Global Engagement in a Changing World
The Elliott School’s mission to develop the next generation of international leaders requires a degree of forecasting what looms next on the horizon. The dean’s speaker series titled What’s Next in Foreign Affairs, which the school inaugurated last spring, aims to do just that. In its first year, the series featured three events on global topics: the conflict in Ukraine; cities that engage on the international stage, and the global refugee crisis.
On March 1, five panelists with a wide range of expertise addressed the “Conflict in Ukraine” a mere six days after Russia attacked that country.
Marlene Laruelle, director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, said many experts miscalculated how strategically Russia saw Ukraine, and thus underestimated its threshold to inflict and receive pain. She predicted no winner will emerge, and even if Russia’s military triumph—which is less certain than it seemed in March—President Vladimir Putin galvanized the European Union, legitimized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, reinforced the transatlantic relationship, and lost Germany.
Dr. Laruelle added that a new Ukraine—with a mature leadership—and a new Russia have emerged. “I think we should be very careful in wishing the Russian regime to fail, because the chance of having something nicer arriving after is not there,” she said.
March 1, 2022, event recording: Conflict in Ukraine
Ambassador Kurt Volker, M.A. ’87, a former U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations (2017-19) and U.S. ambassador to NATO (2008-09), recommended distinguishing between Putin and Russia, especially given how notoriously inaccurate polling can be about what Russians really believe.
“I don’t think that the Russian people support this war on Ukraine,” he said.
Amb. Volker also contextualized the current war, which reflects Putin’s longstanding desire to rebuild the Russian Empire upon the former Soviet Union lines. When Putin said that 22 years ago, many thought he meant reforming lawlessness following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “But he clearly had something else in mind,” he said.
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea—which shocked Ukrainians and the West—without any bullets fired, and after Russia’s efforts to fake an uprising in Eastern Ukraine, Putin may have seen Ukraine as vulnerable given Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s then-low approval ratings (in the 20s, following 70 percent when he was elected), according to Amb. Volker. The Russian leader was also very isolated during the Covid pandemic, he added, predicting that powerful Russians will give Putin, who seems to be acting irrationally, a very short leash before removing him.
Alexander Downes, co-director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, drew on his research on regime changes—including in his 2021 book Catastrophic Success—to analyze Russia’s effort to replace Zelensky with a puppet.
The kind of puppet Putin has in mind simply does not work, according to Dr. Downes. It leads to civil wars and insurgency, and it ultimately worsens relations between the two countries.
The kind of puppet Putin has in mind simply does not work, according to Dr. Downes. It leads to civil wars and insurgency, and it ultimately worsens relations between the two countries. As the puppet is increasingly inclined toward the puppetmaster, it moves further (“interest divergence”) from the population it ostensibly serves, which is why puppets don’t tend to survive long, he said.
Charlie Glaser, Dr. Downes’ co-director at ISCS, said that U.S. policy has been good so far, but it should have dangled something tempting to Putin in negotiations to avoid war. He suggested that chip should have been taking Ukrainian NATO membership off the table in the near term.
“It’s a violation of principle, but not a big action concession,” he said. And it would give Putin a very important opportunity to save face. “We need to balance out imposing very large punishments on the one hand, without totally undermining him on the other hand,” he said. Dr. Glaser added that Washington must—preferably quietly—make clear to China that it should not assume from what is going on in Ukraine that the United States will stand by if it invades Taiwan.
The current economic sanctions are very serious... but just as Cuban, North Korean, Iranian, and Iraqi leaders have persisted in their megalomaniac goals to the detriment of their sanctioned populations, Putin is unlikely to yield due to sanctions.
On the sanctions front, Michael Moore, professor of economics and international affairs, said that sanctions are generally thought to either punish or alter behavior. Yet they are often “feel-good efforts” that avoid military action.
The current economic sanctions are very serious, particularly suspending the Russian central bank’s ability to defend the ruble, but just as Cuban, North Korean, Iranian, and Iraqi leaders have persisted in their megalomaniac goals to the detriment of their sanctioned populations, Putin is unlikely to yield due to sanctions, Dr. Moore said.
Still, many countries—including the typically hesitant Germany—moved very rapidly to impose the sanctions. “I’d be stunned if Putin was not stunned with that ability to coordinate those efforts,” he said.
Dr. Moore is skeptical that sanctions can persist for a long time, but he thinks there is already a kind-of regime change, since no one will see Russia as a sound place to invest in the future.
Three weeks after the very-thorough discussion about Ukraine, the speaker series hosted Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles, on March 22 to discuss “Cities on the Global Stage.”
Alyssa Ayres, Elliott School dean and professor of history and international affairs, explained in her introduction that city governments, and other “subnational” and local actors, are increasingly engaging with international affairs. This has not traditionally been the case, she said.
The mayor attributed his global perspective to having grown up in a city “where you can see the face of the world on the streets of Los Angeles and vice versa.”
“I think that we very much would have to create a Los Angeles if one didn’t exist. It’s kind of at this intersection of North America, Latin America, and the Pacific rim, the most dynamic kind of intersection arguably in the world,” he said. “Everything we do depends on those global ties.”
March 22, 2022, event recording: Cities on the Global Stage
Mr. Garcetti identified climate change, the interconnected economy, and justice and anti-poverty work as his three main focuses.
“Our world faces the biggest challenge of our lifetimes and maybe in human history with climate change, so I don’t see that in any way retreating,” he said.
He noted that cities, especially as they are organized globally in networks like C40 Cities (which actually has 96 city members), are “the factory floors of the change that needs to happen.”
International collaboration is baked into everything the city does, like when it paved streets with lighter asphalt to mitigate what’s called “heat island effect,” Los Angeles received calls from all over the world asking how cities could co-bid to bring the price down globally.
Asked about his advice for students, one of the things Mr. Garcetti said was: “Don’t fetishize that national level. Really embed yourself at a local level, and put down roots.”
“Your conversations at the global level are only as strong as your local roots. If you know a block, or you know a street, or you know a neighborhood, or even if you can try to figure out a city, a city is a pretty complicated place. You’re going to speak with the specificity and authority that so often we lack when we get to the highest-level conversations,” he said.
The final event of the series last academic year, “On the Frontlines of the Global Refugee Crisis,” was held on April 20. It featured Krish O’Mara Vignaraja, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and a former policy director for First Lady Michelle Obama. Vignarajah, who immigrated to the United States at 9-months-old due to the Sri Lankan civil war, said her life experience motivated her to work in refugee aid.
“For me, it was about appreciating my good fortune and figuring out how I could pay it forward,” she said, as quoted in the GW Hatchet.
“We know that climate and the crisis will be the top driver of migration in the 21st century,” she added, per the Hatchet. “When you look at the numbers, they could overwhelm the system by 2050. We could have 200 million migrants who are fleeing slow or sudden-onset disasters, and it’s something that hits close to home, because obviously Americans are experiencing this ourselves.”
The Office of Graduate Student Services (GSS) provides a one-stop location for the full cycle of graduate student development. Centralized services offer Elliott students a strategic advantage as they advance in their careers and find success all over the world as leaders and professionals.
As GSS celebrated Elliott’s first year fully in person since March 2020, students found jobs in diplomacy, security, international service and the private sector. In 2021, the rate of students employed within six months of graduation jumped from 85% to 90%. Of those, 60% benefited from the experience of an internship in their second year of study. Students sought jobs in three main sectors of employment: 37.9% public; 26.7% private; and 28.6% in nonprofit industries. Compared to past years, there was an uptick in the nonprofit sector and a slight drop in the public sector.
More highlights from the year:
- 21 Finalists in the Presidential Management Fellowship (PMF) program—the largest percentage of any school at GW.
- 65 networking, informational, and skills building events held.
- In person Site Visits resumed for the first time since the pandemic.
Class of 2021 by the Numbers
Source: December 2020 - August 2021 Graduate Employment Report
Main Sectors of Employment
37.9%
Public
27.7%
Private
28.6%
Non-profit
Public Sector Breakdown
Private Sector Breakdown
Non-profit Sector Breakdown
Years of Experience Prior to Elliott
Completed an internship during the program
Over the last two summers, the Elliott School of International Affairs and Institute for International Science and Technology Policy program offered a new science diplomacy course for graduate students. This course provides the opportunity to explore a discipline that has become increasingly important in an ever-connected world. Students took field trips to places such as the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation and Institute to get feedback and evaluation and visited Dr. Florent Bernard, the science counselor of the EU Delegation to the U.S.
This past summer, adjunct professors Derya Buyuktanir Karacan, visiting scholar and program manager at EURAXESS North America, and Anthony Eames, historian of nuclear technologies and director of scholarly initiatives at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute co-taught the class.
Eames, who also taught the course in summer of 2021, answered questions on teaching science diplomacy and some of its inner workings.
Why is it important to teach science diplomacy to international affairs students?
Historically, scientists have had a really profound impact on both geopolitical alliances and adversarial relationships. But as a field of study in theoretical terms, it’s a relatively new field of study. It's been understood in different ways in academia over the years, but it's really not until the turn of the 20th to 21st century that there's a more concerted effort to examine how scientists have behaved like diplomats, how scientists understood their role and expertise in the management of international relations, and how an increasingly globalized and technologically-advanced world required scientists to play a larger role in defining our relations with each other, both interpersonally and internationally. You started to see this with climate change and with pandemics. You started to see this as things that we thought of as previously being the domain of massive industrial powers like nuclear weapons or biological weapons and whatnot become available to developing countries. So, all of a sudden, it became quite apparent we need to think more seriously about not only the role of scientists and the role of diplomats who utilize scientific knowledge in these things, but also think of other moral obligations.
Scientific authority has become this kind of new pillar of authority in the public sphere—alongside government, corporate power and religious institutions—and it’s been seized by the people everywhere to forge new relationships and connections.
How does Science Diplomacy differ from traditional diplomacy performed by the State Department?
Diplomacy, in the way I view it, is an ordering of knowledge claims. Take an issue like abortion. You're ordering certain sets of religious knowledge claims, certain sets of scientific knowledge claims, certain sense of medical knowledge claims and lived experiences that bring together a personal knowledge claim. And you're deciding which one of those claims has governing authority over the rest. Science diplomacy differs in the sense that you're giving priority to science as the most important knowledge claim to be made. And oftentimes, that means science overrules security rationales or over cultural sensitivities. It means that science is used to support or buttress another knowledge claim or another power claim to overcome a competitor.
I think it’s become a critical tool for social movements and a critical tool for integrating local actors and local knowledge into a broader transnational understanding of issues in the world. Science, in some ways provides a check, if properly used, on governing political power.
How does science become corrupt?
Science is fundamentally international in practice. Scientific norms that we understand are international, and that knowledge should be for all. It shouldn't be secret; it shouldn't be monopolized. It is an international community which can run counter to the kind of national prejudices or national objectives that are often part of nations' diplomacy. So, in that sense, the internationalism of science often comes into complex conflict with the national prerogatives of security or economy. Science is fundamentally diplomatic, but it’s in a constant fight with itself over where the money comes from. Money from science comes overwhelmingly from national governments and military projects. A huge strain of science diplomacy is reconciling those two competing issues of the fundamental international nature of science, and at the same time, the bounty of support that comes from militarization or military projects from national government. There's a tension there that makes it unique.
This class was taught this summer as we kind of had a reflective view of how governments handled COVID. What did the pandemic teach us about science diplomacy?
That's a lesson I think we're still learning. It's taught us some ugly things about the limits of science diplomacy. It perhaps retaught us a lesson that we've been taught time and time again and still failed to learn, and that’s the importance of science communication and the need for better science communication, but also higher degrees of scientific literacy. In one way, the scientific experts themselves need to be better science communicators, and that is true. But we also need to prepare the more the general public to be better receivers to scientific communication.
And I hate to say it, but I think it showed the hubris of our scientific experts and scientific leaders because what it revealed wasn't so much that their scientific and technical knowledge was lacking, but that they underestimated or didn't have a firm enough grasp on the social structures of science and how science relates to society, and certainly the pandemic fundamentally changed the way science relates to society.
For someone interested in Science Diplomacy, what other kinds of courses and academic subjects should they be taking?
It's important to marry theory and practice. So, for one, I think a general history of science course is necessary. Then, the standard kind of foreign service and international affairs degrees apply. Being a historian, I recommend a strong general knowledge of history. And then I’d say you need to take a non-western history course. The obvious would be Chinese and Russian history. Those bring to light different conceptions of science and natural knowledge that are really important for understanding science diplomacy.