The pair will perform music from their self-titled album on Saturday March 2, 2024 at the Yale Schwarzman Center.

Notes from the Interviewer: The first time I heard Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei’s “The Roving Cowboy / Avarguli (阿瓦尔古丽),” I was washing dishes in my kitchen. I turned off the tap to hear it better and stood over the sink for eight minutes letting the song unspool around me. I could feel their long friendship in their work. There is no gimmick in their collaboration. In an era of rising nationalism, their music is testament to the value of human-to-human connection. As Abby says in this interview: “we have some deep cultural differences, but we have some massive shared territory as human beings.”

Megan: How did the two of you meet?

AW: Fei and I met because we have a mutual friend named Nick Forster. Nick runs a radio program called E-Town out of Boulder, Colorado. He and I had been friends for a long time. He knew my deep connection to China, and I had even played Chinese music on his show, with American musicians. And so when he saw Fei… where was it? Was it a bookshop?

WF: It was a bookstore I played after I moved to Boulder. I think he gave me his business card afterwards. I didn’t know anything about E-Town.

AW: He saw Fei playing and knew right away that she was really special, which she is. He connected us. I was playing outside of Boulder a few months later, in a little church schoolhouse with Bela Fleck and Casey Driessen and Ben Sollee. We asked her if she’d come jam with us on stage that night. It was just a very chill little show for a small community up in the mountains. And she did! She came. She drove up in this little clunker of a station wagon and pulled this beautiful big guzheng of her car, and had this bubbly, fun, sassy way about her. I just fell in love with her. We played music together, and then we stayed in touch by email, as you did back in those days—I guess that was 2006. 

Our lives paralleled in a lot of ways: world travels, playing music, connecting to Chinese and American folk traditions. And then also just breaking up with boyfriends and getting married and having children—it all kind of sort of happened at the same time for us, when we could really relate to each other.

WF: You covered everything in the best way. When we met in 2006, I was on tour in Europe a lot, because my solo record had come out in Italy. Abby was touring more in the US and China. So we really stayed in touch just through emails. America is big. It’s not easy to see each other if your paths don’t cross. Later, I moved back to Beijing for a few years. And that’s actually when Abby and I got to play together more, because she was touring China every year. I wasn’t touring as much because I’d had two babies. 

We reconnected after my family and I moved to Nashville in 2015. Still, it wasn’t easy to get work done together because we’d both just had babies. It’s just hard to work when you’re exhausted. We’re in that stage, as mothers, as women, dealing with the household stuff. We’d get a nanny to come over and watch the two babies—and then the three babies, and then the four babies—so we could work.

AW: Slowly, over many years, we shared folk songs with each other and figured out how they pieced together. Then my husband, Bela, offered to produce our album.

WF: Bela doesn’t easily just choose a project to work on. He must have known that there was something special when he watched us rehearse. Because normally you can’t pay him to sit through something. 

AW: [laughter] Right. And by that time he had a strong understanding of the material. As a producer he knew our expertise and our strengths, and how to weave us together.

Megan: How would each of you define folk music? What drew you to this music within your own artistic practice? I’d also be really interested in hearing the names of people who you think are in your sort of artistic legacy as musicians. Who are the people who are, metaphorically, in the room with you as you make work?

AW: I like that way of putting it. When I think of Fei and I making music, I think of a number of folk musicians—honestly, mostly dead ones—who have had a big impact on me through recordings.

One person Fei and I both love a lot is Doc Watson. He was my entry point into old-timey folk music from Southern Appalachia. I also think about artists like Blind Willie Johnson, Reverend Gary Davis, Mahalia Jackson, Roscoe Holcomb, Peggy Seger—the whole Seeger family, but more Mike and Peggy than Pete, honestly; as well as their parents, who did a lot of the recording and transcribing that you find in the Library of Congress. Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Buell Kazee, great old banjo picker and singer. Ola Belle Reed. Texas Gladden. I mean, I could go on and on, so I think I’ll stop there. But that’s what’s influenced me: a long list of recordings of this old beautiful folk music from Southern Appalachia, from the delta and the plains of the South. 

This music is derived from the coming together of cultures during the institution of slavery. You had all kinds of African peoples being forced through the Caribbean during the slave trade. The lore—although you can’t find it written anywhere—is that slave traders would take musicians first, because they’d discovered that more of their human cargo would survive the journey to America if they heard the sound of music. So almost every slave ship had local musicians on board. This meant that different kinds of lutes from all over Africa—the akonting and the ngoni, from West Gambia and Gambia and Senegal and Mali—came through the Caribbean and resulted in the invention of the banjo in America. 

So you had a melding of African diasporic traditions on plantations in the Southeast. Then you had immigrants from Western Europe: either poor ones coming to America to escape famine, like from Ireland and Scotland; or the English and the French and the Germans, who came to try to “discover” their new wealth on the Eastern seaboard. All those cultures were at play. 

Another story that’s fascinating to me is that white plantation masters and their families would hire dance masters to come over from France and Germany and England to come and teach the local whites how to dance. But the dance masters needed musicians. So the plantation master would hire a poor Irish immigrant to come and fiddle—not for much, since the Irish were pretty low on the rung of the caste system back then—and the African musicians on the plantation would learn the songs as well. Improvisational aspects of African musical culture—and I have to say African, even though it’s unfair to treat a continent like a country, because one of the tragedies of slavery is that it made it impossible to parse out distinct lineages—and banjo music blended with Scottish and Irish fiddling. That’s the oral tradition that I’ve become a part of.

Very little of it is actually set repertoire within music. It’s stuff you have to go seek out in recordings, or learn from other people at jam sessions. I’m really proud to be a part of that tradition because of the impact it’s had. The world has been integrated by this music. People didn’t even know it was happening. They enjoyed the process of being integrated. Our nationalistic and fearful race barriers— mostly perpetrated by people who want to make money—have kept us from seeing it and feeling it on a more intellectual level, and letting it be more a part of our mainstream self-awareness as a culture. But we’ve been heavily integrated by our arts from the very beginning of this country. That’s what this American music that I play is.

And it’s very, very different from Chinese folk music, which I’d love to hear Fei talk a little bit about. It’s an incredibly diverse world of music as well.

WF: I actually wouldn’t call myself a Chinese folk musician. I’m more of an observer. I was basically chosen to do music at the age of two and went through a very rigorous conservatory training. There are so many Chinese folk songs because the culture is so long. They’ve all been institutionalized within the conservatory. I thought of folk music as one of the subjects I needed to study to fulfill my degree.

But now, when I look back, there was folk music everywhere. I was steeped in it. There’s a word in Chinese, xūn, which is an action word, meaning “smoke.” Imagine you burn incense in a room for forty years. Imagine I’m a piece of wood in that room. The smoke goes into the wood for forty years. That wood comes out smelling like incense. That’s me. The burning and the smoke is all the music, including the institutionalized music and the daily sounds of the streets.

My home was in the center of Beijing. There were lots of parks where people just sang opera with little bands. That was just a part of the culture. When you walked out the door, that was the sound of the neighborhood. I don’t know if it counts as folk music, because they were singing opera repertoire. But that’s the culture. You wake up, you hear some pigeons flying overhead, you hear old people far away singing opera—that’s just my entire upbringing.

But I think “folk” music is people singing about their lives. That’s why I say I’m an observer. I don’t wash clothes by hand. So I can’t come up with clothes-washing songs. I use a washing machine and a dryer. If someone makes up words about that process, that would be folk music. It’s in every culture and time period. It’s humans expressing loss, love, and craving, and work, and cooking.

When I think of who is in the room when I make music, it would be my parents. That also goes back to my upbringing. Singing is very big in Chinese culture, in the household. A lot of the folk tunes I learned were from my parents. They were constantly singing. Of course, they were arguing. But the best moments of my life were when they started singing.

I also think about my professors at the China Conservatory of Music. One part of my training to be a composer was to memorize about 300 folk songs in one semester. Another semester was to learn Chinese operas from different regions, sung in the local dialects. Another was to learn Chinese shuochang, a traditional speaking/singing music form.

Those music forms have been around for centuries, if not for more than a thousand years. During school, we would go to different villages to make field recordings and learn the music of different provinces. I don’t know if they do that any more; it’s very costly, and it’s such a different country now. They might not value these things.

But I can’t name particular folk musicians, because folk musicians in my world have been so institutionalized. They’re folk music professors teaching at conservatories. I actually had a hard time finding folk musicians in the villages. I would say, “I’ve learned some songs historically from your village. Do you know anyone who sings?” They were like, “who sings? Nobody sings. My life’s too hard. No one sings.” I would be like “ok, sorry.”

So I see myself as an observer rather than a folk musician. But I love folk songs. I’m an observer and I want to share the culture and the music, beautiful melodies and songs and stories. But what I create is not folk music.

Megan: What is your relationship with national identity? Have tensions between the American and Chinese governments become a presence in your work?

WF: I don’t think about these things when I make music. I don’t see myself as representing anything else but myself. But I can’t control what other people think of me or what category they put me in based on what I look like or the music I play. I can’t change other people’s perspectives. But they don’t know me. 

Music is human to human. It’s person to person. But unfortunately government people, who are a different species of people, see the world very differently. They have a very different purpose and ego. And they use artists as tools.

If anything can come out of our collaboration, I would love for people to learn to care about individuals. And for artists to not fall into the trap of being used as tools. I don’t trust government people in any way. They’re master manipulators. We don’t have their capacity to manipulate the world. Musicians and government people are different species, I have to say.

But maybe because I’m quite firm about what I do and why I do it, I don’t attract the wrong kind of people. I feel I’ve only been appreciated, either in the US or elsewhere. I just do human-to-human interaction. When the other kind of human species smells that, they see they can’t use me as a tool. So they disappear. When they can’t control you, they fear you. And you cannot let them control you. You have such a short lifetime. You have to find your own tribe. 

AW: I’ve enjoyed watching you, Fei, draw your lines. I remember a few years ago you were approached about being on the Chinese version of The Voice. And you didn’t say, “ooh, I could get in front of a billion people and play my music.” It was more like, “hell no. Somebody is going to put me up there and tell me what to do and how to do it. I’m not that person. That’s not what I do.”

WF: I had completely forgotten about that. I mean, I just was like, “I’m not going to be your clown.” There’s a lot of talent being discovered on that show. But so many of them ended up in such a tragic, miserable life. That’s not the life I want. I started giving public performances as a soloist at a very young age, and went to school with China’s mega music stars in high school and college. I saw the huge price those musicians had to pay in life from young to older. It was a sad life. Nothing about that kind of life attracts me.

AW: I’ve so appreciated Fei’s perspective, about just being who you are as a musician and letting the rest fall where it falls. It’s a great way to be. It’s helped me a lot. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in wanting success of one sort or another. But if you have to be anything other than exactly the artist you are to get that success, do something else. 

WF: We’re at this age. We’re mothers. We’ve lived a lot longer than—well, I realize we may be speaking to a bunch of undergrad students. I want them to know that life is long, and it’s a very complex world.

Megan: Abby, what about your relationship with the US government?

AW: There was a period of time in the early aughts—about 2004 to 2012—when I had a relationship with the US State Department. I was doing independent touring through a couple of foreigners who lived in China. Really low-budget, playing little bars and stuff. The foreigners who lived in those towns would come out and see me. 

Often there were one or two people who worked at the consulates who would be there. Mention of my name worked its way up the ranks. By 2007, I had attracted the attention of the State Department. They said, “hey, there’s this girl who can go around and talk about American folk music in Chinese and do performances for Chinese audiences that connect,” and they started setting me up with second gigs in local universities and colleges in each of the markets I was already touring. I’d play a little bar in Chongqing, and the next day I’d play Chongqing Normal University. I’d play a little theater in Chengdu, and then the next day I’d play at the Chengdu Animal Husbandry College.

So every year, between 2007-2012, I had a State Department tour. I was way into it. I consider myself a full participant in the American folk music scene. I’m capable enough of sharing stories about the history of American folk music, and folk music itself. I was comfortable and excited to share this information. Nobody asked me to be anything other than what I was. I got to be exactly who I wanted to be and do exactly what I wanted to do, and I just got to do it with audiences that I never would have gotten to do it without the State Department. They were just like, “go do your thing.”

I was approached a couple of times by different Chinese organizations to do things for them. And I started to engage in two different instances. I quickly figured out they wanted to turn me into something that I wasn’t. I immediately became uncomfortable and pulled out. I just said, “I don’t know how to be anything other than this. I don’t mind wearing a cool outfit or something, but you can’t tell me what to sing and how to sing it and how to hold my hand or my head.” I don’t do that.

Then just the relationship between China and the US just became more and more and more strained. It just became really sad. Then I had kids. Honestly, that’s the real reason I stopped engaging as much as I had before. I had children and I didn’t want to leave them. So I really can’t speak to the US-China connection through music past about 2013. I feel like if I was given an opportunity through the State Department to do something similar to what I had done in the past, where I just do what I do and I do it in front of Chinese audiences—I would do that again.

WF: The State Department—well, they’re Americans. Americans’ understanding of how artists sing or play is very different from the Chinese side. The Chinese always want to have control. You can’t sing these lyrics or those lyrics. You have to submit the lyrics to be reviewed first. It’s like a cultural thing, almost. In a family, in a household, the father must be the king. He decides for everybody how you bow, how you eat, how you hold your rice bowl. This just didn’t pop out because of the CCP. It’s been like this for 2,000 years.

So it’s very uncomfortable for individuality to blossom, which is what art is about. It’s not about collectivism or praising authority. It should be the opposite. But in Chinese culture, it’s not. It was said even by Confucius: music is a great tool to control people. So that’s the firm belief: music is to unify. So people will fight the war when they hear the war song.

But on the American side, actually—I think America is a very special place. Maybe my bar is too low. I mean, it’s just much more relaxing making music here in the U.S. No one’s going to force you to play a certain song. Even the State Department: they just say, “play whatever you want.” But in China, they will check every little thing. 

Nonetheless, the people are just people. They’re the same as people everywhere who just want to make a better life. But the governments culturally just don’t get each other. 

AW: There’s no trust at this moment. There’s just none. Back then, there was a certain amount of trust between the Cultural Bureau of China and the State Department folks. It was a special moment that I got to be a part of. I even got to tour Tibet, which is just unheard of.

WF: It’s very difficult now for Americans to go to Tibet.

AW: I was the first and only band to officially tour Tibet. I’m sure people have gone in there and played their guitars and had gigs at bars and stuff like that. But I actually got to play at the Animal Husbandry College, Tibet University, Lhasa High School—it was absolutely amazing.

WF: I’m the same age as Abby, so I also benefited from this open window of time—a ten to twenty years’ honeymoon era between the two countries. My professors at China Conservatory of Music invited musicians from England, from Australia, from Hungary, from Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and America—everywhere. It was because of that sentiment of being open, wanting to learn, wanting to exchange. It was the rising global atmosphere.

And then somehow, it got to where things are now. We’re not even that old yet, and it’s already closed? Already enemies? 

AW: I know. It’s so insane. It’s so sad. I just appreciate my friendship with Fei on so many levels. She understands my US context and the world that I got to be a part of in China, and I have a strong sense of the world she’s run in as well, in both countries. She has a broader sense of who I am than probably most of my friends could ever understand. I’m just really glad to have somebody who can see me in that way. I get to be the full me because Fei exists here.

One wish I have to put out there over and over again is that mainland Chinese people and American people had more of a way to just see each other. Yeah, we have some deep cultural differences, but we have some massive shared territory as human beings. It’s really sad that we have these keepers right now that are pulling us further and further and further apart, and making it possible for them to incite war and commit violence against each other because of how they’re isolating us. We’ve got abusers right now that are keeping us from each other. I think it’s really, really sad. 

Those barriers need to break down somehow. We need to have some fun together, make some music, and have some food. Talk about whatever’s bothering us about our husbands. There’s so much to share and enjoy.

WF: How do we get less ego-maniacal decision-making people into office? It’s not about just who’s got a big dick. Maybe women should be in office because we don’t have that kind of ego. We just want to solve problems. We’re multitaskers.

There are no direct flights between the U.S. and China at the moment. I know Chinese friends who have to fly to Ethiopia to go to China because there’s no direct flights. It’s getting more difficult to get visas. And a lot of Americans think “oh, China is scary now,” and then there’s not enough customers for airlines to resume those flights. All these obstacles are actually concrete policies that someone made.

Yale kids are smart. If you want success, solve that problem. Make that your target.

AW: Let’s get these badass Yale students working on this! Because I think it will bring them joy. And it will put their energies in the right direction. How do we pull down some of these barriers? Let’s get more of a love moment going around here.

Megan: The headline of this interview is just going to be: “it’s not about who has the big dick.” 

WF: [Laughter] So done with big dicks.

This interview was conducted by Megan Wright on February 9, 2023.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Abigail Washburn (left) and Wu Fei (right) | Image courtesy the Kurland Agency

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Haywood: Could you summarize your career and what has brought you now to Yale and the Jackson School?

De Ruyter: I’ve been working in the energy sector for more than 30 years. I started in coal, I’ve worked in natural gas, I’ve worked in oil, I’ve worked in electricity. I worked in many African countries – Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Ethiopia, and Nigeria – and then also lived for a period in China where I led a very large energy project, and I also ran a business in Germany for a while. My really broad range of international experience eventually culminated in my being appointed to the position of Group Chief Executive of Eskom, the South African national power utility. I was in that job for a period of three years. That sounds like a very short time, but it was the longest tenure of my ten predecessors. So it was quite a remarkable achievement in and of itself to stick it out for that long 

Eventually, I was confronted with a significant degree of corruption and malfeasance in the energy business there in South Africa. That made it extremely challenging to turn the business around and to implement some of the decarbonization initiatives that I had identified and for which I’d obtained significant financing from the international and multilateral financing communities. I then tendered my resignation. I also wrote a book about my experiences at Eskom, Truth to Power, that has been a bestseller. The Guardian in London has nominated this as one of the top five books by whistleblowers internationally. I was also recently nominated one of the top 100 Most Influential Africans by New African magazine. 

I was very happy when the opportunity came along last year for me to share some of my experiences and insights into decarbonization and climate finance with Yale. This opportunity is mainly due to the Jackson School, but also because of the Yale School of the Environment and School of Management, where I am currently lecturing on climate finance with a particular emphasis on developing countries. 

Haywood: That’s fantastic. If we can back up to right before you joined Eskom – what drove you to want to take the position as Group Chief Executive, especially when you knew about the high turnover rate among Eskom’s leaders in the past?

De Ruyter: I’ve often described my motivation as a combination of naivety and idealism. I strongly believe in a sense of civic duty: I think that citizens who sit on the sidelines and criticize and complain without being prepared to go out there and be part of the solution to the problems that they’re criticizing, forfeit their right to complain to a certain extent. If you’re not prepared to be part of the solution, if you’re not prepared to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in the mud and sort out what irks you in the society that you live in, then maybe it’s time for you to go look for another country. 

So when I received the offer, I thought to myself that, yes, electricity shortfalls, corruption – these are major issues plaguing South Africa. I had been fortunate enough to gain experiences that could be relevant in helping to address these shortfalls. And when the call came to ask whether I would be interested (it wasn’t a job that I applied for I must add) I accepted. I said, I’ll do this because I feel it’s my duty as a South African to do so. 

Kushi: I’m curious to learn more about Eskom’s leadership and how appointment to that role works. How did the government decide on you? What do you think the future leaders of Eskom will need to do to turn it around? 

De Ruyter: I guess that I was a fairly controversial appointment. For key government and parastatal appointments, of which the Eskom job certainly is one, the ruling party and government typically appoint somebody who is a loyal party member and can be counted upon to toe the party line. I definitely don’t fall into that category as I was a member of a political party thirty years ago, but since then, I’ve had no formal political affiliation, and certainly have not been a supporter of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party in South Africa. Be that as it may, I ran an industrial company as chief executive, where the chairman was the former Central Bank governor, similar to the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the US. Eventually, this gentleman left to become South Africa’s Minister of Finance. He and I got along really well at a personal level. There was a lot of mutual respect, I have a very high regard for his integrity and intellect. He was instrumental in suggesting me as a potential candidate for the job. Apparently, this was after they had already offered the position to 23 other candidates, who had already turned it down. I was the last man standing. 

Darragi: Mr. de Ruyter, the South African government has made several proposals for reforming Eskom. One of them is to divide Escom into three separate entities for generation, transmission, and distribution. Do you think that this proposal is efficient? And if not, what is perhaps another alternative that you propose? 

De Ruyter: I think this type of structural utility reform is absolutely critical for the electricity industry in South Africa to move forward. It’s not a particularly novel structural reform; this path has been trodden by, I think at last count, 126 other countries, where generation was separated from the transmission business and from the distribution business. It’s pretty much how the US electricity industry is set up as well, obviously subject to appropriate regulation and oversight to ensure that the environment is protected and that the rights of the consumer are protected, and so forth. In order to attract sufficient private investment in energy, and in particular to the generation sector which is where the biggest demand is for new capital, a disaggregated utility has proven to be a critical enabler in other cases. The old days of a monolithic monopolistic utility that could supply electricity at a rate below the cost of production, to a small minority of people in the country – those days are gone for good in South Africa. And there’s absolutely no way in which that construct can, or should, be resurrected. I’m fully supportive of that structural reform; it’s the right way forward for the utility to go.

Haywood: We’ve been dancing around the topic of the South African energy crisis for a bit here and I just want to make sure we take a step back and ask you, what do you think the root causes of the current energy crisis are and what is the context that led to the current situation?

De Ruyter: I think for students attending the Jackson School this can serve as a bit of a case study, really, as to what happens when there’s a policy failure. So in 1998, the South African government published a white paper, which was essentially a policy document that set out what the objectives are for dealing with the electricity industry going forward. And in that document, a mention was made that Eskom would no longer be allowed to build new generation capacity because the paper said there would instead be reforms to the energy sector that would allow the private sector to come in and build that generation capacity.

Now, building that generation capacity was crucial due to two factors. First, an expected growth in consumption, bearing in mind that the economy was growing and the largely African community that had been disadvantaged in terms of electricity supply, amongst many other things, under the apartheid era, were now being served with electricity connection, so the demand for electricity had suddenly increased substantially. The second element is that it was already anticipated back then that the aging coal fleet would have to be retired and replaced. Any mechanical piece of equipment has a finite age – you don’t see many 50-year-old cars on the road anymore, they all eventually break down and then need to be replaced.

Now, what happened was that the government effectively told Eskom they may not build new power stations but did not follow through on the policies required to enable the private sector and private investments to come in and fill in that gap of electricity demand. As a consequence, the reserve margin that South Africa had available very quickly got eroded by poor performance from the aging fleet, exacerbated by corruption, as well as an increase in demand. And that led to the first incidences of load shedding, which are rotational blackouts imposed on the community from between four to twelve hours per day. Load shedding is quite onerous and disruptive not only to domestic life but also obviously to business and industry. This has now been a feature of the South African landscape for 22 years and counting. The whole situation is really a classic case study of what happens if ideas are not translated into policies that are not translated into legislation and then implemented in order to achieve the objectives that governments have in mind.

Kushi: You mentioned a little bit about corruption in South Africa and Eksom, and it’s something I’ve heard you talk about in interviews before. What do you think made Eskom particularly vulnerable to corruption?

De Ruyter: I think that this has been the result of the change in the nature of Eskom from a standalone power utility that had one objective – to generate, transmit, and supply electricity at the lowest possible cost – to what is known as a state-owned enterprise, run by a board that was appointed by the ruling party. And that created a temptation to appoint people who would be pliable, people who would accede to the wishes of politicians, who wouldn’t have moral qualms about engaging in corrupt practices. That’s exactly what happened. There have been many cases that have gone through the courts here or have been exposed in the media that contained the elements of what’s called state capture, where the resources of the state are abused by politicians in corrupt association with private sector actors, and where these malfeasances then translate into corruption. And you actually create an environment where corruption can thrive, because you allow the normal principles of good corporate governance to be thrown out the window.

Just to prove the hypothesis that I’m putting forward, just about every state-owned enterprise, – and there are over 400 of them in South Africa, some are big and some are small – just about every one of them has been a hotbed of corruption since changing this model. So there are clear structural reasons why corruption got a foot in the door very soon after this change in political oversight and political involvement, or even interference, in running the affairs of state-owned entities.

Haywood: Why do you think corruption in South Africa is so persistent, especially given its broad recognition among the people? Public figures like you have called out corruption, I’m thinking of the recent commission into the subject, the Zondo Commission, which gave a very deep dive into looking at corruption in South Africa. It’s a very acknowledged problem. But what makes it so stubborn?

De Ruyter: You know, one of the spokespersons of the government, Smuts Ngonyama, made a very revealing comment about five, six years ago. He said, “I did not join the struggle [against apartheid] to be poor.” So there is this prevalent notion that access to the levers of power entitles you to access to financial wealth. Of course, one must be very careful. You cannot blame only the politicians, because in every corrupt relationship, there are two parties. There’s a corruptor and a corruptee. I think we absolutely need to acknowledge that private sector actors gleefully participated in the corruption. Some of them were very well-known international names: Deloitte; McKinsey; SAP, the German software company; and ABB, which is a major Swiss company. So it’s a two-way street.

But I do think that the opportunity that people had to abuse the positions of power that they were put in without appropriate checks and balances, and without the right consequence management in terms of successful law enforcement prosecution, followed by exemplary terms of incarceration; in the absence of those normal measures of control, corruption just took over and ran like wildfire. There was a specific focus by the ruling party, the ANC, to reduce the effectiveness of the anti-corruption entity, an independent investigative body called the Scorpions. The Scorpions were disbanded at the insistence of the annual Congress of the ANC which said we can’t have these people prying into our affairs. This was the same conference at which the very effective but fairly unpopular President of the African National Conference, Thabo Mbeki, was unceremoniously defenestrated and replaced by Jacob Zuma. And if you’re familiar with the Zondo report, you’ll know that during the Zuma years, state capture and corruption became completely rampant. This was because the institutions that were supposed to maintain adequate oversight over government procurement practices, which is how funds flow from government to private sector actors, were deliberately dismantled and undermined.

In your studies, you’ve likely already come across a book called Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. What that book really is about is institutions. Once you undermine institutions, that’s when states fail. Corruption and undermining of institutions has not particularly got anything to do with Africa, per se. The United States also went through periods of rampant corruption and the undermining of institutions. You might argue that’s an inevitable cycle that societies go through. But we certainly are in the middle of fighting corruption in a very challenging and very significant way.

Kushi: What do you think are some strategies that South Africans, whether they be government members or people in the private sector can take to stop corruption?

De Ruyter: One of the big elements that should be implemented is to ensure that there’s adequate transparency in public procurement. Thirty years ago, tenders – bids for providing goods or services to public entities – were opened in public and the numbers were read out in public. Now, of course, some of these tenders are very complicated, they’re very technical, they’re subject to adjustment, and they’re not always easy to compare. But the transparency that is introduced by a public opening of documents, so that there’s no opportunity to “lose” a bid, or there’s no opportunity to quickly adjust the numbers, because it’s opened right there when everybody’s present, and all the bidders can say “yes, that’s the number that I wrote into my document.” That public opening, I believe, is one of the critical steps.

There’s an old saying, ”sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Transparency in any public process is a sine qua non for good clean governance. And unfortunately, the public procurement processes in South Africa are incredibly complicated. They have scoring mechanisms that are based on adjustments for the race, gender, age of the bidders. In that complicated process, of course, the opportunity arises for non-value-adding intermediaries to inject themselves into the process. Also, by the deployment of bribes, brown envelopes, paper bags, cars, and even in a couple of instances, cows that are delivered to farms, people can influence the process in a way that would in a transparent environment not be possible.

Darragi: Mr. de Ruyter, while we are on the topic of transparency, I have seen references by some journalists to an “energy apartheid.” Some allegations have been made that Eskom segregates load shedding based on where you are in South Africa. For instance, townships like Soweto (which has a large black population) have experienced more load shedding than places like Sandton (which is more white). What is your response to those allegations?

De Ruyter: I think you need to distinguish first of all between load shedding, which is a way of managing the demand for electricity in order to allow the available generation capacity to meet the demand. That is done on an equitable basis across the board. There’s absolutely no discrimination. But what has happened in a place like Soweto, for example, is that years ago, at the advent of democracy, some irresponsible politicians went to Soweto and said, as a reward for supporting the ANC, we will absolve you from ever having to pay your electricity accounts. As a consequence, the payment rate in Soweto during my tenure at Eskom was hovering between 13 and 17%. Now, just what happens in the US, if you don’t pay your bill, electricity gets cut off. The utility just comes and disconnects you. But this has nothing to do with race. It’s got everything to do with whether you buy your bill. And the extent to which there is widespread meter tampering, electricity theft, and nonpayment, those feature quite strongly in electricity distribution, and unfortunately, the perception has been created that this has somehow correlated to race, which is not the case at all. In fact, I think Eskom was particularly lenient in still providing electricity in spite of the fact that revenue collection was so poor.

Haywood: Speaking of revenue collection, one of the things we noticed is that South Africa still exports energy to its neighboring countries. Do you think that behavior is incompatible with South Africa resolving its energy crisis? And to what extent do you see solving the South African energy crisis as involving other regional actors?

De Ruyter: South Africa is one of the members of the Southern African Power Pool, which pools electricity supply into one interconnected grid, across countries. Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Eswatini, Lesotho, and obviously South Africa are all members. South Africa dominates the power pool – it generates about 73% of all the electricity that is consumed in the pool. But it is also a significant buyer of electricity from Mozambique, for example. Mozambique has a very large and very successful hydroelectric project called Cahora Bassa and there’s a high voltage direct current line that has been supplying electricity from the north of Mozambique to South Africa for many, many decades. So if we were not a member of the pool, if we did not provide electricity to other countries, and we did not buy electricity, then the shortfall in our own electricity would be even greater.

Now, what needed to be done on this issue was a couple of quite unpopular things which I introduced. I said, first of all, Eskom needs to make a profit on the electricity that it sells and that is a process where we significantly increased the tariffs charged to our neighboring countries. But also we said, like we did with Soweto, well, you actually have to pay for the electricity that we provide you. We went so far as to demand cash upfront from Zimbabwe, which had an extremely poor payment record before we would supply them with electricity because we just had no faith in their ability or their willingness to pay for the electricity offered and supplied. So I think regional integration generally is a positive thing.

We know that Namibia, for example, is going to be investing massively in renewable energy and for South Africa to be able to tap into those resources as part of the Southern African Power Pool makes absolute sense. So I think buying and selling electricity across the region is a good idea and is to be supported.

Kushi: There’s been some talk about South Africa trying to transition away from coal. What proposals are out there for that transition? Do you think that they’re going to work?

De Ruyter: This was one of the main thrusts of my tenure as Group Chief Executive of Eskom is that I very quickly came to the conclusion that we had to produce new generation capacity as quickly as possible. If you compare different technologies, the lowest cost and the quickest to deploy these days are solar and wind energy. Even if you ignore the negative environmental impacts of the externalities imposed on the environment by coal-fired power generation, which you shouldn’t, it still makes perfect sense to roll out wind and solar as quickly as possible. There are technical challenges with the fact that these are variable renewable energy sources, but these can be resolved and certainly only become a critical problem for the grid when you get to a very high penetration of renewable energy sources.

This drive ran into considerable opposition, in particular from the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, which had a focus on prolonging the life of coal-fired power stations because it had a dual mandate to both promote mining and provide policy direction for the energy industry. The inherent conflict between those two mandates, in addition to the very significant political sway held by heavily unionized coal workers, caused the process to be, pardon the pun, undermined.

That being said, we still made very good progress in our energy transition. We were able to deliver a groundbreaking $8.5 billion Just Energy Transition Partnership agreement, which was signed between the US, UK, France, Germany, the European Union, and South Africa at COP 26 in Glasgow. We were able to secure more than a billion dollars through concessional financing to repurpose and repower a decommissioned coal-fired power station, in order to ensure that the transition to a decarbonized electricity industry would be a just one. This is something that I feel very strongly about: without ensuring that there is social and environmental justice that accompanies the transition, it is highly likely that those kinds of energy transitions will not succeed. They will be held up by interference through the vested interests who have been involved in the coal industry or have made investments in the industry over many decades and have legitimate concerns about the transition’s effects.

South Africa is very fortunate in that it’s got some of the best wind and solar resources in the world. I’m still firmly of the view that in the absence of any sort of likelihood that the government will solve the energy crisis, there will be a de facto liberalization of the electricity sector that will cause the electricity industry in South Africa to decarbonize. Just in the last year, privately distributed energy generation through renewables exceeded the capacity of one major coal-fired power station in South Africa without any incentive or support from the government. So load shedding is forcing people to take matters into their own hands and decarbonize. Whether the government wants to promote that or not is no longer relevant. It’s happening because people need electricity to live their lives.

Haywood: Do you foresee a future in South Africa where the growth of the private sector energy generation and renewable energy push out Eskom or state involvement in energy? Or how do you see that future playing out?

De Ruyter: In the future, I think all of Eskom is going to be very different. As we spoke about the restructuring of Eskom, I think we were going to have an Eskom which will have a very reduced presence in the generation sector, which will be largely operated by the private sector. It will still have a substantial presence in the transmission industry, that’s a natural monopoly – it is infrastructural in nature. Typically, that is the last element of the electricity industry where the state maintains a significant degree of involvement. The distribution parts of the industry, I think, will either go into the hands of private distributors, very much like mobile phone operators, or it will go into the hands of local authorities. So the role of Eskom, as I said earlier, the monolith that was able to meet all of South Africa’s electricity needs, that’s going to change and it’s going to become a much smaller, much more focused business with a significantly smaller presence in generation and distribution.

Kushi: While we’re looking ahead, do you see yourself returning to South Africa in the future? And if not at the moment, what will it take for that to happen?

De Ruyter: I’d love to return to South Africa. It’s still a place that I regard as home. It’s a place that I’m very fond of. I’m fond of the people, I think we’ve absolutely fantastic people who live in the country. So yeah, I absolutely intend to return to South Africa. Much as I appreciate the opportunity of living and working in the US, I do miss South African sunshine and South African wine.

Haywood: I wanted to ask you personally about the circumstances under which you left both Eskom and South Africa. I’ve heard that’s a complicated and fraught story. Can you tell us about that?

De Ruyter: Yeah, it was a very interesting period. On the day that I tendered my resignation to the chairman of the board, I returned to my office and was provided with coffee. That coffee turned out to be laced with poison, a mix of cyanide and insecticide – which by the way is apparently a Russian recipe. I’ve since learned more about poison than I ever wanted to. So I became quite ill. But fortunately, I survived the attempt. I was told by a toxicologist that I was very, very lucky to escape. I won’t go into all the gory details but yes, I made it.

Soon after that, as I was serving my notice period, I started to speak up more openly about the reasons why we have not been able to make as much progress as people wanted to on solving the energy crisis. In particular, I spoke out about some of the vested interests that underpinned corrupt behavior in Eskom: coal theft by organized crime of very, very significant proportions, and to a large extent a supine police force that wasn’t particularly interested in ensuring that there were consequences for these criminal activities. That then led to some considerable pressure on me at that stage. I was driving around in a bulletproof Land Cruiser accompanied by bodyguards due to various threats that I’d received. So life was getting quite interesting. You always watch movies, but once you start living it, it’s not to be recommended.

I decided I’d rather go abroad. This was achieved by some sleight of hand. At that stage, various people were looking for me who wanted to apprehend me and force me to testify and so forth. I’m told they were watching the airport in Johannesburg, so I then hitched a ride on a private jet to Cape Town, got on a plane there, and made my way out of the country.

Haywood: Wow. That is truly remarkable. I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been for you and everyone close to you. How do you manage to stay committed to speaking out against corruption and working to improve South Africa even when there’s all this persecution against you?

De Ruyter: You need to be a bit bloody-minded when it comes to principles relating to honesty and integrity. I’ve often been asked, you know, why? Why did you speak out? And I guess one strategy I could have followed was to just keep my mouth shut, attend all of my farewell parties, and just go off quietly into the sunset. I could have had a very nice retirement and served on a couple of boards, and that would have been the end of the story. 

But I do think that there is something like principle, there is something like right and wrong. By not speaking out when you see something that is wrong, you become complicit. You become part of the problem, even if you’re not a direct beneficiary of corrupt activity. If you’re aware of it, and you don’t speak out, you are compromised, and you are complicit. And I just thought that the people of South Africa deserve better. They deserve to know why the lights were off for many hours every day. It was not due to people who work hard and try their best, but it was due to a toxic combination (I guess I shouldn’t use that phrase) of poor policy and corrupt and criminal activity.

Kushi: South Africa has an election this year. What are you looking for? What are your hopes?

De Ruyter: One of the frustrations with the South African political environment is that parties have been quite poor about articulating their policies. If you look at the ANC, I think we know what the ANC’s policy agenda is because they’re in government: they publish white papers, they push laws to Parliament, so we know what the policies are. But most, if not all, of the opposition parties define themselves by being opposed to the ANC. So their election strategy, by and large, is to say, please vote for me, because I’m not the ANC, which I find to be a very unsatisfactory approach to canvassing votes from the electorate. Yes, you might not be the ANC, but does that mean that you’re going to be better or worse than the ANC? And if you don’t tell me what your policies are going to be, well, I’m really going to struggle to make that decision 

There is a dearth of good policy thinking in South Africa, that is coherent, that is consistent, that hangs together across the various aspects of policy. For example, if you think about energy policy, it’s not only about energy policy, it’s about environmental policy, it’s about fiscal policy, it’s about industrial policy. All of these policies have to hang together and integrate. Sitting in Parliament and shouting at the Minister for not doing his or her job is necessary, I guess, for there is some form of political accountability. But what is your alternative agenda? What I’d be looking for in the selection is a party that articulates policies that I believe have a high degree of successful implementation to address the very significant challenges that South Africa faces.

Haywood: I think we have some time left for a few more questions.

Darragi: If the government chooses to make Eskom a private company, do you think that would help solve its corruption problems? If it’s not owned by the government, would this mean fewer opportunities for corruption and corrupt actors to be in control?

De Ruyter: I think more private involvement in the electricity industry would be beneficial. I think it’s highly unlikely that the current ruling party will privatize Eskom because it’s ideologically opposed to doing so. Part of the ANC’s policy is a very strong preference for significant state control and state involvement in the economy. I don’t think that privatization is likely to happen.

What I do think is that transparent market-based competition will be a good check on corrupt activity in the electricity industry. Once you’ve got monopolies, and you’ve got the coincidence between politics and commercial interests, that’s generally when things go off the rails. But when people have to compete for business, and they are properly regulated, and there’s adequate transparency, things are much better. So, my preferred solution is not so much to privatize Eskom, but it is to enable far more private sector participation in the electricity industry.

Kushi: Do you have any message to the next generation of leaders in South Africa that are looking at this corrupt situation and thinking what hope is there? How are we going to get out of this?

De Ruyter: South Africa is a very interesting country. We seem to have this knack for peering over into the abyss and at the moment when it seems inevitable that we are likely to topple over the edge, we manage to pull back and somehow make it work. This characterized the greatest challenge of all, which was the transition from apartheid to democracy. The transition was fraught with risk and the potential for very, very significant bloodshed and eventually went off largely peacefully, which was a minor miracle at the time.

I still back the resilience and character of the ordinary South African – let’s forget about the politicians – to do the right thing, to do the decent thing, and to pull through. But they need to do so with proper leadership. My appeal would be to the next generation to step up to the plate, do your duty, and take the lead in doing what is right for the country and its people.

This interview was conducted by Nour Darragi, Owen Haywood, and Ty Kushi on January 30, 2024.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Haywood: When most people hear Howard Dean, they think of you as someone with experience in domestic policy — as Governor of Vermont, obviously, as well as being the chairman of the Democratic National Committee [DNC] and your experience running for president in 2004. Can you talk about how you have since begun to transition towards working on issues of foreign policy?

Dean: That is a very interesting story. When Madeline Albright was head of the NDI [National Democratic Institute] I knew her, and when I was chairman of the DNC, Obama was about to be elected. I recognized how important it was for Obama to resurrect the American image abroad, especially after George W. Bush, who I personally liked but thought was a pretty awful president, as did most of the world – with the exception of the people who benefit from PEPFAR [U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief], which I think is a major international achievement, and getting the three Baltic countries into NATO, which turned out to be prescient given how the Russians are behaving. Anyways, so I as Chairman controlled roughly 600 tickets to the DNC, which usually go out to various politicos: I gave every one of them to Madeline Albright to distribute to ambassadors from around the world. I thought it was really important for people from around the world to see that America is back. You know, the international election to Obama’s election was extraordinary and it was because America is always expected to do unexpected things and break new barriers in ways that nobody else can. And that was a big barrier he broke.

Madeline eventually, when I left the DNC, asked if I would join the board of NDI. So I said of course, and I stayed there for probably 12 or 13 years. The European people all knew me because they didn’t like Bush and I was the only Democrat running for president in 2004 with the you-know-whats to take on the War in Iraq. Everybody, all the other top candidates voted for the war and voted for Bush’s tax cuts, which mostly benefited the top 10%. If the election had been held in Canada or Europe I might have won because they all knew me. So, I was well-known in Europe and had a lot of supporters, so they were thrilled to have me over there. I started in Eastern Europe – the NDI doesn’t do much work in the European Union, except for a few programs to deal with discrimination against the Roma people. But most of our work is on the fringes of the EU. I spent a lot of time in the Balkans, and I spent a lot of time in Ukraine, including coming in after the Maidan after the dust had settled. And from there, you know, we began to expand into Burma and other places.

Abdulkadir: Turning towards your time in the NDI doing work on integrating the Roma community into Eastern European politics, I’m curious to hear what you think the link is between integrating ethnic and gender minorities into the political mainstream and maintaining strong democratic institutions? Do you think one causes the other?

Dean: From a purely calculus point of view, if the minority is small, you can probably get away with abusing them. But from a human rights point of view, I don’t think any of us succeed in the world, any society succeeds, unless everybody succeeds. The long-term goal is to make sure everybody has human rights. Now the Roma are complicated. Many of them are living with 15^th century traditions, which may not be the healthiest environment for small children, as in they might not permit their kids to go to school. Not all Roma live in wagons or tents someplace, there are members of the German parliament, for example, who are Roma, but there are some communities in Eastern Europe that are very insular and removed. And the question is, how do you integrate them? There are Roma who have been successfully integrated into the political process in some places and can speak for their brethren. But there are also some members of the community who don’t want to be integrated. The trouble is, then, that if you don’t choose to be integrated then your kids can’t make a living and so have no choice but to live in conditions that might not be considered acceptable. So the big thing for us to do was foster programs for those who wanted to be more integrated and wanted to have a livelihood. We also tried to get local people not to “other” the Roma. The Roma are very famous for being “othered” throughout history. There has been a lot of scapegoating of them and their culture in Eastern Europe especially. The real guts of the problem is about trying to improve the lives of the Roma people without telling them how to live. And part of our role was to make sure the people who might be tempted to abuse the Roma understood that they were being watched by the United States.

Haywood: Can you talk more about your experience in Ukraine for a second?

Dean: Ukraine was wonderful. The first time we went there I think was after the overthrow of former President Viktor Yanukovych. And Yulia Tymoshenko and others were expected to run for president at that time. We met with someone called the “Minister of Lustration” which we had no idea what that was. Turns out, it was the minister who fights corruption – of which there was a great deal in Ukraine, as in most post-Soviet states. Well, it also turned out that he had no office, no staff, and no money. So we bought him a cup of coffee and that was our meeting with the Minister of Lustration. So we started at the bottom.

Then I did a lot of coaching of political parties in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Georgia – I spent a lot of time in Georgia – Kosovo, and Armenia. To have a political party in a country that hasn’t had a real political party for generations is quite difficult. They don’t really understand everything that is involved. At one point I had a meeting with Tymoshenko (this was when Yanukovych was in power) and it was ten people around a table in a relatively small restaurant. Tymoshenko had the big game: when I sat down in front of her, she had my chair a little lower to the ground than hers. That’s a whole bunch of Washington crap but everybody does it, you know. I’m looking over her shoulder and I see Madeline Albright’s biography. Well, that didn’t get there by accident. They knew who I was, and who would be coming in, and so rearranged the books. I mean, this is the big game, right? So we’re sitting around this table in some fleabag-ish restaurant with all the political parties, there were about eight of them. The idea was to get them all together behind a candidate and then we’d challenge Yanukovych. None of the parties had any clue what they were doing except for Tymoshenko’s. So Tymoshenko’s person proposes we have a primary. I said “Great! How would you run that?”, since they had no experience in running primaries at the time. So he says “we’ll just have a poll and whoever leads the poll is the candidate.” But Tymoshenko had already been Prime Minister and so everyone knew who she was – she’d win easily. It was just ludicrous.

There was some real talent in Ukraine. One of the guys, who started a party of young people and had some enthusiasm – in addition to being the only person who understood organizations besides Tymoshenko. His name was Arseniy Yatsenyuk – he ended up becoming the Prime Minister of Ukraine. He had a real problem with corruption though and left after a couple of years. But then along comes Volodymyr Zelensky and along comes the Russians and the corruption gets rooted out and so forth. It is not totally rooted out now, but it is a democratic state. Kyiv is a modern city – it’s a lot like Berkeley in the 1960s. A lot of young people and coffee houses (except now the young people of computers, of course).

One of the most moving things that happened to me is that there was one guy at the end of our roundtable discussion that came up to me – he didn’t speak English, he had a translator who spoke only Russian. This was in 2014 after Putin had already illegally seized Crimea from the Ukrainians. He told me “I was raised by two good communists who taught me the Americans were the bad guys and the Russians were the good guys. I’m married to a Tatar, and we had to leave Crimea and she’ll never be able to go back and see her parents again as a result of this. So I just want to thank you for your support.” That kind of stuff makes it all worth dealing with. It’s the big picture and the diplomacy and all that. But stuff like that is what really matters: when you move people’s lives, that’s what matters.

We did the same thing in Burma. I knew about the persecution of the Rohingya long before anyone else I knew did because I did a meeting with young people in Yangon. The NDI always tried to meet with young people. And it was extraordinary – there was a civil war going on. This was followed by a peaceful transition to democracy. The civil war has since been rekindled when the military decided to become unpeaceful and untransition. Anyways, it was during the transition that I met with many young people. Obama was following me by a week (which terrified me because I have a penchant for speaking my mind and I was worried I was going to leave a mess for him. Luckily I didn’t). Among the young people there were members of every ethnic group in the country, and these ethnic groups had all been fighting each other for thirty years. What I discovered is they uniformly hated the Rohingya. I kept asking them all about it. Finally one of them got annoyed – which was surprising since it’s a very polite society, they certainly treat their elders more properly than the Americans do. But even they got upset sometimes. He said “how come you’re asking these difficult questions?” My answer was if you don’t ask difficult questions you don’t get truthful answers. But all of them, including all the minority groups that were being persecuted by the army, hated the Rohingya. It was really scary because usually what happens when I go to a country, I find the older folks have the same old ethnic hates they’ve always had but the younger folks are starting to get together and become less interested in these divisions. And that was not the case in what is now Myanmar.

Haywood: Why do you think that is? I’ve heard discussions of social media as having  a particularly bad effect on the conflict in Myanmar – do you think that’s the case?

Dean: Social media is a negative influence on any conflict because you get so much disinformation, and the people who are spreading the disinformation know how to appeal to the worst prejudices of people, and they know exactly where to hit them. That was part of it. Part of it probably was these kids have not had this much exposure, if any, to democracy. There had been a junta for years, and Aung San Suu Kyi had only been in power briefly before being deposed by the military. There’s lot of theories. The guy who took over after Ken Wallach as president of the NDI, Derek Mitchell, had been the ambassador when I was in Myanmar. Derek is just a stand-up guy who really understands all this stuff very well. He used to joke that the junta got tired of retirement and was looking for something to do so they decided to come back. That’s not exactly true but it seemed like it sometimes.

Tauch: I’m curious, besides Myanmar, what are your thoughts on democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia in general?

Dean: How about democratic backsliding in the United States of America? That’s not so great either! None of us are immune to appeals to people’s worst instincts instead of their best instincts. I’m worried about it. I spent a lot of time in Vietnam with NDI and IRI – the International Republican Institute.  Interestingly, both organizations were formed by the same legislation under Reagan, and we work in parallel (although they have a little more of an ideological agenda than we do). We sent a joint delegation to Vietnam. Vietnam is not a democracy. But it is also not as authoritarian and controlling as China. Especially the southern part of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City is very lively. If you didn’t know you were in Vietnam, you would think you were in any big Asian city in a relatively free country. Vietnam is very business-oriented. When we would meet with the local and provincial and national officials, every one of them started out with a five-minute diatribe about how they were shooting at us 40 years ago, and then a 45 minute dialogue about how terrible the Chinese were. They had been paying tribute to the Chinese since 941 AD and the United States was only a relatively recent irritant. That’s why now Da Nang is the only port in the world that services both Russian and American naval vessels.

So our relationship with Vietnam is actually quite good.  Is it an authoritarian country? Yes. Do you get in trouble if you criticize the government? Yes. But is there free enterprise? Also yes. I would call it a thriving country, which we’re investing a lot in because it’s a friendlier environment than China right now for American companies. I won’t say it’s a good model, because it’s not a democracy, but I will say for all but a relatively small number of political dissidents, it’s a fairly safe country to make a living and have children in. 

The other funny thing about our trip to Vietnam was – and this was just like the United States – we’d go to see the big shots. And then we’d go down to their version of a county government, and all they would do is complain about the big shots. And then we’d go to the local people, living a village just like the United States except for everyone was speaking Vietnamese, and they’d all complain about the authorities and the counties and the government. They weren’t very measured with it. I don’t want to be a fool and say it’s a free society – it isn’t. But there’s a real spirit of capitalism in Vietnam and I’m guessing the government is a little bit behind where the people are.

There is a lot of rural poverty in Vietnam – which we weren’t shown much of on our visit there. The rural areas are different. I took the U.S. embassy staff out to dinner there and one of the things I heard from them is their main immigration situation is going out to the villages and seeing who really got married to who and who didn’t. Because of course if you’re an American citizen, which many Vietnamese people are after the Vietnam war, then you get to come over to America without any problem. But it turns out a lot of those “marriages” to U.S. citizens weren’t quite true – they would be married to someone else.

Haywood: Do you foresee a role the US should play in encouraging countries like Vietnam towards more liberal democracy? Or do you think we should be focusing on our own problems with democracy that you mentioned earlier?

Dean: Well, I think that we as a country have to be careful. I’m obviously in favor of democracy, absolutely in favor. But I think our efforts to influence that process in other countries depend on how much repression there is in that system. For example, I am much more worried about Uganda because of its murderous anti-gay policies than I am about Vietnam. Are there human rights violations in both places? Yes, there are. But we cannot force a government on every group of people in the world. So I think we have to be judicious in where we apply our efforts for democracy.

We just taught a class on Africa, I had a woman named Michelle Gavin come in and speak to my class, she was an ambassador to Botswana and now works for the Council on Foreign Relations. One of the things we talked about is how the United States recently cut the Ugandan government off from an African trade association over their persecution of gay Ugandans. But the hard question is: do you cut them off like that and punish them? Or keep them engaged and try to influence them? That’s a discussion you have to have, and the answer is not clear-cut. Policymakers have to ask themselves how many human rights violations and abuses they are willing to tolerate before disengaging. And it’s not universal. We put up with more human rights abuses in Egypt than we would in, say, Algeria. Why? Because Egypt is, from a strategic point, more important to us. So we give them tons and tons of money and they mostly align with our priorities. But at the same time they put a hell of a lot of people in jail just for trying to be democrats (small D).

Haywood: Switching gears for a minute here. Do you mind talking about Donald Trump and his effect on foreign policy both in and out of office?

Dean: Trump was a disaster. And he was a disaster for foreign policy – first because he was inconsistent. Second, he has an affinity for dictators that I don’t understand except that he’d like to be one himself. Third, he took away all of America’s leverage on the world stage because no leaders were able to take him seriously. His four years were tempered only by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who knew what they were doing, and some public servants who also knew what they were doing. I personally think he’s mislocated a couple of brain cells in general.

Haywood: I assume then you’re concerned about his intent for a second term?

Dean: Sure. Wouldn’t you be concerned if somebody openly advertises that we’re going to get rid of your democracy?

Haywood: Can you also talk about the general trends toward isolationism in the Republican Party that have expressed themselves more recently?

Dean: Well, we pay a price for isolationism every time we do it. We were isolationist after the First World War and got Nazi Germany as a result. You’re going to pay a much bigger price later if you choose not to be involved in the world now. Trump is known for that. I mean, in his hotel business he always had a policy of “take what you can now” and is paying for that in New York State Court. I grew up in New York and no real estate guy I know in New York will do any business with Donald Trump. His word is no good. But he has an incredible gift for grievance politics, and this is a good time for that in the world. But I think he’ll set the country back terribly if he’s elected, especially setting our international status back dramatically. Europe doesn’t like him. Guess what? Europe is pretty powerful these days. They can do without us if they have to, except in defense.

So yes, I’m concerned. But what I’m more concerned about is the failure of the Republican Party to stand up for the country. Republicans and Democrats, I always knew we’ve had disagreements about spending money on programs and things like that. But the disagreements ended when had to defend the country together. That’s gone now. Some elected officials are more afraid of Trump’s anger than they are of Putin. That is a gross misjudgment in a public servant. And there are a lot of those people in the Republican Party.

Haywood: On a related note, you mentioned Europe and our defensive relationships there. Can you talk about how perceptions and the role of NATO have changed since the end of the Cold War?

Dean: The attack on Ukraine has created a sense of solidarity among NATO countries, as well as better arming and a better approach to the budget. I think the countries of Europe understand now, too, that they’re going to have to pay more for their own defense. Europe’s coordination and NATO’s expansion has been very, very helpful. To have 800 miles of frontier with Russia that we didn’t have before is a big deal. But NATO has problems. We have dictators or wannabe dictators within the European Union – the Law and Justice Party (PIS) in Poland, which is the sitting party currently (and hopefully soon to be opposition) [Note: Since the recording of this interview, Polish national elections were held in which the PIS did not win a majority of seats.], and Viktor Orban in Hungary, who is a disaster.

Haywood: This is a broader question. From a high level, what do you think the goals or guiding principles of American foreign policy should be?

Dean: We need to encourage to the best of our ability, first of all, dealing with climate change, which is the biggest threat to the world right now. Second of all, we need to find ways to respect people that we didn’t use to respect. You know, we were never a quote-unquote, “colonial power”, but we acted like one using other methods than the British and the French and Spanish and so forth all did. This change is happening — it’s slow, and problematic sometimes in some countries, but it’s happening. When Ambassador Galvin, who I mentioned earlier, came to talk to my class, one of the things I said was I’m very hopeful this is going to be the African century. Everybody says, Oh, isn’t it going to be the Chinese century? What about the African century? Africa is going to become the most populated continent at some point. There is enormous capacity in that continent for creativity and development, and it ought to be our responsibility to provide reasonable, thoughtful help. Not that that process is going to be easy. I mean, South Africa is really scary considering the goodwill that’s been wasted by corruption and so forth after their incredible liberation. The EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters] there is terrifying though, they’re basically the Trump of the left. But it still is a democracy, which makes it stand out, and it is a multiracial society, which is terrific considering where that came from. So we need to be as helpful to South Africa as we possibly can.

You get a much better understanding of places and their complexity when you actually talk to people from there rather than talking to me. But I’ll share one story: NDI did an exercise with some southern African countries, which were fairly democratic. One of the problems in many democracies, including the United States, is that the major political parties don’t talk to each other. They look at each other as enemies. Particularly on their “home turf.” So the goal was to get members of the three largest political parties in each of the six countries we were working with. And one of the countries – Zambia – had just had an election. The top three officials of Zambia were women: the President was a woman, the attorney general was a woman and the chief justice was also a woman. Which is unfortunately unusual, especially in Africa. So we’re doing this roundtable with all the significant figures from each party and one of the men says “Well, what do you do if you have a woman who is the president who’s totally incompetent, and Chief Justice who doesn’t know anything about the law and an Attorney General who can’t win court cases?” And I said, “Oh, I understand just what your problem is, the women are behaving just like the men!” But working there was great.

Wright: I want to ask a little bit more about what you mentioned, about developing respect for people in areas of the world that previously America has not had so much respect for. We’ve been talking in this interview about the impact of domestic culture and politics on foreign policy, but I’m wondering about the opposite: what information comes from outside the United States into the US either by Americans or by people from other countries that can alter or deepen our understanding of foreign policy?

Dean: The answer to that is music. People will always write stuff, and the intellectuals will read it and everyone can “my-good-man” their way through cocktail hour and what not. But what really is changing is music. Especially in Africa – there’s this incredible fusion of Caribbean, black American, and more traditionally African music. It’s all over the place, and it’s really cool. That’s how you get understanding between people. Remember it’s the people that really matter, not so much the diplomats. The shared cultural stuff that’s happening more and more, that’s what I think is important.

Wright: Do you have any thought or opinions on the way the US has done cultural diplomacy in the past? Are there any strong cultural diplomatic initiatives you’ve seen, or is this something that will happen or perhaps happens best without the hand of government being involved?

Dean: It matters who the president is. Obama was great, especially regarding connections with Africa because of his personal ties there. And he hired some really great people who were able to reach out to various countries there. Obama appointed Patrick Gaspard, who was a big supporter of mine when I ran for president as well as a union guy for SEIU (Service Employees International Union), as ambassador to South Africa. Patrick is black, for context. That kind of representation and connection matters. And not only was Patrick a black diplomat in a majority black country, but this is also a guy who was a black union executive with one of the largest and most successful unions in the United States which matters because labor organizations in South Africa are very developed and an important issue. So Obama was able to pick Patrick as someone who transcended all the handshaking of the State Department and was able to form real bonds with the country and people he was assigned to.

Look, the State Department and diplomacy is important but it’s not everything. Culture and universities and student exchanges and music and kids staying at each other’s houses – that kind of thing is actually in the long run more important for building connections. Obviously, you need an experienced diplomatic corps so when the you-know-what hits the fan you know what to do. But the way people really get to know each other is to have, you know, student exchanges and things like that.

Tauch: What are your thoughts on the current conflict between Israel and Hamas as well as the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict? Can you discuss how the administration’s stance has changed from the start of the conflict until now?

Dean: I think Biden is moving in the right direction. To back up a bit, first I don’t think anyone is going to be able to solve this problem in the long run without a two-state solution. That’s going to require the United States to put pressure on Israel. Second, I’ve made my views on Benjamin Netanyahu well-known in the past. I don’t think he has served Israel well. Israel is in as much if not greater danger from internal threats than they are from terrorists, although I of course think Hamas is awful. I think Israel was better off when Yitzhak Rabin and even Shimon Peres were Prime Ministers than Israel is today, as the most right-wing government in Israeli has attempted to undermine Israeli law against the will of the people.

Many terrible things are going on in this conflict. One of the things I try to do is avoid focusing only on the terrible things without looking for a solution. People get incredibly emotional, as they very well should, about these tragedies, especially when they are close to home. But it’s hard to figure out what the hell to do to solve the problem when you’re clogged up with anger and fury. Before pontificating about which group is terrible or which isn’t, I try to look at the facts. Is Hamas a terrorist organization? Yes. Are they honest? Are they a good negotiating partner? No. Is there terrorism being perpetrated in the West Bank by the settlers? Yes. They’re shooting people and taking their land; that’s terrorism. So it’s a mess. It needs to be stopped: I’m in favor of the ceasefire, obviously. We need to get those hostages out; that has been happening, which is good. But in order for a long-term solution to take shape, the United States must insist on a two-state solution in a way that is fair for the Palestinians. Just for the record: Representative Rashida Tlaib, whom I have not met, was censored for saying “from the river to the sea” in reference to Palestine. You know who also used that phrase? Menachem Begin, when he was Israel’s Prime Minister. There’s two groups that want “from the river to the sea” but they don’t mean the same thing. In a long-run solution, no one is going to get everything they want.

Part of the problem is that, except for the Sadat-Begin agreement at Camp David (and Begin was pressured by Carter), we’ve never had good leadership on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict at the same time. That’s a travesty. That’s just been one of the tragedies of the Middle East is that there have not been leaders on both sides who are capable of moving their people at the same time. The trick about great leadership is telling your people something they don’t want to hear and getting them to do it. It is easy to be pushed along by the crowd to avoid court appearances or wherever your motivation is. But it’s not easy to face them and get them to do something they don’t want to do.

Now I think Israel’s Ariel Sharon would’ve been able to do it when he was Prime Minister. When Sharon was Prime Minister he had been a bit of a bete noire to the liberal Jews because he was very right wing and had stood back during a massacre of Palestinians in Shatila, which was a refugee camp in Lebanon. But Sharon had courage. That’s the thing about politics: it requires strong leaders with courage. I mean, he was prepared to tell his nation that they had to do something that they really didn’t want to do so that there would be a better long term future. And there’s not enough of that anywhere. But that’s what it takes to be a good leader.

Wright: Are their leaders elsewhere in the world who have that quality that you admire? Are there other people that you’ve seen rising in leadership positions or who are making a name for themselves that we should be watching and learning from?

Dean: My favorite was Merkel. Angela Merkel was, in my view, the leader of the free world when Trump was President. As for your second question, I think a lot of those leaders aren’t proven yet. One of the places I’m looking is Great Britain. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when power changes hands in Great Britain. Great Britain is in enormous amount of trouble as a result of their Brexit vote, which was dishonestly engineered. Keir Starmer is going to be the prime minister — for better or for worse, I don’t know him personally. But the Conservatives really screwed up Great Britain terribly, and now we’re going to see if Labour can do any better. The previous Labour leadership and Labour as a whole was a disaster. So they ended up being out of power for 14 years, and now Starmer will get a chance to turn things around. Supposedly he’s boring. I don’t care if he’s boring or if he’s thrilling. I just want him to tell the truth and be a strong leader, which means telling people what they don’t want to hear sometimes. That’s one problem about democracy. You know, people will say things that they think people want to hear. And that’s not what they need all the time. Sometimes you just have to stand up and do what’s right. And if you lose your office, you lose your office, but at least you did what you thought was important. 

But to answer your question, I’m sure there’s a long list of people who are up and coming. You guys should tell me.

Haywood: We’ve heard you’re an avid reader. Have you read anything on foreign policy lately you’d like to share?

Dean: Arne Westad wrote a really interesting book about 12^th century Korea and China, Empire and Righteous Nation, which was very interesting. Strobe Talbott, who was an undergrad at Yale when I was before ending up as Deputy Secretary of State, wrote an interesting book The Great Experiment about how nations have developed and grown together. Ned Blackhawk’s book, The Rediscovery of America, was great – really shines a light on all the hooey people learn about what Native American society was like. It really painted a comprehensive picture of what America was like before settlement by white people, which I found very interesting.

Haywood: Can you talk about how opinions and attitudes have evolved on China within U.S. politics, especially over the last few decades?

Dean: I’ve spent a lot of time in China. My first trip there was around 1999 – a business trip while I was governor. I was getting lunch with some Chinese businessmen, and after a few drinks they said some not great things about the Chinese government. And I asked them “how can you say these things about the government? Don’t you get nervous?” and one of them replied “there has been a saying in Guangzhou for many centuries: ‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.’” And that’s true. I think the people know a lot about the government that they don’t say.

Even earlier, my father was in charge of freight operations to supply Chiang Kai Shek during the Chinese civil war. My father had to return home to take care of his father and eventually Chiang Kai Shek was defeated. But one of the things he said was “the Chinese are never going to stay communist because they’re too entrepreneurial.” And they are. Their work ethic is unbelievable. They have made huge leaps since Mao, especially under Deng Xiaoping. I am very fond of China. And I’m not afraid of China, although I do think there are factions you have to watch out for. When I’d come back from trips to China I’d say “China’s a democracy.” Which would surprise people. But I’d tell them “all nine of the Politburo get to vote.” But the President does have to line up those votes – the three from the army, the three from the party, and the three from the bureaucracy.

I went many times with NDI to China. I used to go with other groups, too. At one point, Yale Law and Vermont Law School were co-running an NGO that sued provincial governors for violating environmental laws. We did this with the blessing of the central government there because, 20 years ago, the provincial governors had the strength to threaten the central government. Anyways, what I learned is that you can’t get a flavor of China until you spend some time there. I don’t think it’s possible. I think what people will find out is that we have a lot in common. The Chinese are so entrepreneurial. The young people especially were incredible. The first time I ever went to Beijing, I didn’t know what to expect. (Turns out it’s a big gray city with terrible architecture — go to Shanghai). But there were all these kids in blue jeans walking around hand in hand, you know, girlfriend and boyfriend. That wasn’t at all what I expected. It was indistinguishable from walking around the United States.

The problem with China’s government, and the problem with authoritarianism in general, is in the long run it’s a losing hand. I’ve met Xi before, when he was Vice President. I have respect for him. He’s a tough guy though – I would not want to meet him in the middle of the dark in the night. But his great mistake was getting rid of the term and age limits on the presidency. There are two main problems in every society: asset allocation and succession. The Chinese had solved the succession problem. If you don’t have an orderly succession, you risk blowing everything up. Many societies have blown up because there was no order of succession. And the Chinese had that. And Xi took it away. Xi is very capable, but nobody is perfect. Everybody gets old and a little demented and can’t remember things [gestures at self and laughs]. That’s the mistake they’ve made. The real danger is then when they get into a position of losing stability because of a transition in power. It’s always easier to cause a distraction elsewhere, getting a rise out of people and inspiring patriotism to detract from the chaos and inability to have an orderly succession, than it is to just have an orderly succession process. Of course, most democratic countries in the world already have that process.

[Note: The above transcript reflect the personal opinions of Dr. Dean and do not represent the views or endorsement of the Yale Review of International Studies or the Yale International Relations Association.]

This interview was conducted by Abla Abdulkadir, Owen Haywood, Lisa Tauch, and Megan Wright.

Note: Questions 1-3 were submitted ahead of time by students. This transcript was edited for clarity.

Introductions:

[Guy Disney]: Hi all, thank you very much for coming out on a Friday evening. Guy Disney, from the UK. I was in the British army for seven years, did a trip to the North Pole, and then led an expedition to the South Pole. I’ve been working in Central and Southern Africa for the last five to seven years.

[Bam Aquino]: Hello everyone, I’m Bam Aquino, I’m a Filipino politician, so if anyone is interested in legislation or politics, feel free to ask. Thank you.

[Ala Qasem]: Hi everybody, my name is Ala Qasem, and I’m from Yemen. I work on different things: I established civic society organizations that engage youth in public policy, I established a boutique consulting firm that works on peacebuilding, and I work in areas of economic development, now as a part of the economic team advising the Presidential Leadership Council of Yemen. My career is wide and generalist, if somebody is interested in what it’s like to switch careers.

[Shamil Ibragimov]: Hi everyone, my name is Shamil. I am from Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Union country in Central Asia. For the last few years, I was the head of Open Society Foundations in my country, and I am the founder of a data-driven, civic engagement startup. I work on the intersection of civic engagement and on social innovations, technology, and education. Thank you.

[Raphaela Schweiger]: Hi everyone, my name is Raphaela. I’m from Germany and I work at a big European foundation, Robert Bosch Stiftung. I work on issues of migration, climate change, global governance, and technology.

[Naasu Genevieve Fofanah]: Hello, I’m Naasu Fofanah and I’m from Sierra Leone. I work in different areas: I’m an entrepreneur, I specialize in gender and women’s empowerment, and you can ask me anything about that, including public service.

[Ann Iyonu]: Hi everyone, my name is Ann. I’m from Nigeria and I work on democracy, conflict resolution and governance.

[Abdouramane Diallo] Hi everyone, my name is Abdou. I’m from Cote d’Ivoire and am currently working in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia at the Islamic Development Bank. This is a multilateral development bank that oversees 57 countries, 27 of which are in Africa. I am also the co-founder of two startups: Agrobiotech in Mali, which specializes in cloning plants, and Paygas in South Africa, which specializes in the distribution of clean cooking fuel to low-income families.

[Smita Rakesh] Hello, I am Smita Rakesh and I am from India. I work on climate change, and particularly with early-stage start-ups — investing in them but also supporting them in non-financial ways. I’m happy to speak about social enterprises, innovation, or climate change in India. Thanks.

[Binbin Wang] Hello everyone, I’m Binbin from China, and I work on climate policy and governance. I and my team are going to COP28 [United Nations Climate Change Conference] and we will host a particular pavilion there, so if you guys have any interest on COP, global governance, our planet, come talk to me.

First question: What advice would you give to young leaders (like ourselves) and changemakers who are passionate about making a difference in their communities on a global scale?

[Smita Rakesh]: All of us know a little bit about leadership; it’s about discovering what you think your style of leadership is depending on where you work, who you’re leading, and what problem you’re solving. So, without being preachy about “what should ideal leadership look like” or “what should I really focus on,” I would say that true leadership is one that one leads from the front but also, in a way, from behind, in order to make sure that you’re not just a leader as somebody who is heading something, but also engaging more from the farther quarters as well. So, leadership in climate change, for example, means making sure that it is inclusive and we’re not just talking about one country, one sector, or one community’s problems, but thinking of the globe as a whole. So, in today’s time, which is particularly divisive, just ensuring that we are factoring in multiple interests is a big part of leadership in any sector, particularly in climate. So, leadership must be empathetic, inclusive, and equitable.

[Bam Aquino]: If you’re thinking about development work, politics, or any type of work, go for it. Don’t wait. Most of you will say “I’m going to do that when I’m established,” “I’m going to do that when I have a stable job,” or “I’m going to do that when I graduate.” If you want to do something, do it. You can be an intern, at this age, and you can set up something — we know a lot of people who have set up things, even while they are in college. Look for good people and for your tribe who can be around you and support you, and look for a mentor. You can do it right now. I think most of you are eighteen, right? [Mixed answers from audience]. Nope, seventeen? [Laughter and mixed conversation in audience] Oh, older!

[From audience]: Twenty-one!

[Bam Aquino]: I see, so you’re old! So, you know… All I’m saying is, don’t let your age, status, or where you are be a hindrance. You’re all at Yale, so that’s a leg up already. Don’t let those things hinder you from doing what you think you would like to do, or how you would like to contribute. My school in the Philippines is like the Yale of the Philippines, and oftentimes there is pressure for us to go into business or the corporate world; the most difficult thing is just accepting what it is you really want to do. I think a lot of the World Fellows, at some point in our lives, said we were going to take the risk and do this thing even though we didn’t know what the outcome would be. So that’s my suggestion: go for it and see where it goes. And if it doesn’t work out, you’re twenty-two and you can figure something else out. But don’t let where you are now stop you from doing that.

[Naasu Genevieve Fofanah]: I just want to let you know that having difficulties and challenges is part of life, and I’m here because I’ve overcome very difficult challenges. The strategy for that is you take responsibility for your role in whatever is happening; you cannot be 100% sure over other people’s roles. So, there should be self-reflection and you should be humble in understanding that you cannot always be right. Accept constructive criticism and feedback — there is nothing like bad feedback. However bad it is, just learn from it. My motto is that challenges are growth poles and that’s how you maintain your resilience. Remain humble, be intentional, and if you want to learn more about how to overcome that, my book is out there. Leave it to Naasu: How to Take Charge and Go for What You Want has a chapter for each and every one of you. Read it.

Question 2: In each of your opinions, how can education and empowerment be leveraged to create positive change, especially within your respective fields?

[Ann Iyonu]: I work as the Executive Director of the Goodluck Jonathan Foundation, which was founded by the former president of Nigeria, President Goodluck Jonathan. When you are working with a president, usually he is supposed to be smarter than everybody around him — that’s the perceived notion. But when you are working with the president, ideally you should be smarter than the president. You must always be ten steps, and if possible, twenty steps, ahead. That’s my own perspective. Education is knowing a lot about different topics — democracy, conflicts, context-specifics in the different countries we work in. I work in West Africa, so I have to know a little bit about politics, economics, socio-political life in all of the fifteen countries in the region. So educating myself beyond the education we see within the four walls of the classroom is very key. Learning from people, especially through assimilation (where you embed yourself in every community in which you find yourself), is another form of education. I allow myself to get assimilated; I learn the culture and the food, because we break barriers by being friendly with people. It’s not just the formal education that you need; it is the informal education — you can learn from peers, from people, colleagues. You can learn even by reading and keeping yourself abreast with current events. You must keep studying and studying. Just keep developing yourself; that has helped me. You guys are brilliant; I am sure you can help yourselves. Make sense?

[Ala Qasem] In my case, I’ve been educated in the West. I studied in Canada for my undergrad, I did my masters at Harvard University, and there was always this thought that maybe being educated in elite institutions would give you an advantage when you go back to your country, which in my case was Yemen. You’re going to get that advantage and you’re going to go back equipped with knowledge, and you will be able to push things in a direction that is necessarily better. One thing I’ve learned once I came back, and I came back to Yemen around the time of the Arab Spring, is that there is a level of knowledge that, as Ann mentioned, is not found in the books. It is the kind of tacit knowledge that needs only to be built through experiential learning. And that kind of knowledge only comes from being in the field and having yourself open to what the circumstances are going to teach you. It is only then that you will be able to understand systems that are not taught in books and relations that are not necessarily gained from just reading, but instead through experiencing. Those are very, very critical if you are to drive change in very difficult contexts. And they take time. Traditionally, this kind of tacit knowledge only comes from time, from putting yourself out there, and from being open to the fact that you’re not going to get it the first, second, or third time, but eventually you will be able to build it. That is the key thing — if you can link and connect that with the actual knowledge you are getting in schools here, then you will be able to create changes within complex systems that do not necessarily have pre-defined solutions. The solution only comes from being involved, and being able to adapt very quickly to changes and how the system pushes back. I think that’s one of the things that is very critical, and I have learned the hard way when I went back to Yemen and became part of the government. I hope that you get the chance to experience that, and to open yourself up to that level of training and education.

[Shamil Ibragimov]: I am the co-founder of a private school, the oldest private school in Kyrgyzstan, and I am mostly thinking and reflecting on the topic of high school education rather than higher education. Nowadays, in the time of high-speeds and tectonic changes that are driven by new technologies, we have to admit that the current system of education is outdated. It’s very static, it’s very slow. What you can do with this, this is my personal opinion, but I believe the most important thing you can get from education is to preserve curiosity, to make your passion to study, to develop it, to be curious. There is one phenomenon in school: when kids go to school in the first grade, on the fourth week they lose interest in studying. Because in the first four weeks [Shamil raises his hand above his head], they are so excited, they are so curious to learn something new, at the fourth week it’s like [Shamil drops his hand down low and makes a falling noise]. Their interest drops! Because the system that still exists kills their curiosity. They see that it is boring, that there is nothing to learn. My recommendation for you, for your age, wherever you are – twenty, thirty, forty years – preserve and nurture this curiosity. Because the moment you graduate from this university, the technical knowledge you are getting here will be outdated. Maybe in a year from now it will be outdated, AI drives a lot. You have to be curious, you have to find new questions, you know, that you will be curious to find the answer to. Thank you.

[Abdouramane Diallo]: I think my fellows here have said it all in the area of education and empowerment. I think what I’d like to share with you is that when we come from the kind of school we are in here, that we tend to want to be forward, we know a lot of things, I’ve seen and heard the best talk. I’ve felt the same as that, I did a graduate program at Columbia University. And then I went to work in the Middle East. So, I also was educated in the West, I come from the Ivory Coast, a French-speaking environment, a former French colony, so I studied in French schools, I studied in a French business school. I went to Columbia University. And then I went to the Middle East, to the Islamic Development Bank. And I went there with a conceptual framework of what I had learned in the West, so how to do peacebuilding in conflict-affected areas but I realized there it didn’t work like that. I was confronted with a lot of opposition of my views, and I felt that I knew things better than the people there. But it wasn’t the case; they knew much better. One of the best experiences I have had in my life is to learn from the people that I found there, in this institution where I was working. So, I founded an enterprise department in the bank worth three hundred thousand dollars, and then we brought it to forty-eight million dollars after four years, thanks to the people who were working there. Principally, because they had much better contextual knowledge of the place, they knew the players much better, and they were, especially, open-minded. That’s what I want to tell you. I went there with some ideas that I had from here, and whereas they had so many better ideas. What I am glad to share is to be curious, but to also let yourself be empowered by others. Don’t believe that you come from Yale or Harvard or from Columbia and then you are leading the world – those people, they know so much better. Just let yourself be influenced by others as well. Be humble and do that. I’ve co-founded companies, also, without having any knowledge of energy and agriculture or biotechnology, just because I’ve also worked with people from those fields who knew these things so much better. I humbled myself to the point where I could learn from them. That’s just a recommendation, learning actually happens both in the classroom and in the field, as my colleague said here, so just be humble and accept learning from others.

Question 3: In your individual experiences, what are some of the most pressing global challenges you have encountered in your fields of work and how do you navigate those?

[Raphaela Schweiger]: As I’ve said, I work on migration, and if you look at the world these days, you look at the high numbers of people displaced. You look at how many thousands of people don’t have access to education because they cannot continue with their life as they were planning and it was supposed to be. So, I think for me, when you talk about global challenges we can go through everyone here talking about migration, climate, agriculture, peace and conflict, the role of women in politics. For me it is a bigger question of how we envisage the world that we live in and how we create new collaborations and how we actually think and work together because we so many divisions and some of them are ending up in really big conflicts. Some of them are really visible, some of them are very present in the media, and others are not. I have been listening to so many colleagues, fellows, here. Over time, what it does to individual people’s lives and how much the geopolitics of it is influencing in that sense. If we are thinking about the [recording inaudible], thinking about how conflicts emerge and how to solve conflicts, thinking about different possibilities for the world, are we talking ourselves into conflicts between the US and China, are we talking ourselves into certain new challenges that we don’t need to have. How do we find different ways of thinking about it? And then you can go into all these areas that are increasingly interconnected and see how organizations and people are connecting. I work on how the climate crisis will affect migration in the future and already does. All the displacement we see all over the world is not only doing a lot of harm to people but is hindering economic development because people are being put into situations where they can really create. All the conflicts are hindering economic development. So what does that mean going forward, and I think places like here and people like you when you’re studying here, you can actually think about different possibilities for how to think about the world and how we can resolve some of those things in a very tiny way, having conversations about what are our commonalities as people in that sense. That was very broad, but I feel I wouldn’t only want to talk about migration.

[Binbin Wang]: So, as I mentioned, I work on climate. You may think the crisis I mention will be on climate, the climate crisis. Fourteen years ago if you had asked me the same question my answer would be “Yes! Climate! The climate crisis!” At that moment, I was in Copenhagen and it was also my first time participating in this kind of UN treaty policy, at this high-level, influential conference. I was shocked, and I said wow! So many people care about this issue, but it’s not enough. If other people don’t take action then we cannot address climate change together. Nowadays, through this program something here changed [Binbin points to her head], and the fellows here changed my mindset. Why? Because when we talk about climate change, now there’s a new goal, a new word and that’s carbon neutrality, right? And if we want to reach the carbon neutrality, net-zero future we should use more renewable energy, right? But renewable energy means that it’s another chance for humans to experience an industrial revolution. We can look back in the history of humans. Every time – the first industrial revolution, we found coal. The second one, we found oil. These are all fossil fuels; we need to use renewable energy. You can learn from the history, you can identify this is really a new chance for all of us. To only talk about climate is not enough. Renewable energy will change all our systems. Our lives, our working style, everything. Together with AI. Then when we talk about the future, the net-zero future, what should we think of? Beyond climate. This is now why I, together with my team, work on the synergy between climate and the other sixteen SDGs [UN Sustainable Development Goals], which we will reach the seventeenth SDG together when we reach a net-zero future. And then we can see what is happening around the world nowadays. As Raphaela mentioned, conflicts, right? And Janah [Binbin is referring to Janah Ncube, another one of the 2023 World Fellows who was not able to attend the event], Janah is not here, she showed us a map of the world this year. Only North America, part of South America, China, and South Africa are still in peace. All the other parts of the world are in crisis, conflicts. Civil wars or other kinds of wars. If we have more wars, then how can we reach the net-zero future? How we can we reach the SDGs? This is why we should care about this kind of issue together. We need to find the synergetic solutions, and we should open our hearts, open our minds to not only stand in our own silo, our own aspect of the future. It’s not enough. What I say is why should open our mind to the world, keep our curiosity, and think of what I can contribute. Otherwise, if we only stand in our own silo, and we refuse to learn new things then we cannot shake hands with other people. We should set up our connections between academics and practicers. This morning, one of my students called me and said “I got a new offer in the UN but I refused.” I said “Why?” He said “Oh, I have participated. You have given me a lot of opportunities, to support me through different kinds of UN conferences, and I feel tired. They are similar, you know. I don’t want to go to these kinds of fancy conferences anymore, I want to go into academia, to a university.” And I said “What do you need?” “I need to publish journal papers, more papers. I need to reach Nature, Science.” “I see. Any conflicts between these two, your experience in different UN conferences, and your research interests? Have you asked the people in this conference for their feedback, their own concerns about your research interest? Because they are in the real world! Have you tested your research interests with them? And if you can make good use of this opportunity, then you can identify the real problems, and then you can change your platform to that of a university and conduct research on that real problem. Then, you can contribute more to solving those real problems. There are also deep connections between these two.” So this is my suggestion: to keep open and to try and set connections to your world and open your world to the outside

[Questions 4 and 5 came from the audience]:

Question 4:

[Tomas]: Thank you all so much for your time and for being here, it has been great. This question is especially for those of you who work in development institutions, and economic development in developing countries (I, myself, am from Colombia). What I want to ask you is: how do you navigate the institutional challenges of the public and the private together? Of going into a national, institutional framework and trying to bring things from international governance, for example? Oh, and my name is Tomas and I am a sophomore in Branford.

[Abdouramane Diallo]: Look, how to navigate the challenge of international, public institutions and the private sector. To be honest with you, it’s very difficult, okay? I started my career as a banker, in Europe, so I’ve been always kind of private sector driven, and I decided to go back to school and join an international, multilateral development institution. But, you know, over time I got bored by the work in that development institution; it’s still very important what the institution does, but that’s the reason why I felt the need to go back a little bit to the private sector and try my way at entrepreneurship. That way, I could always be connected to some sort of world where I can see some concrete things. So, how I reconcile this is by actually acting, by trying to do my best to, you know, see private sector work, speak with companies, build companies, and understand those challenges. I had the chance to be in an institution where I understand the biggest issues and I’m connected with governments, with ministries, with influencers at that level, which is important. With resources, also, that they provide to do this work, but it’s also very good to be close to reality. Hence, being close to the private sector. I don’t really have a recommendation, you know, for that, but if you intend to do a career in a multilateral development institution, there is also always windows available at all institutions. They are always, I mean you’re from Colombia, you have the Inter-American Development Bank and you have the World Bank, and here you will always have some private sector sections that are there. Then, the biggest challenge is to overcome the administrative part of it, the red tape part of it. If you are someone who is really active, likes a fast-paced environment, then you know you have to make a choice where you would like to go: if you would like to go to the public part of it, or if you would like to strictly remain in the private part of it, that will depend on you. But what worked for me is to actually keep one foot in the private sector, while actually looking at the bigger issues and benefitting from the network of the public institution.

[Bam Aquino, addressing the audience member who asked the question]: Do you intend to work in Colombia or do you intend to work in the multilaterals?

[Tomas]: I’m still figuring it out, but I am leaning more toward the multilaterals.

[Bam Aquino]: So, from the perspective of a local practitioner, the big multilaterals come and there is a tendency to do everything they say. And that’s just not the case. You always have to remember, they come with good intentions probably, but sometimes things don’t translate the same – that’s happened in the Philippines many times. For example, policies that the World Bank pushed that on paper seemed really good but in practice didn’t really work. If you’re from the multilateral, just have the humility to understand how things really happen in the local setting because there’s a tendency for people from these multilaterals to come in with all the solutions. They say “oh, it worked in Colombia, it must work in the Philippines” and sometimes it just doesn’t. So always have that in mind.

[Ana Iyonu]: Let me just add to what Bam said. I think it’s all about context, knowing the context of where you want to work properly. Like he said, if they come with the idea that whatever worked in let’s say Venezuela should work in Colombia, I think it’s about understanding the context. Taking what you can, and applying it within in your own context. Because most times, they have the peripheral knowledge about the environment, but you have been somebody who probably comes from there, who understands the context and the issues better. It’s not about taking everything hook, line, and sinker, but applying it to your context.

[Naasu Genevieve Fofanah]: I will answer your question but because others have to ask, we can talk. I worked in government, I worked in the UN, I am now in the private sector.

[Ala Qasem]: I’ll add one more, one last thing. I think this is very, very important what you are trying to ask, and I have as well worked in the government, within economic development. One of the realizations that we have come to is the fact that, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected countries, or least developed countries, is that development will not happen by the government alone. You need the private sector, you need civil society organizations, you need all the actors. Now the challenge that we have faced when we are trying to mobilize the private sector is that in order for them to come in a context where there is a high cost for accessing finance, it becomes really hard. That formula of risk and reward, it is not calibrated in a way that makes incentives for the private sector to want to invest. So, what we are trying to do at this point in time is we are trying to work with development finance institutions and others to bring in some of the development financing to lower the risk for the private sector so that they can accept to work in countries like that. If I am, for example, the World Bank or others can I put in some money towards first-loss or [recording inaudible] so the private sector is going to come and it’s going say “this is going to make it now much more attractive for me.” This is where we need to start thinking of some creative solutions where you can bring the multilaterals or development finance institutions or others and bring the private sector and bring the government and get them to talk about what is it that is preventing that kind of synergy and that kind of collaboration and come up with solutions that are very pragmatic, that can be implemented. And that requires some dialogue, that requires some openness to thinking about some new innovative types of solutions. That is just one of the big issues that we are facing.

Question 5:

[Katia]: Hi, thank you so much for being here. My name is Katia, I am from Ukraine and I understand that if you want to go back and help your country it’s more about the skills rather than the concrete facts that you learn. And I love America, I love studying here, but I feel like my purpose here is to go back to my country and help there. But, for many of us, I feel that our home countries are quite different from where we study and go to university. So I was wondering: how can we be the most helpful and how can we overcome the fact the issues we deal with here and at home can be so different?

[Guy Disney]: Horrendous, to hear what’s going on at home for you. There will be light at the end of the tunnel. For myself, I mean from my point of view, while I was in the British army at [recording inaudible] I got my right leg blown off below the knee in Afghanistan, I lost a soldier, it was quite challenging. And then to lead expeditions with other injured soldiers – I’m not saying that to talk myself up but more seeing what human beings can do post-conflict. And you know I’ve been seeing the Superhumans Project you’ve got in Lviv which I think is exceptional. For me, it’s all about how do you empower society to be a better version of itself and it starts at the individual level and builds up. But you know, seeing the coverage that’s coming out, I’ve no doubt you guys have that in you, but it will take changemakers to do that. And it’s finding the grassroots projects that really can affect that, not losing sight of what you are as a society. There will come a point when it is over. And all of us, we still focus on the good society piece, and it’s fundamentally important. Making money — great. Being good politicians — great. But having people who are invested in what they believe and, I don’t want to sound too fluffy, but a slightly better world. Do go home. And make it better.

[Raphaela Schweiger]: Maybe I can just add, for my organization and philanthropy we work a lot with civil society actors in Ukraine who have left Ukraine for now, all across the world. And my sense specifically referring to Ukraine is that amazing people who can do great stuff are all over the place right now for all of the very dramatic reasons. I really believe all the people that I work with have the sense of “we want to rebuild” and are thinking about this and I think this will be an exercise where it doesn’t matter where you spent the time during the war, but more kind of what skills, what intents you are bringing to it. I think it’s horrendous what’s going on. There are coalitions that are being built right now for rebuilding, there will be major finances, there will be impact funds, there are already a lot of funds for civil society and social investments and start-up investments. When it comes to Ukraine I think there will be, on a positive note, a lot of opportunities that you can think about here right now, but probably you are in that world enough that you have and start something. What I’ve seen specifically from Ukraine is a lot of the digital connectivity of people just getting things done without being in the same place, which is very, very impressive, which is what I have seen coming out of this, even in this situation right now. So keep up that spirit, and go with it.

[Naasu Genevieve Fofanah]: So I returned home after living in the UK, I returned to Sierra Lione just after the civil war and I went back because I was feeling like you and needed, you know, I was hungry to go back home. So took the degrees, left everything here, a good job, and I returned home. I went back because nobody is going to build Ukraine for you. You are Ukraine [gestures at Katia]. You are the person who is going to build Ukraine. Because you understand Ukraine better. So you have to go with that zeal, understanding that you have more influence now. Networks. Education. That you can take to Ukraine and make Ukraine a better society. So what you have, which is really good, is the passion and the intentionality, which is all good, but you are going to make a difference. And when you get there – when I went back, I wasn’t expecting to do the things that I am doing now. I will tell you had I not gone back, I most definitely would not be at Yale University talking to you today. I am here because I returned to Sierra Lione. I learned, and I have supported, I have worked in Sierra Lione on post-war reconstruction. That’s the value I bring to places like this. So, go. You will find a niche. You will not find the big job you think Yale is going to give you, but you can create. And once you do that, it’s so valuable, you will expand; you are going to find all the rough diamonds. You will claim them, and come back here, and people will be in this room, trying to listen to you.

[Clapping from audience]

[Shamil Ibragimov]: We have an office in Ukraine, and the director is a good friend of mine. I noticed one thing, I was several times in Ukraine, what I really admire about the local initiatives in Ukraine. My point is that, after graduation from Yale, you will be inspired like I was to go big, to do something big, you know? To be employed by the World Bank, whatever. But the real things happen on the very local level. So my point is the best you can probably do for your country is to be “glocal”: think globally, and act locally. And that you will find, because you have a huge, great legacy in Ukraine of very local initiatives. I love them and I admire them. I love them so much that I implemented them back home, also. It is a competition between being humble and at the same time thinking big. And then you will end up with something really cool. Here at Yale, you will find so many opportunities. Then you can apply those opportunities. [Shamil expresses his support for Ukraine to Katia in Russian].

[Clapping from audience]

[End of transcript]

Al-Qassemi described the nascence of what has evolved into modern Arab political art as beginning at the turn of the century. At the time, much of the Arab world was controlled by the Ottoman empire. “As the Ottoman Empire continued to deny Arabs the right to use their language, the Arabic language, and ask them to choose to use Turkish as an official language, they started agitating for more autonomy,” Al-Qassemi said. “Some people wanted autonomy, when others wanted to complete independence from the Ottoman Empire. Then you had a number of intellectuals coming to the fore, who started demanding the use of the Arabic language because they felt the Turkish language was imposed on them.” According to Al-Qassemi, with this growing dissent came the depiction of the political figures involved. “The artists saw these political figures as representative of their ideals and their desires,” Al-Qassemi said. 

In the early decades of the twentieth century, nationalist movements began to emerge in the region, “culminating in the ending of foreign presence in the Arab world- beginning in 1952, with the Egyptian revolution. Egypt was the first to overthrow any sort of foreign presence— even though it was run by a king, the king was seen as a puppet of Britain.” Al-Qassemi described this era as an era of “celebration” as artists depicted the end of the kingdom. “The same thing happened with Iraq, with Yemen, with Tunisia, with Libya, with Syria,” Al-Qassemi said. A parallel of the throwing out of foreign powers in the region was the formation of what Al-Qassemi calls a “native art aesthetic”- a rejection of the teachings Arab artists were taught by Western artists. “They took the techniques,” Al-Qassemi said, “but they said, ‘this is not the content we want to produce. We want to produce local content. We want to draw our own icons. We want to draw inspiration from our own cultural heritage.’” This evolution happened from the 1920s onwards into the 1960s, with inspiration dating as far back as Pharaonic Egypt. “Our art is global,” Al-Qassemi declared. 

In Al-Qassemi’s opinion, art and politics have been intertwined for hundreds if not thousands of years. He described the Great Pyramids of Egypt as being giant architectural structures that were built to honor political figures, in that case, the leaders of the country. In a more modern context, artists still express their admiration for other artists through their art, evolving to include political figures too. “Some musicians would sing in praise of an artist, obviously, or a political figure,” Al-Qassemi said, and that “these leaders are affected by these intellectuals, so intellectuals and artists, sculptors, painters, can either depict figures that they admire.” 

Not only is there a deep relationship between art and politics in the Middle East, but Al-Qassemi also believes that art can in fact be used as a tool to better understand a nation at a given moment in time. “I think art offers us an avenue to understand the region and dynamic,” Al-Qassemi said. “You can look at articles and essays and scholarly texts as well as newspaper articles, you can look at speeches, you can look at TV coverage, radio documentaries, all these are ways for you to understand the region, but I think art has for many years been overlooked.” Al-Qassemi offered the example of Israeli self-depiction in the 1940s and 50s as a way to understand how art represents what image a nation wants to be portrayed. “So they’re like, we want to depict soldiers, heroism, the kibbutz everyday life,” Al-Qassemi said of Israel. You can perform a similar exercise about Iran and Iraq, he thinks, saying that “When the Iran-Iraq war occurred, you see the Iranian state directing artists who create images showing martyrdom, showing sacrifice, showing parents weeping for their kids who have died in honor and service and sacrifice for their country.” In Iraq, on the other hand, the government was “directing the TV channels to make fun of Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, and then you can understand the country’s psychology.” 

Al-Qassemi points out, importantly, the different stylistic evolution of Middle Eastern art—a tradition separate from that of the West. “A lot of people come to me and say ‘oh did you have Cubism in West Africa, North West Asia, North Africa, did you have… all these weird Western words?’”Al-Qassemi is wary of conflating the art movements of the West with those of the Middle East, pointing out that “we have our own movements of art, many of which were founded by women, which is something incredible because this isn’t the case in the West. Most of the art movements in the West were founded by men, whereas in the Middle East it was the other way around.”  

According to Al-Qassemi, women have played a uniquely prominent role in Middle Eastern and North African art. “You have crystalism, which was founded by a Sudanese woman. You have naturalism. And Arabic lettrism,” Al-Qassemi said, mentioning art schools across the region founded and influenced by women, allowing a flourishing of a unique artistic heritage. “It makes no sense for someone to say do you have this, do you have this movement,” Al-Qassemi said. “The Middle East has its own movement, its own schools, and so there are elements that are unique to every region.”

With its own tradition came a unique leveraging of art in situations of political unrest or protest. Al-Qassemi sees protest art as being as old as art and language itself. “People assume that protest art is a recent development with the Arab Spring,” Al-Qassemi said. “In fact, poetry was a protest art, and this goes back thousands of years. So, the Arabic language is 2000 years old. You’d denounce a corrupt leader through poetry.” The role of art in protest has not diminished over the milenia. Even in the 20th century, Al-Qassemi said, “art was used with the use of banners in the 1920s again, denouncing corrupt Arabic leaders, denouncing foreign occupation protests.” Al-Qassemi points out that this catharsis of art and poetry was particularly strong “during the times of war, during the times of occupation, and especially the Arab Spring.”

With a tradition thousands of years old, the role of political art in the Middle East is ever evolving. Al-Qassemi mentioned that political art has recently become far more digital, with people using downloadable templates as a tool to disseminate protest materials. “Protests are very much alive in the region,” Al-Qassemi said. “Even now with that, with the rise of authoritarianism once again in the region, protests are had, still people continued to upload anonymously, people that unfortunately have gone into exile, are still uploading and creating work.” In short, then, the art has no borders, no named artist, and is increasingly easy to pass on. While the world’s eyes are ever turned to the region, a look at the Middle East’s art might help us get a better look. 

Luthi’s approach sits within an ongoing movement to turn away from high-level diplomatic narratives which tend to privilege an American triumphalist narrative. For instance,Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s recent work The Cold War’s Killing Fields suggests that the late 20th century was only “cold” for some countries, while throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia it was a time of bloody wars, pogroms, and genocidal violence. These new histories of the Cold War therefore challenge us to consider whether the very name “Cold War” is an appropriate characterization for this period. Indeed, Luthi notes that, while 1989 has come to be seen as a watershed moment for many western countries, the international dynamics which would define the post-Cold War era had already been in place since the 1970s in some cases elsewhere in the world. In the Middle East for instance, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat viewed Cold War superpower competition as a hindrance to his efforts to make peace with Israel and grew increasingly convinced he would have to try and ignore the US-Soviet fault line to succeed in his foreign policy goals. Post-revolutionary Iran also rejected the idea of bipolar competition and proposed a new vision for a theocratic world order, the consequences of which still play out in the present day. While, as Luthi was careful to note throughout his talk, this does not mean the superpowers were inconsequential, it complicates our tendency to compartmentalize certain issues as Cold War or post-Cold War. Throughout much of the Middle East and Asia, the battle between Soviet communism and American capitalism took a back seat to questions of how to organize postcolonial society, conflicts of identity, religion, and representation. That these issues were catapulted to international prominence after the collapse of the USSR did not mean that they did not exist before then. Luthi’s arguments in this respect offered a refreshing new take on late 20th century international relations. 

While it is unlikely that the superpower-centric view and terminology of the Cold War will disappear anytime soon, the push led by scholars such as Luthi towards more global scholarship of this period is a welcome one. In particular, it is worthwhile to consider the regions Luthi left out in his talk, most notably Africa and Latin America, which faced similar struggles to define themselves amid ever-present neo-colonial and interventionist threats from the superpowers. Hopefully the attendees at this event and the readers of Cold Wars, Asia, the Middle East, Europe will themselves be inspired to draw upon Luthi’s work and fill in these persistent regional gaps in our understanding of the Cold War.

Written by: Emily Lin

On October 23, 2019, Yale Law School invited Andrew Hong, the founder and executive director of Emancipate North Koreans (ENoK), to speak on the resettlement process and challenges for North Korean refugees adjusting to life in the United States. Based in Chicago, Hong’s non-profit provides education services, career counseling, community support, and a safe shelter for refugees.

Hong began the talk with a historical overview of the reasons that motivate individuals to leave North Korea despite the arduous journey and dangers that come with the defection process. Refugees often leave due to political fallout with the regime or to seek a better standard of living. They typically cross the Yalu or Tumen Rivers on the North Korean-Chinese border, making their way through mainland China with the help of brokers, non-profit organizations, or missionary groups. The next step of the journey takes them to Southeast Asia, typically ending at the UN refugee base camp in Bangkok, Thailand where members from various national consulates begin a screening process. Refugees have the freedom to choose where to relocate, with most migrating to South Korea or the United States. 

North Koreans who choose to come to the United States face additional challenges due to the language barrier and difficulties adjusting to a full-fledged market economy. Usually, they do not have access to a robust support network and face obstacles in applying for benefits due to the lack of information on available assistance programs. In that regard, ENoK’s Empower House program provides them with living necessities, access to information and job networks, and educational training on valuable and marketable life skills, seeking to fulfill three main goals to emancipate, empower, and embrace North Korean refugees.

Hong described his last five years as an eye-opening experience because he realized that resettlement involves more than practical and tangible assistance for migrants. It also involves building a support base that makes a continued effort to understand each individual’s narrative, since the psychological trauma and social challenges of resettlement are often more jarring and complex. Hong concluded the discussion with his next steps for ENoK, focusing on empowering North Korean refugees by expanding the network of defectors, volunteers, and donors to help them feel more at home in the United States.

The Brady-Johnson program in Grand Strategy and the Yale College Democrats invited former FBI director James Comey to speak on October 7 and October 8, respectively. Though both events were organized and moderated independently, they inevitably shared similarities among the topics discussed.

The Grand Strategy-organized event, entitled “the FBI: Past, Present, and Future,” was a conversation between James Comey and Beverly Gage – professor of History and American Studies as well as Director of Grand Strategy – and moderated by Asha Rangappa,  senior lecturer at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a CNN legal and national security analyst. Rangappa loosely moderated the discussion around four central themes: the FBI’s perception and public image; its rules and accountability; its relationship with civil rights; and the independence of law enforcement. Professor Gage and Director Comey’s responses complemented one another, as Gage elucidated questions regarding the FBI’s troubled past, while Comey discussed its controversial present. 

Most surprisingly, the FBI’s dubious investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use and the consequences of the 2016 Russian election interference were left largely unaddressed in great detail. Instead, more historical controversies – like J. Edgar Hoover’s shaping of the FBI, its harassment of Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists, and its institutionalized, homogeneous culture – were at the forefront. Additionally, discussed in great detail were Director Comey’s efforts to combat the lack of diversity within the FBI. While in office, Comey spearheaded a series of campaigns aimed at improving the racial and gender parity within the Bureau, focusing on the particularly diverse New York office for the CBS television series FBIcreated by Dick Wolf, the executive producer of Law & Order. In their closing remarks, both Gage and Comey seemed hopeful for the future of the FBI, despite America’s current political climate, and insinuated that the current administration is incapable of undermining the objectivity and independence of the Bureau and the intelligence community.

The Yale College Democrats – in conjunction with the Politic, Every Vote Counts, the Jackson Institute, and the Yale International Relations Association – hosted a “Conversation with James Comey,” moderated by Aliesa Bahri (Murray ’22). Structured differently than Grand Strategy’s event and focusing more on contemporary issues, Director Comey opened with a monologue extensively discussing Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and the breath of declassified information released by the Senate Intelligence Committee the day before. When asked about President Trump’s impending impeachment inquiry, Director Comey asserted that the best measure of accountability is voting the president out of office in 2020, not removing him through impeachment. 

Moreover, Director Comey spent considerable time explaining the previously-confidential reasoning for the FBI’s questionable handing of the investigation over Secretary Clinton’s email use, which some attribute to influencing the election in favor of now-President Trump. Director Comey insisted that the investigation was necessary, but the timeline – with the final findings released just days before the election – as unintentional. Nevertheless, he maintained that the Bureau’s actions were integral in ensuring its objectivity and political independence, as deferral of action could have been interpreted as aiding Clinton’s campaign complicity. In his final justifications, Comey stated that he believed that damage to the credibility of the FBI was inescapable, but the Bureau has an extensive experience in atoning for its actions.

On the whole, Director Comey proved optimistic for the future and integrity of America’s political system despite the deepening political polarization. He likewise was confident in the FBI’s stable and objective role as an enforcer of America’s democratic ideals and its strides in atoning and correcting itself following controversies. 

By one o’clock, a dozen students had already taken the most coveted seats in Yale Law School’s Levinson Hall. Soon to be joined by community members and faculty, the spectators engaged in quiet conversation, with some notable murmurs about coming assignments and skipped classes. Others spent the time hurriedly making up the work they were missing or getting ahead on work due later so they could spend the rest of this Wednesday afternoon carefully reflecting on the discussion they would hear.

That discussion was one of many in the new “Big Picture” series, hosted by the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. October 2nd marked the first public talk in the series, focusing on the real-world applications of former UN Ambassador Samantha Power’s recently published memoir, The Education of an Idealist.

The memoir traces Ambassador Power’s life from her childhood in an Irish pub to her new life in Atlanta, Georgia; her athletic college days to her experience as a war-correspondent in Bosnia; and from her life as a professor and advocate for human rights to her appointment to the National Security Council by former President Barack Obama. Her role as the American Ambassador to the United Nations is expounded upon, as well as the struggles she faced in trying to protect human rights and promote freedom around the world. Ambassador Power is best known for her foreign policy regarding humanitarian crises, and the role America has to play when there is trouble abroad. One of the main questions her new memoir seeks to answer is how the United States should intervene in foreign nations when the lives or liberties of people are at stake.

Interviewing Ambassador Power about her book and her role in foreign policy were former National Security Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and visiting lecturer, Jake Sullivan, as well as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the Department of State and Sterling Professor of International Law Harold Hongju Koh. After a brief introduction by Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy and History, Beverly Gage, Ambassador Power took up the microphone to greet the crowd of eager students and to read an excerpt from her memoir, setting the tone for the discussion. 

Throughout the panel, Power harkened back to her memoir, referencing the outbreak and persistence of certain issues like the Ukrainian Crisis and her mission to Cameroon to promote the safety of civilians living in fear of the Boko Haram. The memoir not only reflects the growth and education of an important American ambassador, but the influence she and her policies had on the world. 

With brief commentary on the current state of American foreign relations, Ambassador Power admitted that the power America once had to intervene in humanitarian crises may have been recently ignored. With the current presidency focusing on internal affairs, our former status to foreign countries— and certainly our allies— has been reduced. But, she recalls her own time at Yale, specifically in the History department, and hopes that new educational initiatives—such as the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy—are raising a new generation of humanitarians and policy makers.

You can buy Ambassador Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Education of an Idealistat the Campus Bookstore, Barnes and Noble online, or Amazon, as well as her well-known book on foreign policy “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. For more information about Ambassador Power, or to see upcoming dates for her book tour, you can visit www.samanthapower.com.

For the next “Big Picture” event, visit the Brady-Johnson Program in grand strategy website.

On August 5th 2019,  Kashmir was stripped of Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which granted special status to the Muslim majority including autonomy over land, business, and most matters barring foreign affairs and defence. The bureaucratic, political move was paired with, to no one’s surprise, thousands of additional troops, a communications blackout, and a paralyzing curfew. Kashmiris, far from being able to exercise the autonomy previously granted to them by the constitution, are under the puppeteering actions of the three nuclear powers which continue to fight under the ruse of territorial rights and national integration.

Yale’s South Asian Society recently hosted a panel discussion on finding the semblances of humanity in a conflict smeared by territorial and bureaucratic interests and sentiments of nationalism. Panelist Sushant Singh presented the audience with several dimensions on the issue. On the bilateral level, he stated how the conflict appears to be of a central identity conflict between two states, India and Pakistan, both torn apart at birth post British-coloanialim. From a geopolitical perspective, Kashmir is advantageous for its shared border with India, Pakistan,China, and Afghanistan. Moreover, Kashmir is rich in glacial reserves which provide water supply for the agriculture of both countries. Either way, Kashmir and its concept bare to be essential to the nations which choose to claim it.

Professor Supriya Gandhi added how the Kashmiri question is flowered, in large part, by the religious landscape of the region. Kashmir being the only Muslim majority state in India, plays to India’s core identity as a non-sectarian democracy, heralded, of course, in direct contrast to Pakistan’s identity as a nation-state for the muslim population of South Asia. 

Moreover, she shared how the current rhetoric from political leaders in India resembles discussions of Muslim conquest in India’s past. India has hosted several Mughali Muslim rulers over its history and Kashmir, now, stands as the symbol of one of the last poritons of that historical narrative that India can hold. Kashmir, then, becomes the crown of India and Pakistan’s national identity. An India without Kashmir perceptually falsifies the principle of secular democracy for many Indians. Similarly, Pakistan loosening its reigns of a muslim-majority state is antithetical to the core of the ideals preached by its founder, Muhmammad Ali-Jinnah. Kashmir lies, then, as a territorial and symbolic necessity for the imagined national identities both countries adamantly hold. 

Neither bureaucratic officials in Pakistan or India are victims of this conflict. Indians and Pakistanis who safe in their houses, those who are free to pick up their phone and watch nationalistic renditions of news, are also not the victims. The victims, as always, are the Kashmiri citizens who have now physically been silenced in land which has always been their home. Panelist Salman Anees Soz stated that 40% of Kashmiris suffer with depression. Over 48,000 Kashmiris have died in the territorial conflicts so far, and thousands more have suffered at the hands of violent militaries from both nations. 

As Kashmiris take to the streets to fight for their human rights and basic necessities and freedoms, they are met with silencing tear gas, pellets launched deep into their flesh, and, as always, discussion on which nuclear power should “rightfully” lay claim over the region. This discussion presents horrific irony, as its pursuit negates space for discussion on the rights which should be at the center of the debate– those of the Kashmiri citizens who have sacrificed decades of peace, prosperity, and comfort for a conflict they neither signed to start nor are able to resign from.

There is no clear international actor to root for here. Pakistan, India, China, and the multilateral organizations offering to forge agreements of peace have all been involved in human rights violations not just in Kashmir but around the world and in the flesh of their own land. The solution cannot be war, either. Focusing on protecting the human rights of Kashmiris and creating space for diplomatic discourse between India and Pakistan, though inadequate for the thousands who have suffered and continue to do so,may be the best outcome one can hope for to distill current tensions and restore the abnormal normalcy Kashmiris have previously bore before the 5th of August.