’ first intramural Cricket team.

Tovia Smith

Tovia Smith is an award-winning NPR National Correspondent based in Boston, who's spent more than three decades covering news around New England and beyond.

Most recently, she's reported on the pandemic and its fallout, and she has also reported extensively on the #MeToo movement and on the world of higher education. 

Smith has extensive experience covering breaking news, including the Newtown school shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent trial, as well as the capture and trial of Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger. She's provided coverage of the gay marriage fight in MA, and the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, including breaking the news of the Pope's secret meeting with survivors.

Throughout the years, Smith has brought to air the distinct voices of Boston area residents, whether those demanding the ouster of Cardinal Bernard Law, or those mourning the death of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. In her reporting on contentious issues like race relations, abortion, and juvenile crime, her reporting pushes past the polemics, and advances the national conversation with thoughtful, nuanced arguments from all sides.

Smith has reported on seven consecutive New Hampshire Primary elections, the BP oil spill, and the Sept. 11 attacks. She has gone behind prison bars to interview female prisoners who keep their babies with them, and behind closed doors to watch a college admissions committee decide whom to admit. She embedded in a local orphanage to tell the stories of the children living there. 

Smith has also chronicled such personal tales as a woman's battle against obesity and family businesses struggling to survive the recession of 2008, and the pandemic of 2020.

Throughout her career, Smith has won dozens of national journalism awards including a Gracie, the Casey Medal, the Unity Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Honorable Mention, and numerous honors from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Radio News Directors Association, and the Associated Press.

Smith took a leave of absence from NPR in 1998 to help create and launch Here and Now, a daily news magazine co-produced by NPR and WBUR in Boston. As co-host of the program, she conducted live interviews on issues ranging from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton to allegations of sexual abuse in Massachusetts prisons.

In 1996, Smith worked as a radio consultant and journalism instructor in Africa. She spent several months teaching and reporting in Ethiopia, Guinea, and Tunisia. She filed her first stories as an intern and then reporter for local affiliate WBUR in Boston beginning in 1987.

She is a graduate of Tufts University, with a degree in international relations, and a proud alum of the second cohort of the EPIIC program in 1986-7.

Quite simply, EPIIC taught me more than any other book, class or professor I’d ever encountered. I didn’t quite know it when I signed up for the program, but EPIIC was a lesson not only in politics and history, but also in morality, the search for “truth,” and personal leadership.  And it prepared me for a life-long career in journalism.

One of my assignments was to help edit what we called “The Briefing Book:” a compilation of writings, news articles and essays on the Palestinian - Israeli conflict that would serve as background to those who would attend our Symposium.  Knowing how difficult it would be to compose an historical narrative of the disputed region, we endeavored to create an “objective” timeline.  But even there, our little committee of Israelis, Jews, Palestinians and Protestants haggled for hours about which events belonged in our “true” record of the past, and how far back in history our timeline should begin. In the end, we opted to omit the timeline, and instead printed an excerpt from E.H. Carr’s “What is History?”  

“In the first place, the facts of history never come to us as “pure,” since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form:   they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder...  The facts...are like fish swimming about in a vast...ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in.”

This lesson still guides me every day.  As a journalist, I find myself constantly straining to see a situation from another perspective.  And I’m constantly challenging opposing parties to answer each other’s grievance. 

In Memoriam: Leslie Gelb

Les Gelb, a brilliant public servant greatly impacted US foreign policy on a multitude of levels.  A former American diplomat, journalist, and prodigious commentator on world affairs, over the years I learned from him, and was the beneficiary of his support (at times unknown to me), unsparing advice, and counsel, as many of my students — now alumni — have benefitted as well. 

He did not “suffer fools gladly.” He was at times gruff, always provocative, and certainly iconoclastic. We argued and disagreed often, especially about soft power and idealism in foreign policy, but he honed my thinking, kept my feet to the fire, supported me, and intervened at critical points in my career at Tufts, when there were advocates for curtailing my program, even dismissing me.

He was director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs at the Department of Defense from 1967 to 1969, winning the Pentagon's highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal. Secretary of Defense  Robert McNamara appointed Gelb as director of the secret project that produced the controversial Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War.

From 1969 to 1973, Gelb was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. A perceptive and unsparing journalist, he was diplomatic correspondent at The New York Times from 1973 to 1977.

He served as an Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter Administration from 1977 to 1979, serving as director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs and winning the Distinguished Honor Award, the highest award of the US State Department. In 1980 he co-authored The Irony of Vietnam which won the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award in 1981. From 1980 to 1981, he was also a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He returned to the Times in 1981 until 1993, where he was in turn its national security correspondent, deputy editorial page editor, editor of the op-ed page, and a columnist. In 1983, he worked as a producer on the ABC documentary The Crisis Game, which received an Emmy award in 1984. 

Gelb became President of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1993 and as of 2003, and until his death in 2019, was its President Emeritus. Gelb was also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He served as the chairman of the advisory board for the National Security Network and served on the boards of directors of several non-profit organizations including Carnegie Endowment, the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, the James Baker Institute at Rice University, the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy. 

He served on the board of directors of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and was a member of the board of advisors of the Truman Project and America Abroad Media. Gelb served on the board of directors of the Center for the National Interest and of the Diplomacy Center Foundation. He also sat on the editorial advisory committee of Democracy magazine, on the advisory council of The National Interest magazine, and on the advisory board of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He was a contributor to The Daily Beast.

Winston Lord, another former diplomat and one of his predecessors at the CFR who advised my Institute’s TILIP program, said of him, “Les Gelb was a unique star in American foreign policy. He was a patriot in its noblest definition who devoted his senior years to helping veterans and mentoring coming generations of policymakers.”

George Packer, one of my favorite journalists, understood him (as I experienced him) “Politically … as a centrist and a realist. Growing up against the background of the corner store where his parents worked 14 hours a day never left him. It gave him a kind of immunity to the temptations and deceptions of power.”

He wrote a powerful, controversial book Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, which I often assigned as text. Michael Bechloss’ review in The New York Times is an excellent precis.

Gelb’s opinion of the quagmires the US entered was pithy — “These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, what the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.” He originally endorsed the Iraq War, but ruefully admitted that his initial support for the war  “was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives of supporting wars to retain political and professional credibility.” He argued that “we ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common–often wrong–wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”

Les received a bachelor’s degree in government from Tufts University in 1959 after working his way through school as a valet parking attendant and dishwasher. He was Trustee Emeritus of Tufts University. In the New York Times’s obituary, Mr. Gelb was understood by one of his best friends as “a giant of mentors.” That is how I surely experienced him.

I first met Les when I sought him out in 1979 to interview him about his views on the deployment of the MX missile for a WBUR/NPR radio series I was writing as their international relations analyst. He had been the Times’s national security correspondent and led the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1986 for a six-part series on the Reagan administration’s Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative.

Our paths crossed again a few years later when I returned to Tufts in 1984, and after a few weeks of teaching, I became embroiled in a controversy. I was confronted with the following The Tufts Daily newspaper article headline of 1984, “Students Protest PS 131 Workload," and the demand by some officers of the Tufts Council on International Relations that I be fired.

The course, “International Relations: Theory and Practice,” was the department’s mandatory capstone class. I took it seriously and prepared a challenging curriculum. After the Department reviewed my syllabus, it offered an extra half-credit for all of the students enrolled. It was the first, and last time, to my knowledge, that has happened.

I ran the course, despite its 130 students, as a rigorous seminar with TA sessions, and frequent questions asked and answered even during plenary lectures. I personally met several times with each of the students to review their work during the semester, and made friends of many of them — some relationships endure to this day. The students were proud of their efforts and created an edited journal of their final research papers.

At my suggestion they asked me to invite Les Gelb, then chair of Tufts’ Social Sciences Overseers Board, to write a preface for their journal.

Almost two decades later, Les received the Institute’s Dr. Mayer Award in 2003. I asked Amb. John Niland, one of the student editors of the 1985 journal, to help present the Award to Les at the Sovereignty and Intervention EPIIC symposium.

I maintained a wonderful relationship with Les. Years later in 2013, Les, then as president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke on behalf of the Institute at a development gathering and entered into a wonderful conversation with two of our distinguished alumni and now my very close friends, Lauren Lovelace and Matan Chorev, both exceptional members of the U.S. State Department. I actually officiated, as the Justice of the Peace, the marriage of Matan to another of my great students, the wonderful Claire Putzeys.

That afternoon he termed the Institute a “unique, premier international relations program.” When I referenced the origins of our 1984 controversy, he joked that little did I know it then, but that there were faculty and students preparing “to burn me at the stake.” He told me he told the faculty and advised President Jean Mayer to encourage me and to “leave me alone,” and that not having a PhD was hardly the metric by which to judge me.

The session was hosted by Ed Merrin, a wonderfully thoughtful man and another great ally who I miss greatly. It was organized by my wonderful alumna, Maria Figueroa, now the co-chair of the Institute’s External Advisory Board, together with another one of my superb students, Jennifer Hooper Selendy, now the Secretary of The Trebuchet.

I had named Maria and “Hoops” to the Institute’s Board years earlier and ultimately envisaged my students would lead it. Community and continuity — the essence of Convisero. Maria and Jennifer are now leading an effort to preserve the integrity of the Institute and to support Heather Barry, its long-term Associate Director who was my student in 1988 and who is as the letters linked here indicate what was considered appropriately, by so many, the heart and soul of the Institute.

Les is missed. He never failed to care, to listen, to critique, in the most positive, preceptive, and prescriptive ways. He encouraged me to stay beyond my 25th Anniversary, and laughingly told me to teach and encourage my students to learn to write one-pager policy briefs, something I was never capable of doing. And despite declining health, he somehow always had time for the students and alumni I sent him for advice, successfully sponsoring several of our alumni as Fellows of the CFR. He would have been yet another wonderful Convisero mentor.

In Conversation with Timothy Snyder and FASPE

Join us on December 14th at 10am ET, for a webinar co-sponsored with the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. FASPE Executive Director Thorsten Wagner will speak with Timothy Snyder, noted historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, and author of eight groundbreaking books including #1 New York Times Bestseller On Tyranny. They will discuss Professor Snyder’s latest book, Our Malady, an impassioned condemnation of commercial medicine, America’s coronavirus response, and an urgent call to rethink the connection between health and freedom.

“The word freedom is hypocritical when spoken by the people who create the conditions that leave us sick and powerless. If our federal government and our commercial medicine make us unhealthy, they are making us unfree.”

Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author of The Road to Unfreedom, On Tyranny, Black Earth, and Bloodlands. His work has received the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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The Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) challenges graduate students and future leaders to recognize and confront their ethical responsibilities as professionals by analyzing the decisions and actions of Nazi-era professionals. FASPE offers programs for graduate students and professionals, integrating history and contemporary ethical issues.

This is the second event in our co-sponsorship with FASPE. Our first was a conversation with three alumni of both FASPE and the IGL, as well as Talia Weiss, a new ally in our concern of science, technology, ethics, and international security.

Don Thieme

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

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

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

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

In Memoriam - Yaron Ezrahi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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