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Cutler Fellow to Work at International Court of Justice at The Hague
Marcos Kotlik, a recent LLM graduate from the University of Michigan Law School, at the sixth annual Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program in Washington, D.C. earlier this yearMarcos Kotlik, a recent LLM graduate from the University of Michigan Law School, at the sixth annual Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program in Washington, D.C. earlier this year
Cutler Fellow to Work at International Court of Justice at The Hague
By: Oscar Tollast 

LLM graduate Marcos Kotlik will move to the Netherlands in September to begin a 10-month Judicial Fellowship at the International Court of Justice at The Hague

A Salzburg Cutler Fellow has been selected to undertake a 10-month Judicial Fellowship at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. 

Marcos Kotlik, a recent LLM graduate from the University of Michigan Law School, attended the sixth annual Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program in Washington, D.C. earlier this year. 

He was one of five MLaw Cutler Fellows who explored the future of public and private international law. 

Speaking to LegalNews.com, Kotlik said, "Beyond the professional and academic aspects of the program, it was a really nice opportunity to meet wonderful people from around the world, learn about their countries and the universities they belonged to, and make new friends."

This year's Cutler Fellows Program saw participants engage with prominent legal professionals and public servants, including Seventh Circuit Chief Judge Diane Wood; Ivan Šimonović, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect; and William H. Webster, former CIA and FBI director.  

Kotlik and his peers also worked with faculty advisors from each of the participating law schools – University of Chicago, Columbia University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, University of Michigan, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, University of Virginia, and Yale University – to sharpen their research papers tackling issues in international law ranging from trade and investment law to the law of war.

The Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program was established in memory of Lloyd N. Cutler, the Washington “superlawyer” who served as White House Counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton. Cutler also served as Chair of Salzburg Global’s Board of Directors for a decade and advocated passionately for mentoring young leaders with a commitment to shaping a better world through law and rule of law. 

Since its founding in 2012, the Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program has carried forward Lloyd Cutler’s legacy and continues to empower rising legal professionals from around the world. 

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Combating Extremism and Promoting Pluralism
Combating Extremism and Promoting Pluralism
By: Salzburg Global Seminar 

The Salzburg Global Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention series publishes new report 

Xenophobia, racism, and violent extremism are tearing at the fabric of societies across the globe. Although contexts and specifics differ, many shared human values do not: the wish to live in peace and security, and to ensure a positive future for the next generation. At the same time, where atrocities have occurred there is a need to commemorate victims and to confront perpetrators without perpetuating a cycle of violence or creating a climate overwhelmed by vengeance.

Faced with a rise in violent extremism, policymakers are under pressure to invest in prevention and to show that it works. Structured efforts to reduce extremist mindsets and behaviors have existed for some time, but evidence of effectiveness is often not widely known or utilized. Many interventions require considerable time to effect change, making rigorous measurement of their success over the long-term resource-intensive with sustained political will around an often-unpopular topic. What works? How do we know? And will it work in different geographic, cultural, and political contexts?

These were the questions at the front mind for the educators, practitioners and museum curators invited to take part in a new phase of Salzburg Global Seminar’s Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention multi-year program series as they devised strategies to support cultures of prevention, with a specific focus on Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. 

Funded by the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the two-year project saw Fellows collaborate within and across countries to develop locally-driven, culturally-sensitive and -specific responses to combat extremism and promote pluralism in the five focus countries: Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Rwanda, and South Africa.

The new report, Combating Extremism and Promoting Pluralism, presents the findings of the project from August 2016 to March 2018, starting with a workshop at Schloss Leopoldskron, culminating in several successful pilot projects that are now being scaled-up across their regions, and generating a series of concrete recommendations for others wishing to implement their own projects to combat extremism and promote pluralism. Interviews with several Fellows are also included.

Pilot Projects

Fellows from Rwanda and South Africa collaborated in launching the Change Makers Program, a leadership program for high school students. Using case studies on the Rwandan genocide, South African apartheid and the Holocaust, students develop critical thinking skills and are empowered to be agents of positive change. 

In Egypt, educators at the American University of Cairo (AUC) established the Civic Peace Education Initiative. This strives to integrate community-based learning, intergenerational dialogue and storytelling into the curriculum and prompts students and faculty to think about societal divides and adopt values of global citizenship. Similarly, Fellows at the International University of Rabat in Morocco developed a graduate degree program in Conflict Resolution and Peace Governance. 

In Pakistan, as part of its mission to protect youth against extremist recruitment efforts, the Renaissance Foundation for Social Innovation, Pakistan (RESIP) used this funding to conduct a study on the effect of socio-religious identities in shaping university students’ behavior. Elsewhere in the country, Fellows at Kohat University launched a study circle to connect students across the country’s northwestern provinces. 

“After the Holocaust, people have repeated the mantra ‘never again’ – but then mass atrocities keep happening,” explains Charles Ehrlich, Salzburg Global Program Director.  “In Salzburg, we’ve heard first-hand accounts of tragedies taking place right now afflicting the Rohingya and the Yazidis, among others. Many of our participants in this program have themselves witnessed or survived unspeakable horror.

“As an institution based in Austria, a country which itself continues to have difficulty addressing its own Nazi legacy, Salzburg Global Seminar has an especially important role in working with our colleagues from countries across the world to both address their own difficult histories and, through grassroots action, to seek to create a future where these tragedies do not repeat. The network has grown organically – mostly consisting of Fellows from countries in the Global South – as a way to break the isolation, so they have the opportunity to share experiences and ideas and to learn from each other how to develop initiatives appropriate for the circumstances of their own countries.”

All five of the pilot projects are now poised for expansion or replication over the course of 2018 and 2019. For its part, Salzburg Global intends to continue this series on Holocaust education and combating extremism through the convening of future sessions in Salzburg, as well as by supporting in-region gatherings of Fellows to aid in the execution of these initiatives.

Download the Report


Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention is a multi-year program series held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with further support from Ronald D. Abramson, the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

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Ayub Ayubi - “I Had No Time for Thinking Independently”
A former zealot-turned-social activist, Ayub Ayubi now helps other young people in Pakistan to de-radicalize
Ayub Ayubi - “I Had No Time for Thinking Independently”
By: Helena Santos and Mirva Villa 

Pakistani social activist reflects on his past leading up to his current work of promoting de-radicalization and preventing violent extremism in his home country

Today Ayub Ayubi is a Pakistani social activist dedicated to youth empowerment and to engaging college students from different cultural and religious backgrounds through the Renaissance Foundation for Social Innovation, Pakistan (RESIP). But this story could have been radically different if Ayubi had not attended college. Born and raised in a “religiously fanatic environment” as he describes it, Ayubi’s childhood was marked by hatred and extremist views on how to treat others who didn’t belong to the deobandi – a strict Sunni school of thought.

“My time was divided 40% for school, 30% for madrassa and the rest of the time for my family. In this proportion I had no time for thinking independently or I was not allowed to go around freely with friends not of my culture. The parents belong to a deobandi sector and they didn’t want any friend outside that sector.”

Gaining time to think and his own space is what Ayubi considers as the defining moment in his life. While in college he started to have contact with believers from other Muslim sects and it led him to challenge preconceived notions that were prevalent in his household, like how the Shias are the enemies of Islam.

“At the college time I changed my circle of friends and that was the time I began to change. I improved myself and it was the initial point for me to de-radicalize myself and to have some freedom, for me to have some space for myself. That was the beginning of it and I really love that moment.”

This passion and will to change his extremist ways propelled him to create a safe space for others to go through the same process he had. Hence RESIP was born.

His main goal with RESIP, an organization he founded in 2011 and of which he now serves as its chairman, is to promote de-radicalization and preventing violent extremism in his country. With support from Salzburg Global Seminar, he is now also piloting another de-radicalization project, as part of the Salzburg Global Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program.

RESIP started as an informal way for students to gather and have the opportunity to discuss their own views, and since 2011 it has helped 5000 young Pakistanis. Seven years later RESIP has two nationwide programs, one of which is Mashal-e-Rah.

“Mashal-e-Rah is an on campus campaign for alternative engagement to stop the recruitment of extremist groups like ISIS/Daesh and many of these jihad groups [that] are actively working within the campus. We are trying with this campaign to provide young people a platform where they could share their voices, that could share their grievances against the state, against their own families, against the campus, anyone.”

Issues such as gender equality, Islamic extremism and other religions are discussed by students who have different views so that they have a chance to develop empathy with the other person’s believes and values. Mashal-e-Rah is currently present in 25 campuses across Pakistan.

“We are not judging them; we are giving them an option to speak up [...] We are trying to let them realize that violence is not an option and that you need to tolerate other people’s views.”

Having a space to talk and confront different ideologies is exactly one of the things Ayubi cherishes the most about his time in Salzburg. In his opinion, global meetings are the key to think of the world without any constraints imposed by family, society, governments or media.

“I would call it building empathy with the international community. That’s what we need at this stage. That’s one of the stepping stones toward peacebuilding and this is what I’m learning from here.”


Ayub Ayubi is a Fellow of the Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program. This multi-year series is held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with further support from Ronald D. Abramson, the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. More information is available here: holocaust.salzburgglobal.org

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Salzburg Global Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program on the BBC World Service
Students of the Change Makers Program in Johannesburg celebrate their graduation
Salzburg Global Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program on the BBC World Service
By: Bethany Bell, BBC World News 

Could lessons from the Holocaust help people overcome the divisions created by modern day extremism?

On November 19, 2017, the
BBC World Service featured Salzburg Global Fellows, Albert Lichtblau, Tali Nates and Freddy Mutanguha, and Salzburg Global Program Director Charles Ehrlich as they discussed with BBC Foreign Correspondent Bethany Bell the importance of teaching about the Holocaust in order to prevent future extremism.

Presenter: The rise in violent extremism is one of the most troubling phenomena facing governments and communities in recent times but what actually works to prevent it? Well, this week Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria has brought together people from 20 different countries, including Rwanda, South Africa and Bangladesh, who are working to try and promote peace in troubled regions. The seminar asks how tools developed for educating people about the Holocaust can help counter extremism in societies today, as Bethany Bell now reports from Salzburg.

Lichtblau: “Adolf Hitler was from Austria. He was born here. He grew up here and he moved to Bavaria then…”

Bell: An unusual tour of Salzburg by the Austrian historian Albert Lichtblau. Rather than focusing on the city’s famous citizens like Mozart, this tour is about its Nazi history and the way the city remembers or tries not to remember its past.

But this isn’t just a history lesson. The people on the tour are part of a group which is trying to find ways countering extremism today. Charles Ehrlich is from Salzburg Global Seminar.

Ehrlich: The people who are here make a mix of activists, government officials, museum directors, civil society from countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. They all have their own national tragedies or difficult atrocities or difficult histories that they need to come to grips with. And Holocaust education is so well developed that it has a set of tools that they can actually adapt to their own societies to be able to help them address their own problems in a way that both memorializes the past in a dignified way and remembers the victims of the atrocities, but also allows them to heal and move into the future.

Bell: One of the projects to emerge from the group is the Change Makers Leadership Program, which aims to help high school students from South Africa and Rwanda counter extremism by confronting past atrocities. One of its leaders is Tali Nates from the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Center.

Nates: Our idea was to take three case studies: The Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and the apartheid in South Africa. But to add to that, issues of resilience and empathy and the kids, they would be treated as leaders.

One of the most important components was to look at individual stories and the choices people made in those times. So not only talking about the perpetrators and victims but also bystanders, also rescuers, upstanders, in the case of Rwanda, the international community: where was the world? So really looking deeply into human behaving those times and choices the people – individuals and groups – made. And the feeling was with the kids was that “now we are empowered.”

One of the students said, “the program allowed me to understand my power that I am an upstander. I can stand up and speak up.”

Bell: Tali Nates, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, works closely with Freddy Mutanguha, who lost his parents and siblings in the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. He said they wanted to work with teenagers because they were most at risk of being radicalized.

Mutanguha: The young people, they are drawn into mass atrocities, into violence. So we decided to focus on them and help them to resist extremism. The genocide seems to be a past as history. But it’s really alive. Even today you can see the skulls, you can see the consequences. People really feel traumatized at some point. So we have to tell them, “Other people made wrong actions. How can you change it? How can you change Rwanda to be a very good story to tell instead of telling the story of genocide?”

Presenter: Freddy Mutanguha ending that report by Bethany Bell.


The Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program is a multi-year series held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with further support from Ronald D. Abramson, the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. More information is available here: holocaust.salzburgglobal.org

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Sarah Alnemr - “Being Introduced to so Many Different Perspectives and Different Terminologies... Makes You Think More About the World”
Undergraduate student Sarah AlNemr was invited to join the Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program after her involvement in the summer program, the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change
Sarah Alnemr - “Being Introduced to so Many Different Perspectives and Different Terminologies... Makes You Think More About the World”
By: Carly Sikina and Mirva Villa 

As a television and film studies major at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Egyptian college student Sarah AlNemr understands the complicated role media plays in society.

On one hand, media has the ability to reinforce fears and stereotypes, on the other hand it can also enable shared dialogue, which can help facilitate positive social change. AlNemr first came to Salzburg in the summer of 2017 for the three-week Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, a longrunning program of Salzburg Global Seminar that promotes media literacy and global citizenship. While attending the session, which was that year titled Voices Against Extremism: Media Responses to Global Populism, AlNemr and the other student participants created a multimedia “playbook” to facilitate cross-cultural conversations about populism and extremism.

She described her experience as “amazing”, as she was able to meet people from around the world. Since attending the Academy, AlNemr says, “I am far more comfortable being here with a group of people that I’ve never met… Being introduced to so many different perspectives and different terminology, just a lot of different ideas, makes you think more about the world.”

Based on her thoughtful contributions while attending the Academy, AlNemr was invited to return to Salzburg for a second time and bring her youth perspective to the Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program.

AlNemr states that she wanted to attend the Program because of her desire to learn about the topic of extremism. “I’m really trying to understand a lot more about it [extremism] because it’s very vital to our existence. It’s not something that we talk about.” She continues, “it’s [important] for me to understand more about the world, to understand how things happen and why conflicts happen.”

Although they were different, AlNemr identifies connections between the two sessions. She describes both as “experimental” and “very raw.” She sees the sessions as vital to dismantling current worldviews and systems as well as crucial components to understanding the importance of gaining “different perspectives on how things could be.”

She now plans to incorporate her new insights from Salzburg into future filmmaking projects. She highlights the importance of examining “different contexts, having different cultures, having different histories, …and different explanations of one story, of one history,” and she believes that doing so, “really gives you a lot of perspective on how you can use that in film.”


Sarah AlNemr is a Fellow of the Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program. This multi-year series is held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with further support from Ronald D. Abramson, the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. More information is available here: holocaust.salzburgglobal.org

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Obioma Uche - “If We Can Find Ways to Empower Women, They Will Not Fall Prey to the Ideology of Those Groups”
Providing girls with an education can help deter them from supporting extremist groups, says Nigerian professor Obioma Uche
Obioma Uche - “If We Can Find Ways to Empower Women, They Will Not Fall Prey to the Ideology of Those Groups”
By: Carly Sikina and Mirva Villa 

When examining violent extremism, women are often left out of the narrative. And for professor and chemical engineer Obioma Uche this is extremely problematic.

Although she teaches petroleum chemistry at the American University of Nigeria, Uche is predominantly interested in the delivery of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education to students, particularly young girls. She believes this initiative can help solve local and regional problems. Moreover, she devotes her life to improving the educational infrastructure in Nigeria and supporting children’s education.

“There have been a few bombings in Yola [in the east of Nigeria, near the Cameroonian border]. Fortunately for us, things have quietened down in the past year. But in Maiduguri, there’s a bombing every other day, and what has struck me over the past year is that these bombings have been carried out by women,” she explains.

This realization of the increased participation of women in extremist groups, spurred Uche to become further involved in improving women’s education. Uche believes it is important to empower women, as extremist groups attempt to gain members by giving people hope and by convincing them the group’s beliefs are better than their own. “If we can find ways to empower women, they [will] not fall prey to the ideology of those groups.” This empowerment comes through education. “I think for many African countries, they do not understand that child and girl education is important.”

Uche understands challenging this common ideology will not be easy. She believes that it is one thing to create a law but another thing to put it into practice. “The law is on the book, but is the will to enforce it there?”

In addition to her teaching obligations, Uche is involved in a community scholarship fund. “[We] look for underprivileged children and we pay their tuition all the way through primary school, and for a select few, we also support them through secondary school.”

She continues, “Now, that might not seem like much, but for a lot of families in the region, when you are struggling to actually feed your family, having to spend a few extra naira on educating your daughter does not seem like a workable solution.”

In addition to supporting children throughout school, she explains the fund strives to improve the infrastructure in schools.

“If you go to some of these local schools, you’ll find they are pretty much husks, really. There are no windows, ceiling is in bad repair. So one of the initiatives … this semester has been to refurbish the staff support rooms, give them a facelift, put in a new ceiling and also provide tools that would enable the teachers to put together their lesson plans.”

When speaking about her time in Salzburg, Uche is very enthusiastic. “It’s been an eye-opening experience; I’ve learned quite a lot. I think it’s been interesting, being a scientist in a room of people in the arts, learning how they frame their discussions.”

“It’s a very educational experience, and I have been able to make a network of colleagues that I think will enable me to do a much better job of trying to improve the situation of the girls that I currently work with.”

Despite the obstacles, Uche remains hopeful. “Nigeria is a very patriarchal society and I feel that one of the ways in which I have been able to live a rather independent life for a woman in Nigeria is through education… And so I think, if I can at least be a part of having other women have access to that [same] opportunity, then that’s how we move Nigeria to a better place.”


Obioma Uche is a Fellow of the Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program. This multi-year series is held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with further support from Ronald D. Abramson, the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. More information is available here: holocaust.salzburgglobal.org

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Arjimand Hussain Talib - Believing in a Future That is “Inclusive, Plural, and Not Extreme”
Arijmand Hussain Talib (center), Fawad Javaid (left) and Tom Ndahiro (right) take part in a thematic discussion on building popular narratives
Arjimand Hussain Talib - Believing in a Future That is “Inclusive, Plural, and Not Extreme”
By: Mirva Villa 

International development expert-turned-newspaper editor discusses changing Kashmir’s narrative

Kashmir, divided under the control of India, Pakistan, and China, is one of the most militarized zones in the world. The ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan over the ownership of the prosperous region began with the violent partition of British India 70 years ago. The Kashmiri people are no strangers to power struggles – they have been under foreign rule for centuries, from the Afghans, Mughals in the 16th, Sikhs to the British in the 20th century.

The lives of the people living in the area continue to be affected by the aftermath of the 1947 partition. Seventy years on, approximately one million armed forces man both sides of the line of control, in an area with a population of about 14 million people.  “Post 1990, because of a bloody armed struggle and the counter-insurgency, most of the ordinary Kashmiris were caught in the middle and life for them has been really very difficult since the last 28 years,” said Arjimand Hussain Talib.

“Although Srinagar and New Delhi shared an uneasy political relationship ever since 1947, the advent of armed struggle in 1990 resulted in a whole new situation. Basic civil liberties got hampered to a great extent. Extra-constitutional laws were introduced, which affect people’s safety and dignity. So these are very difficult circumstances,” Talib said, adding that living in an environment of constant fear and uncertainty has taken a significant toll on the people’s psyche and mental health as well.

Talib was brought up in Kashmir, during what he calls a “very difficult time.” In the 1990s, the region was in the midst of heightened armed conflict. Most parents at the time, Talib explains, chose to send their children abroad to receive their education. “Like many others, I was sent to South India,” Talib said.

While trained as an engineer, Talib knew his passions lay elsewhere. “I had more leanings toward social sciences, but finally, I became an engineer.” He later went on to study water resource management and worked for international organizations such as World Bank’s ProVention Consortium, UNESCO, Plan International, Oxfam and ActionAid. The work took him to 16 different countries (including Austria, where he participated in a Salzburg Global Seminar program – The Politics of Water: Addressing Fresh Water Scarcity - in 2002) and many years away from Kashmir, but now, Talib is planning to return to help his home region. “At this point in time,” he said, “I had two options: to continue my international career, working outside of Kashmir, or going back and doing something for Kashmir.”

As Kashmir is yet again living through a turbulent period of unrest, Talib has returned to Kashmir to launch a new newspaper - the Ziraat Times. The paper has been running since October 2017, and it is the first print publication focused solely on Kashmir’s agricultural business community – which makes up a large portion of the local economy.

While other papers mostly report on the ongoing struggles of the region, the Ziraat Times aims to bring something new to the public conversation by focusing on the local economies of Jammu and Kashmir – the Indian-administered part of the region – and broader issues that impact the area, such as climate change, a significant youth population, entrepreneurship and technology and innovation.

This work is part of an effort on Talib’s part to help optimize productivity in the primary economy of Kashmir and create job opportunities for youth across the supply chain, considering dwindling job opportunities for the youth. This is something he spoke about at Schloss Leopoldskron during the November 2017 Salzburg Global program, Learning from the Past: Sharing Experiences across Borders to Combat Extremism.

Talib insists “Kashmir is a very resilient nation.” Despite its decades-long conflict, Talib said Kashmir retains its long-held ethos of compassion and empathy. He indicates Kashmir’s multi-cultural and multi-ethnic moorings, meanwhile, remain mostly unaffected. According to Talib, the fertile lands have ensured the fruit-growing region enjoys economic prosperity – but what is needed now is political stability, a solution to the conflict and peace.

After a long career in international development, Talib hopes his new role as a newspaper editor will help create job opportunities and hope for Kashmir’s young people. “I’ve seen the perils and pain of the Arab Spring, and what it did to countries like Libya and Syria, and I’m affected by that…. I don’t want Kashmir to face a similar situation,” said Talib. “This [idea of] going back [home] is guided by that desire of contributing something small in making sure that our youth have a hope in a better.”

International collaboration gives participants in the Salzburg Global Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention program the opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences on tackling local issues of extremism and consider adapting tried-and-tested strategies in their own contexts and communities. Hearing Rwandan participants share how their country worked through the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, where an estimated 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans were killed by their Hutu compatriots in the space of 100 days, was especially valuable for Talib.

Talib said, “Much of the world is currently facing this challenge of extremism. Extremist right-wing parties and ideologies are taking center-stage almost everywhere.” Talib values the moral support offered by the network of like-minded people. He said, “The biggest thing is that we come to know in these events there are people who believe in a future which is inclusive, which is plural, which is respectful of diversity and is not extreme. And that motivates you, and that gives you an opportunity to form linkages, to think of a future where you would have many other people working for a better tomorrow in their own regions.”


Arjimand Hussain Talib is a Fellow of the Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention program. This multi-year series is held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with further support from Ronald D. Abramson, the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. More information is available here: holocaust.salzburgglobal.org

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Learning from the Past
Jeremy Silvester works to repatriate the remains of the victims of the Herero genocide from Germany to Namibia
Learning from the Past
By: Maryam Ghaddar and Tomas De La Rosa 

Salzburg Global Fellows explore the lessons of genocides and mass violence – both historic and current – in the hope of stopping them in the future.

The scars left by decades of systematic persecution and genocide are strewn across our recent history and are still evident across the globe today.

The Holocaust may be the most widely known and studied genocide of the 20th century, but understanding of it is fading with each generation. The world may now cry “never again” but the dehumanization of its Jewish population and other minorities began long before the Nazis erected their concentration and death camps. To understand how such atrocities occur, it is important to not only study, remember and memorialize the Holocaust, but also other cases of genocide and mass violence, especially if we hope to mitigate against such atrocities happening again in the future.

The examination in Salzburg of various atrocities – including the genocide of Herero in Namibia, the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, and more recently, the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Myanmar and the massacre of Yazidi in Iraqi Kurdistan – was not to compare or rank human suffering, but to understand how such violence can happen and how it can be halted in the future. By acknowledging the differences; highlighting their distinct histories; identifying the impact of political, cultural or religious indoctrination of populations, especially young people; the experts gathered by Salzburg Global Seminar hoped to find a common ground in the fight to prevent future genocides.

Mapping Dehumanization in Colonial Namibia

Genocide is often divided into several stages, three of which can be described as dehumanization, extermination, and denial. These stages do not necessarily occur chronologically, but rather intertwine and create a breeding ground for hostility.

Jeremy Silvester, director of the Museums Association of Namibia (MAN), has spent much of his adult life examining the Herero genocide of 1904-1907, which saw tens of thousands of Herero people deliberately starved to death or rounded up into concentration camps in German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia). The victims suffered further indignity when more than 3000 of their skulls were sent to Germany to be studied.

“What is the process by which you dehumanize a group of people to the extent you can kill them without regret?” Silvester asks. “The exports of decapitated heads to Germany to be used for racist science…it’s very instructive that there were postcards, for example, of skulls being packaged to be sent from Swakopmund concentration camps.”

Through his work with the Africa Accessioned project, Silvester has attempted to map out the historical implications of this dark period of German history and repatriate the victims’ remains and artifacts being held in German museums.

“There has been a willful amnesia within Germany,” he laments. “The emphasis is…very much on the memories of the Holocaust and the Second World War, but the colonial history has been, I think, suppressed. The links between these two events have also not been explored sufficiently.”

The Protracted Extermination of the Rohingya

Mofidul Hoque is director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice in Bangladesh. His country is currently witnessing a large influx of Rohingya refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing in neighboring Myanmar

One cannot begin to speak about dehumanization as a genocidal process without first understanding the degree to which hatred and distrust settle in people’s minds. The minority Muslim Rohingyas are a very small ethnic religious community in the strait of Myanmar, with a distinct language, culture, and identity. Their persecution has a long history. They are denied citizenship in Myanmar and were excluded from the country’s most recent census. The most recent violence is officially in response to Rohingya insurgent attacks, but the Burmese military has responded brutally, targeting not only the militants but destroying whole villages in northern Rakhine State. The UN has called the violence a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Mofidul Hoque, director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice, has witnessed the refugee crisis unfold in neighboring Bangladesh, as nearly 700,000 Rohingya people have fled their homes and sought safety over the border.

“Here, the group is small and the intent to destroy is almost complete... It has a similarity with the Holocaust. The Jewish population was [not] large… the brutality was immense, and the same thing we see with the Rohingyas. They have… denied them of their ethnic identity and citizenship, and they are now trying to wipe them out… There are [Buddhist] monks and priests… who are actually propagating hate speech, who are branding the particular community as an enemy of the state, and the reflection now we see in the tragedy which has unfolded before us.”

Buddhism is a religion of Ahimsa, or non-violence, but with state support in Myanmar, ultra-nationalist, Buddhist extremism and anti-Muslim rhetoric is spreading. “Genocide does not happen overnight,” Hoque says. Instigating hatred, perpetuating that hatred through years of propaganda, and denying atrocities all play a role in making the nightmare a reality.

A Portrait of Denial in Rwanda

Tom Ndahiro is the author of The Friends of Evil: When NGOs Support Genocidaires

Tom Ndahiro, a Rwandan researcher specializing in genocide ideology and denial, contends that denial is present in every phase of genocide, be it a denial of humanity, dignity, or the crime itself.

“When you don’t find the targeted group as equal to the others, when you deny the others’ right to existence, dehumanization is simple. Dehumanization leads your venture to extermination.”

In Salzburg, Ndahiro highlighted the many points in history in which denial has facilitated crimes against humanity, from the genocide of Native Americans and the pogroms against Jews in the Middles Ages, to the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994, which saw 70% of the Tutsi population brutally slaughtered in just 100 days at the hands of their Hutu compatriots.

The publication and dissemination of anti-Tutsi propaganda, such as the Bahutu Manifesto in the 1950s and the Ten Hutu Commandments in the 1990s, helped to galvanize Hutu hatred of their fellow Rwandans over many decades.

After the Bahutu Manifesto-inspired killing of over 20,000 Tutsis in 1959, Ndahiro explains that “The persecution and the killing was never seen as a crime, but a political act they called a revolution… Some voices were raised that there was a genocide in Rwanda, but the world received that information with contemptible indifference. Discrimination against the Tutsis continued for many years…almost total extermination of them was contemplated, planned and prepared by the government in place…in 1994, followed by the perpetrators running away…Their plan to deny the genocide was instituted with impunity as we see today.”

To counter this denial of humanity and history, Ndahiro says that a culture of human rights is needed “that is inculcated from the lowest to the highest strata of the society.”

Extremist Ideology behind the Yazidi Massacre

Speaking of the recent Yazidi persecution by Daesh in Iraqi Kurdistan, Günes Murat Tezcür, Jalal Talabani chair of Kurdish political studies and associate professor at the University of Central Florida, emphasized how Daesh underpinned their killing, raping and enslaving of the Yazidi with religious extremism: “The Islamic State… have a very strong ideological justification for the particular treatment they brought to the Yazidis. To be more specific, they actually used lots of Islamic sources to claim that Yazidis… abandoned Islam. From a classical theological perspective, abandoning Islam for any religion is basically a big sin… In some cases, they were given the choice of conversion… Many Yazidis decided not to convert and they were killed on the spot… So there you basically see a very clear-cut example of ideology shaping an organization’s behavior toward a minority.”

The plight of the Yazidis is not a new phenomenon; campaigns against minority religions have been ongoing for centuries. The pattern is often the same: kill the males, enslave the women and children. Daesh’s ideology has “strong, local connections and… many local people took part,” says Tezcür. In this sense, race and religious prejudice plays a significant role.

“Since the Yazidis were a very isolated community, they did not have much interaction with the outside, it was much easier to… just label them as devil worshippers and then characterize them with some very bizarre features or cultures, so it becomes much more justifiable to dehumanize them and basically attack them.”

Translating Narratives into a Framework for Peace

Acknowledging the patterns of atrocities, memorializing victims of genocide, and learning from humanity’s tragic mistakes will help forge a path toward resilience and global citizenship. Without these elements, humanity is doomed to repeat the worst parts of its history.

Looking again at the Rohingya crisis, Hoque and his team at the Liberation War Museum and The Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice have been conducting small scale research on prevention strategies. He stresses the importance of giving the Rohingyas a human face, giving the women and children a voice, listening to their suffering, protecting their identity, and providing medical support and post-trauma counseling.

Similarly, Silvester suggests integrating the subject of genocide prevention into the schools’ curriculum worldwide. Keeping the memory of victims of the Herero genocide in Namibia alive over a century later is key to “creating a new marker in terms of relations between Africa and other countries that were colonized in Europe. Perhaps it opens up other debates and issues.”

Ndahiro compares the memorialization of the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda to a sort of vaccination against massacres. He suggests establishing legal mechanisms, coupled with education. The process of fighting extremism begins with reversing all policies that led to the genocide – discrimination, unequal treatment of citizens, and poverty.

“Most of these crimes, they don’t start with action,” Ndahiro elaborated. “They start with words…You can’t combat extremism without fighting extremist discourse.”

Tezcür notes that ending local support for insurgency and establishing more effective policies to protect the remaining Yazidis, rather than thinking of them as refugees, would contribute to the survival of a community.

“As some organizations are doing nowadays…like YAZDA…they document the projects, conduct interviews with survivors, with other Yazidis, they try to document the signs of the massacres, collect evidence, so that these things will not only stay at the oral level…but they will be part of a written archive…In the long run, you can basically think about these sites as places for museums or memorials.”

Incorporating lessons from the Holocaust and genocides from a broader international and historically universal perspective ensures that remembrance and empathy are ever-present. As Mofidul Hoque said: “This is a crisis of humanity and humanity should act as one.”


Combating Extremism and Promoting Pluralism 

Download the full Report 


Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention is a multi-year program series held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with further support from Ronald D. Abramson, the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

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Josée Touchette - “Trust Is At The Heart Of So Many Of The Problems That We Grapple With In Government”
Josée Touchette speaking at Salzburg Global Seminar
Josée Touchette - “Trust Is At The Heart Of So Many Of The Problems That We Grapple With In Government”
By: Maryam Ghaddar 

OECD executive director returns to Salzburg Global after 28 years advocating for citizen-centered policies

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” These lyrics, by famous Canadian poet and singer Leonard Cohen, are words to live by. For Josée Touchette, executive director at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar, this quote rings particularly true.

Touchette attended a three-week session on American Law and Legal Institutions in July, 1990. Nearly 30 years later, she returned to Schloss Leopoldskron as a member of the Public Sector Strategy Network for the program titled Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves?

While at the session, participants engaged in peer-to-peer learning on some of the challenges facing the public sector while looking ahead at some of the difficulties that may yet arise. Participants shared their experiences of lessons learned and cross-sector innovations, something Touchette explained was the very essence of what Salzburg Global has always aimed for.

“You had a sense of hope. You had a sense of possibility,” she reflected on her previous visit. “It was a force. It was something that I fed off for many, many years. I made friendships that, to this day, are lasting. We didn’t call it design thinking back then, but the fact that we were coming from such different backgrounds meant that we were tackling issues from very different perspectives… that ability to do it in a safe place is something that hasn’t changed, and it’s a constant in what the Seminar does.”

One of the key themes of this session centered around the topic of trust in governments and the underlying belief more can be done to include public opinion and ideas into the spaces for solutions.
Touchette, who believes global values are “the glue that binds us,” discussed the degree to which public interests and trust can be brought into the conversation on policy-making, highlighting such issues as job inclusion, equality and inclusiveness. She explained that unless citizens are actively engaged in the government’s process of policy-making, policies are “by definition, going to be developed in a bit of a vacuum.”

“Perhaps, what we need to be mindful of is the fact that we may need to change the expression of those values as we go forward because the velocity of change is simply too great to ignore the fact that how they’re expressed and how they are meaningful may not be the same way tomorrow as it is today.”

Elaborating on this point, Touchette discussed the power of social media and how it relates to narratives surrounding governments and a decline in trust in political institutions.

“We have to reconquer that space and make it our own,” she said. “The legitimacy of government, the legitimacy of policy, the legitimacy of policy-makers has to be a part of that, so I think that how we use social media in government is a real opportunity and we’re starting to see governments really innovate in that space… It’s a real opportunity if we’re able to do that and to have that as a platform for trust.”

Management excellence, as Touchette explained, “is often the unsung hero in a lot of the things that we do in government.” Focusing on cost effectiveness, actions, services being delivered, and “engaging with citizens for citizens” paves the way for a much greater chance for success.

However, there are no success stories without a string of failures behind them. Touchette clarified we must “enable the success” and create “a culture that really values those risks that need to be taken.” Speaking on her responsibility in planning a biennial budget for the OECD in Canada, for example, she stressed the importance of “developing good performance indicators” and reaping “the success stories early enough to be able to infuse them as part of the planning for the next biennial. The same thing is true, of course, of the failures.” Touchette humbly acknowledged she is just one person in a much larger team.

“You have to often chunk out the problem and slice it [into] smaller slices to be able to approach and get a small solution here, followed by another one, followed by another one.”

Salzburg Global Seminar has had a strong impact on Touchette’s career, anchoring a core perception of the public sector. “Governance and leadership are inseparable…trust is at the heart of so many of the problems that we grapple with in government,” she said.

Rather than see the world through rose colored glasses, Touchette said stepping away from the everyday challenges and taking some quiet time to gain perspective is the most rewarding aspect of this program. From coming here as a young professional newly embarking on her career path, to returning with nearly thirty years’ experience under her belt, Touchette said, “Salzburg [Global] Seminar has a unique ability to make you think, to help you see the world in a different way and to make you want more. I think you’re a better person when you’re in Salzburg.”


Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves? is part of the Public Sector Strategy Network, a multi-year initiative held in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and in cooperation with Apolitical. More information on this session can be found here.

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Salzburg Cutler Fellow Serves as Rapporteur for Public Sector Strategy Network Meeting
Ashley Finger taking notes at the annual meeting of the Public Sector Strategy NetworkAshley Finger taking notes at the annual meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Network
Salzburg Cutler Fellow Serves as Rapporteur for Public Sector Strategy Network Meeting
By: Ashley Finger 

Ashley Finger reflects on her experience as a rapporteur for Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves?

This article was first published by the University of Virginia's School of Law. To visit the original article, please click here.

Ashley Finger, a 2018 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and a participant in this year’s Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program, recently served as rapporteur for the Salzburg Global Seminar. From May 13-15 in Salzburg, Austria, she documented the conference “Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves?” The public policy meeting drew high-level representatives from governments around the world.

My primary role as rapporteur to the Salzburg Global Seminar, held earlier this month, was to take detailed notes on the proceedings, which will be synthesized into a final report and published by Salzburg Global Seminar sometime this summer. The report will analyze themes in government innovation based on the panels, workshops and talks.

The experience ended up being much less pen-to-paper and much more engaging than I thought it would be. I got to participate in a policymaking simulation on the use of artificial intelligence in health care decisions, and I was able to meet and engage with public-sector leaders from around the world, often about substantive, global issues.

Representatives came from all over, including Australia, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Portugal, the U.K., France and Finland, to name a few. Participants included secretaries of state, ministers, agency directors and senior advisers.

Everyone was simultaneously incredibly accomplished and down-to-earth with boundless positive energy and enthusiasm for improving their countries and the world.

What stood out to me the most about this experience is how it blended together the many facets of my career. As a former physicist (although, the physics community would say there is no such thing as a former physicist, only a physicist who has changed careers), I was able to engage with the technological aspects of the discussions, which allowed for greater understanding of the policy implications.

And as a former intern with the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, I had both working knowledge of the policymaking process and a background in some of the subject areas, such as autonomous vehicles — a field that has developed tremendously since my time on Capitol Hill.

In addition, some of the more unconventional classes I've taken in law school enriched my experience.

Professor Mila Versteeg's Comparative Constitutional Law course proved invaluable in grasping the varied government structures at play in the discussions.

Professor John Norton Moore's seminar, War and Peace: New Thinking About the Causes of War and War Avoidance, gave me a more nuanced perspective on intergovernmental relations.

The conference was organized by Salzburg Global Seminar, an organization based in Salzburg with an office in Washington, D.C., that regularly organizes topical conferences and seminars to share knowledge across governmental entities. Participants discuss both successes and failures in order to learn from one another.

The event was co-hosted by the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court (a center for government innovation and citizen interface in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) and Apolitical, a journalism organization focused on sharing stories in government innovation.


Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves? is part of the Public Sector Strategy Network, a multi-year initiative held in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and in cooperation with Apolitical. More information on this session can be found here.

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Looking Forward - Officials Reflect on Need for Foresight and Innovation in the Public Sector
Participants attending this year's annual meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Network pose for a group photo
Looking Forward - Officials Reflect on Need for Foresight and Innovation in the Public Sector
By: Oscar Tollast 

Participants explore next steps for Public Sector Strategy Network following three-day meeting

Senior officials from governments and multilateral institutions went back to the future earlier this month as they met for the annual meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Network.

Nearly 30 participants from 16 countries took part in the three-day meeting titled
Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves? The meeting was held at Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and in cooperation with Apolitical.

The program supported interactive debate and hands-on problem-solving under the Chatham House Rule.  It provided a rare opportunity for senior officials to engage informally with a select group of dynamic peers, away from media and gatekeepers, and test out ideas for immediate follow-up at the technical level.

Through interactive debate and hands-on problem solving, participants discussed the top priorities and risks facing their countries around the world and were encouraged to develop new ways of thinking and consider alternative perspectives to apply to their day-to-day work.

Initial discussions focused on innovations in public service, optimizing procedures to counteract radical societal changes, and examining the role of future tech. Participants also worked through several case studies that focused on specific challenges they faced concerning workforce pressures and risks in three different countries to facilitate concrete exchange of ideas.

Participants reaffirmed the notion that identifying the problem is easy, while finding the solution is slightly more difficult. They broke up into smaller groups to explore the strategies for government reform and transformation in the areas of public finance, decentralization, and civil service reform.

A practical gamification session with simulated scenario planning allowed participants to examine the potential for advances in artificial intelligence in transforming how government will work and what steps they need to think about now to be prepared. After being divided into groups, participants explored multiple possible solutions and how they might react to events given their own differences in experience, expertise, or government role.  

The theme for the final day of the program was “Mechanisms for Change.” Participants reflected on their experiences with innovation and strategy teams advising national leadership, putting forward case studies which highlighted benefits and risks of new approaches.

As one participant summarized, the challenges faced by one government are challenges others have faced, are facing, and are likely to have tested solutions to resolve them. Year-round dialogue and exchange are essential to share ideas and experiences.

Speaking after the meeting, Charles Ehrlich, a program director at Salzburg Global Seminar, said, “The group of highly-thoughtful senior public servants who came together here at Schloss Leopoldskron underscored the need for governments to employ foresight, proactive innovation, and effective implementation across the public sector ecosystem.

“In the face of ever-more-rapid digital, financial, and societal disruptions, governments must constantly scan the horizon and anticipate trends. The conversations here considered how to strengthen public leadership and communication, sharing experiences, tools, and ideas, to create a congenial atmosphere of mutual support.”

The Public Sector Strategy Network first launched in 2010 as an annual high-level Round Table by the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court. In 2017, Salzburg Global became the politically and geographically neutral convener of what has since become the Public Sector Strategy Network.  The Network is creating a dynamic platform for practical collaboration and impact, connecting governments and innovators leading the way to meet the opportunities and challenges ahead.


Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves? is part of the Public Sector Strategy Network, a multi-year initiative held in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and in cooperation with Apolitical. More information on this session can be found here.

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Mechanics for the Future - How Can Governments Transform Themselves?
Governments are in a race against time to put mechanisms in place to help prepare their societies for a changing worldGovernments are in a race against time to put mechanisms in place to help prepare their societies for a changing world
Mechanics for the Future - How Can Governments Transform Themselves?
By: Oscar Tollast 

Senior officials convene at Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, for Public Sector Strategy Network

A select group of senior officials from governments and multilateral institutions will convene at Salzburg Global Seminar this afternoon for the annual meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Network.

The Network was created at
a Round Table in Salzburg in 2017 to provide a platform for collaboration and to connect governments and innovators to face the challenges and opportunities ahead for their societies.

Participants at this year’s three-day meeting – Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves? – will explore several topics, including the top priorities and risks facing their countries, innovative trends in public service, and how to equip governments for a new era. The future of human capital and governing in the age of artificial intelligence will also be examined.

This meeting is part of a multi-year initiative which was first launched as an annual high-level Round Table by the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court in 2010. Last year, Salzburg Global was chosen to be the politically and geographically neutral convener of what has since become the Public Sector Strategy Network. This year’s meeting is being held in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and in cooperation with Apolitical.

During the meeting, participants will engage in interactive debate and hands-on problem-solving under the Chatham House Rule. They will be encouraged to test out new ideas which can be followed up afterward at a technical level.

In line with the Network’s goals, participants will be asked to consider how they could reimagine the design, delivery, and funding of core services and develop more effective partnerships and communication with citizens, civil society, and business. The Network aims to enable active ongoing peer-to-peer learning under the values of trust and open exchange and provide a space for the sharing of best practices.

Speaking ahead of the meeting, Charles Ehrlich, a program director at Salzburg Global, said, “Complex challenges and opportunities are taking public sector leaders down uncharted paths. We need to understand the world today – and where it might be in 2030 or 2050. For governments to transform themselves, they will require the right mechanics, meaning both the mechanisms of government as well as the people in government whose job it is to fix things. Otherwise, events will leave the public sector behind, broken down at the side of the road. 

“We have gathered a small group of thoughtful, committed, public servants, who will not only examine the cross-cutting priorities and risks but will together build out the Public Sector Strategy Network to inspire new thinking and action at all levels across the globe.”


Mechanics for the Future: How Can Governments Transform Themselves? is part of the Public Sector Strategy Network, a multi-year initiative held in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and in cooperation with Apolitical. More information on this session can be found here.

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Interlinking Challenges, Interdisciplinary Solutions
Interlinking Challenges, Interdisciplinary Solutions
By: Salzburg Global Seminar 

Latest Salzburg Global Seminar session looks at targeting interdisciplinary research to meet the Sustainable Development Goals in climate change, conflict, health and education

The 17 global goals set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are nothing short of ambitious. Building on from the Millennium Development Goals, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to “transform our world,” calling for action in both developed and developing countries. While the broad goals each have specific targets, no one goal can be achieved in isolation. Efforts to achieve one goal will help to advance another—and failures to address some will lead to negative impacts on others. 

Quality education (SDG 4) greatly improves health and well-being (SDG 3), which in turn can increase prosperity, but increased consumption that often comes with that can hinder local and global efforts to tackle climate change (SDG 13). Similarly, reducing conflict (SDG 16) may have benefits for employment and economic growth, but these cannot be sustained unless inequalities in education and access to health care are also addressed. Without holistic action for equality and social justice, peace may be short-lived or conflict may continue by other means. Achieving the targets set out in any of the SDGs thus calls for an interdisciplinary and cross-sector approach. 

Recognizing the significant challenge that comes in adopting such an approach, Salzburg Global Seminar is convening the session, Climate Change, Conflict, Health, and Education: Targeting Interdisciplinary Research to Meet the SDGs, at Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria, starting this Sunday, March 18.

The intensive three-day session will bring together 65 researchers, policymakers and development experts to explore how research can be more effectively translated into policy and practice in order to identify the interlinkages—and tensions—between the SDGs, and how top research funders can help lead the way.

One such leading research funder is session partner, the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), which is a £1.5bn fund established by the British government to help UK researchers work in partnership with researchers in developing countries to make significant progress in meeting the SDGs. Representing the GCRF at the session is UK Research and Innovation, a newly created body that brings together the seven UK research councils, Innovate UK and Research England.

Professor Andrew Thompson, Chief Executive, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and UK Research and Innovation Champion for the Global Challenges Research Fund, said: “We're delighted to partner with Salzburg Global Seminar to explore the ways excellent research of the kind being undertaken through the Global Challenges Research Fund can help to tackle the most stubborn development challenges across and between the Sustainable Development Goals.” 

The session will enable discussion and exploration that span research, policy and practice. This will be achieved through a series of panel discussions and hands-on exercises that will examine the opportunities, challenges, and trade-offs involved in developing interdisciplinary approaches to the implementation of the SDGs related to climate change, conflict, health, and education. The session will also look to identify current research gaps and look at how to communicate the complexity of interdisciplinary research in order to shape evidence-based policy and practice. 

Through its programs, Salzburg Global Seminar seeks to bridge divides, expand collaborations and transform systems. In order to take the work of this session beyond Schloss Leopoldskron and advocate for change in their own sectors, participants will co-create a Salzburg Statement. The Statement will offer key recommendations for various stakeholders and serve as a call to action to help participants personally as well as their institutions and communities.

“Finding solutions to long-standing, seemingly intractable problems and the specific challenges that the SDGs look to mitigate against requires new ways of thinking and new approaches,” says Salzburg Global Program Director Dominic Regester. 

“We are delighted that so many experts across different sectors and geographies have given willingly of their time to come to Salzburg. We very much hope that the Statement that will be collectively authored during and after the session will help advance understanding of and opportunities for interdisciplinary research.”


The session, Climate Change, Conflict, Health, and Education: Targeting Interdisciplinary Research to Meet the SDGs, is being held in partnership with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). More information is available online: www.salzburgglobal.org/go/605 To join in the discussions online, follow the hashtag #SGSsdgs on Twitter

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Former CIA and FBI Director Calls for Renewed Trust in Beleaguered Intelligence Agencies
Former CIA and FBI Director Calls for Renewed Trust in Beleaguered Intelligence Agencies
By: Sarah Sexton 

William H. Webster defends intelligence agencies under fire from President Trump and calls on law students to help rebuild public trust   

“Help restore trust.” 

According to the former CIA and FBI director, William H. Webster, this was the “most important thing” the audience of law students could do, “with the kind of training, education, and exposure you’re getting… to make a serious contribution to [your] country.”

Webster, the first and only person to have served as director of both the CIA and the FBI, posed this challenge during the sixth annual Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program, which gathered 54 law students from the US’ top law schools last month in Washington, DC to explore how they could apply their legal training to careers in public service. 

His challenge to this cadre of future top lawyers and public servants comes at a time of growing mistrust in America – mistrust of the mainstream media, mistrust of government, and mistrust of the intelligence services. The latter has surprisingly been led primarily by the country’s own president, Donald J. Trump.

Now 94 years old but still chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, Webster reflected on his long career in public service – from his military service during World War Two, to his appointments as a Federal District Court and then US Appeals Court judge, to his work with the FBI and later CIA – commenting on the rising tension between the White House and the US intelligence community. 

In the wake of attacks on the FBI for missing a tipster’s warning on the suspect who carried out the February 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which saw the deaths of 14 students and three teachers, Webster came to the FBI’s defense, stating, “This is one of the really great organizations of our country, and it attracts some of the ablest, most dedicated Americans that you could want to know or work with.” 

“Now, they’ll make mistakes; they’re not infallible,” Webster continued, acknowledging the missed Parkland tip as one such error that exposed a need for improvement. “But we cannot afford to undermine the credibility and trustworthiness of the FBI as long as they continue to earn that trust.” 

Webster recalled the day in February 1978 when he was sworn in as FBI Director, inheriting an agency tarnished by a variety of Watergate-era abuses, including illegal break-ins called “black-bag jobs.” Standing before President Jimmy Carter and US Attorney General Griffin Bell at his swearing-in ceremony, Webster knew he needed to address the need for change. 

As he closed his remarks at the ceremony, Webster said, “Together, we’re going to do the work that the American people expect of us in the way that the constitution demands of us.” 

To Webster’s surprise, his words would later be engraved on a bronze medallion that now adorns the entrance to a conference room at FBI headquarters.  This, Webster said, reflects the bureau’s ongoing commitment to fulfilling its responsibilities with integrity. 

As a former federal judge, Webster came to the FBI with built-in credibility, and he preferred that his agents refer to him as “judge” rather than “director,” in part to convey his independence and probity. Webster also brought in assistants with law degrees to help evaluate proposals and to ensure that bureau initiatives conformed to statutes and guidelines. 

Webster carried this practice over to the CIA after his appointment as director of central intelligence. One such assistant was John Bellinger III, then a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, who joined Webster as his special assistant in 1988, supporting the judge as he led the US intelligence community through the end of the Cold War, the invasion of Panama, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and the Persian Gulf War. 

Bellinger went on to serve as a legal advisor to both the US Department of State and the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. Speaking at the same event, Bellinger also shared his experiences with the students.  

“I remember vividly as a 28-year-old going with [Webster] to Europe after the end of the Cold War,” Bellinger recalled. “Sitting in the back rooms with the intelligence chiefs in Germany and in Britain to talk through what the future of Europe would be after that period in time – it was for me, as a young special assistant, an extraordinary period. I learned a lot from you.” 

Bellinger urged the students hailing from law schools at several of America’s top universities – Columbia University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, New York University, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, Stanford University, and Yale University – to consider working as special assistants to political appointees throughout the government. 

“I had two special assistants when I was legal adviser,” Bellinger said, “and this is an extraordinary way as a young person to watch a successful leader do their job and to help that person.” 

Bellinger and Webster now both serve on the advisory board of the Lloyd N. Cutler Center for the Rule of Law, established by Salzburg Global Seminar in memory of the Washington “superlawyer” who served as White House Counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton. Lloyd Cutler also served as chair of Salzburg Global’s Board of Directors for a decade and advocated passionately for mentoring young leaders – both from the US and across the globe – who displayed a commitment to shaping a better world through the rule of law.

Since its founding in 2012, the Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program has carried forward Cutler’s leadership in both public and private practice of law and continues to empower rising legal professionals from around the world. This year’s Salzburg Cutler Fellows represented 23 countries, including Argentina, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, Pakistan and the United States. 

“It’s been my privilege to be part of the Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program,” said Bellinger, who also attended the 2016 event and later delivered the annual Cutler Lecture. “It’s an extraordinary way to both recognize Lloyd Cutler, who was my senior partner when I was a young associate at Wilmer Cutler, and to help shape the careers of a rising generation of international lawyers committed to public service.” 

Recognizing that, as aspiring public servants, this new generation of international lawyers might someday work in agencies charged with sensitive responsibilities, often operating under secret or classified conditions, Webster closed by further underscoring the importance of gaining and maintaining trust. 

“[These agencies] have to rely on your integrity – or what they perceive as your integrity – and you have to be worthy of that trust.”  


The Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program is held under the auspices of the Lloyd N. Cutler Center for the Rule of Law. The annual program collaborates with 11 of the leading US law schools. This year's session was sponsored by NYU Washington and Arnold & Porter. 

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Salzburg Cutler Fellows – Applying Legal Training to Public Service on a Global Stage
Participants and faculty members of the sixth Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program
Salzburg Cutler Fellows – Applying Legal Training to Public Service on a Global Stage
By: Sarah Sexton 

Students from 11 top US law schools discuss issues ranging from financial law to international courts and institutions

Speaking to 54 law students at the United States Institute of Peace on Friday, February 23, Seventh Circuit Chief Judge Diane Wood began her remarks with a reference to a scene from the 1993 film Jurassic Park

As a car full of visitors to the park speeds down a dirt path to escape a charging T-Rex, Wood narrated, the camera zooms in on the warning written on the car’s side mirror: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” 

“I’m here to tell you today that the same message – perhaps not with such dire consequences – holds for international law,” Wood said. 

Wood’s remarks opened the sixth Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program, which gathered students representing 23 countries – including Argentina, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, and Pakistan – in Washington, DC to discuss the future of international law and public service.

While international legal frameworks put in place since World War Two have fostered the effortless flow of ideas, goods, and services around the world, Wood said, challenges have also emerged, including drug trade, online financial scams, and human trafficking. 

“The borderless world has some sinister consequences too,” Wood said, “but these are things that we are dealing with right now in the courts.” 

Over two days, February 23-24, the Cutler Fellows engaged with prominent legal professionals and public servants, including Judge Wood; Ivan Šimonović, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect; and William H. Webster, former CIA and FBI director.  

The Fellows also worked with faculty advisors from each of the participating law schools – University of Chicago, Columbia University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, University of Michigan, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, University of Virginia, and Yale University – to sharpen their research papers tackling issues in international law ranging from trade and investment law to the law of war.

Faculty representatives Matthew Waxman of Columbia Law School and Alex Whiting of Harvard Law School engaged in a luncheon discussion with the Fellows, focusing on the role and recent developments of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Whiting spoke from his experience in the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC from 2010-13. 

On Friday evening, former FBI and CIA director Judge Webster joined in a conversation with John B. Bellinger, III, former US Legal Adviser, reflecting on recent events in the United States and calling for the restoration of the values of public service and fierce integrity across party lines. 

On Saturday at NYU Washington, Šimonović offered the Fellows advice based on his own work in diplomacy, justice, and international institutions. Recalling his experience as a member of the Croatian Delegation at the 1995 Dayton Peace Talks, Šimonović said, “Always remember the importance of cultural context in international negotiations.” 

The Fellows were also joined on Saturday by mentors from institutions including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and New Markets Lab to discuss how legal training can be used for the public good. Two mentors, Joseph Klingler and Eric Lorber, described their journeys from their participation as students in the Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program to their current work as an associate at Foley Hoag LLP and senior advisor to the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the US Treasury Department, respectively. 

The Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program was established in memory of Lloyd N. Cutler, the Washington “superlawyer” who served as White House Counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton. Cutler also served as Chair of Salzburg Global’s Board of Directors for a decade and advocated passionately for mentoring young leaders with a commitment to shaping a better world through law and rule of law. 

Since its founding in 2012, the Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program has carried forward Lloyd Cutler’s legacy and continues to empower rising legal professionals from around the world. 

Following this year’s Program, one student will be selected to travel to Salzburg, Austria – the home of Salzburg Global Seminar – in May 2018 to serve as rapporteur at this year’s high-level meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Network, a multi-year initiative at Salzburg Global run in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical.


The Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program is held under the auspices of the Lloyd N. Cutler Center for the Rule of Law. The annual program collaborates with 11 of the leading US law schools. This year's program was sponsored by NYU Washington and Arnold & Porter. More information on the session is available here. 

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Salzburg Global Explores How Radical Technology-Driven Changes are Impacting Financial Markets and Economies
From left to right - Benjamin Glahn, Masamichi Kono, Ranjit Ajit Singh, Junko Nakagawa, Douglas Flint, and David Wright
Salzburg Global Explores How Radical Technology-Driven Changes are Impacting Financial Markets and Economies
By: Salzburg Global Seminar 

Event co-organized with Securities Commission Malaysia follows the World Capital Markets Symposium on February 7

Salzburg Global Seminar helped cap off the Securities Commission Malaysia’s (SC Malaysia) latest World Capital Markets Symposium with a candid conversation on how technology is changing the financial services industry.

The program, which took place immediately after this year’s World Capital Markets Symposium, was convened by Salzburg Global and the SC Malaysia at the Hotel Mandarin Oriental in Kuala Lumpur.

Guest speakers included Benjamin Glahn, vice president at Salzburg Global; Masamichi Kono, deputy secretary-general at the OECD; Douglas Flint, former chairman of HSBC and a member of the Salzburg Global Forum on Finance Advisory Committee; Junko Nakagawa, executive vice president, executive managing director and chief risk officer at Nomura Asset Management; and David Wright, chair of EUROFI, a partner at Flint-Global, former secretary general of IOSCO, and a member of the Salzburg Global Forum on Finance Advisory Committee.

Around 40 securities regulators, investors, bankers, and market practitioners engaged in the program and were welcomed by Ranjit Ajit Singh, chairman of the SC Malaysia. Following Singh’s remarks, Glahn, Kono, Flint, Nakagawa, and Wright engaged in discussion and debate about the topic of the 2018 Salzburg Global Forum on Finance in a Changing World, The Promise and Perils of Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cybercrime, and FinTech.

The annual Forum, which is off-the-record, takes place at Schloss Leopoldskron, in Salzburg, Austria each June. Public and private sector thought leaders are invited to take part in the two-day gathering, which focuses on issues critical to the future of financial markets and global economic growth and stability, and aims to stimulate important conversations on major trends unfolding across today’s financial landscape, including their implications and the responses they necessitate.

The 2018 Forum will assess how radical technology-driven changes may impact societies, economics and financial markets around the world, what this means for policy, regulation, and practitioners in the short and longer term, and how technology can be utilized positively.

Speaking after the discussion, Benjamin Glahn said, “This was a highly engaging panel and debate, and I would like to extend our sincere thanks to the Securities Commission Malaysia and Ranjit Ajit Singh for co-hosting this panel at the conclusion of a very successful World Capital Markets Symposium. I would also like to express our gratitude to each of our panelists who shared their time and expertise following the conclusion of the World Capital Markets Symposium.

“Artificial intelligence, big data, cryptocurrencies, fintech, and cybercrime heavily featured in this year’s World Capital Markets symposium, and in the discussion afterward there was an interest to engage in this area further. It’s critical for us to understand the implications and responses to the changes taking place in global financial markets, and everyone agreed that the 2018 Forum on Finance in a Changing World will be a perfect place to continue these discussions in June.”


View full set on Flickr


The Salzburg Global Seminar session, The Promise and Perils of Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cybercrime, and FinTech, will take place at Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria, between June 24 and June 26, 2018. For registration information, please click here.

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Katrina Scotto di Carlo - Serving People and Profit at the Local Level
Scotto di Carlo at the third session of the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance – The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?
Katrina Scotto di Carlo - Serving People and Profit at the Local Level
By: Oscar Tollast 

Placemaker co-founder discusses keeping money local and Portland's decision to divest of all corporate securities 

During the third session of the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance – The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit? – participants were asked to consider what attributes make a director “courageous.” Katrina Scotto di Carlo, co-founder of Placemaker, a tech platform for independent businesses, says she finds this question “surprisingly difficult” to answer.

Fittingly, Scotto di Carlo considered this question, and others posed to her while sitting in Max Reinhardt’s former office at Schloss Leopoldskron. Reinhardt was a director of a different kind, but one who achieved widespread recognition as a major theater figure of the 20th Century. Scotto di Carlo says the director, in a boardroom sense, also has to help hold many of the pieces together – not of a play, but of a business.

“I really think we’re stepping into some uncertain times and some major instability globally. It’s a time when people will have to stand up from all sectors and be courageous,” she says.

“I do believe corporations have a really important role to play, and the question is whether they’ll play that role.”

Scotto di Carlo, who considered herself somewhat of an outsider at the session, says, “I find that my role in nearly every business meeting is the same here as it is everywhere else, which I didn’t expect. That role is often to be the really weird thinker. I think that the way I come at problems is just really different. As a kid, I would get penalized for it because a lot of teachers thought I was joking. Nowadays, it is seen as helpful, but my mind is somewhat overly creative. In a business setting, it poses interesting questions.”

Beyond defining what it means to be “courageous,” participants at the third session of the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance also explored the second half of the session title: “Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet and Profit?” Much of the focus of the three-day discussion was on the multinational/planet level. But for Scotto di Carlo, this question is just as important at the local/community level.

Scotto di Carlo played an instrumental role in her local community in Portland, Oregon, USA, as a member of the City of Portland’s Socially Responsible Investments Committee. The efforts by her and others led to Portland City Council divesting from all corporate securities in April 2017.

Looking back at why this decision was made, she says: “The city looked at just like the huge commotion that was coming out of this and they said, ‘You know what? This isn’t why we were elected. We were elected to deal with the homeless population. We were elected to deal with the housing situation. We weren’t elected to spend hours and hours and hours on this investment piece, so we’re just going to divest.’”

Each year, the council will review the investment policy and decide whether it should be changed. Scotto di Carlo says, “The biggest fear I have is that that’s not the solution to divesting. That means we only have US Treasuries to invest in, which with Trump is like an unknown. The solution would be that we look at a municipal bank like the Bank of North Dakota or something like this... The City of Portland is not putting anywhere near the amount of resources needed to create that solution currently. When April comes, it’s going to be: we killed this vehicle, we didn’t build another one.”

Scotto di Carlo believes one of the problems with municipal governments is what they choose to measure as investment. She adds: “To me, a really interesting challenge would be how we measure the overall investment and using investment in the broadest definition possible to understand what it means to invest in community, what municipal government’s role is, and then how that investment compares to Wall Street.”

WATCH: Placemaker co-founder Katrina Scotto di Carlo explains the City of Portland Council's decision to divest of all corporate securities

The Socially Responsible Investment Committee featured six members representing different domains. Scotto di Carlo was selected to capitalize on her expertise of independent businesses. Placemaker, which was established by Scotto di Carlo and her husband in Michael in 2010, was design to help support independent businesses in Portland. Scotto di Carlo describes it as a “loyalty program to the community, not just an individual business.”

Users of the platform can earn and spend points anywhere in their town. Information is stored on their Placemaker card or mobile app. Scotto di Carlo says, “It makes it so that the experience of shopping and eating local is one experience that you share in the community rather than you just going to separate businesses. You feel like you’re going into a solid community where every business is working together.”

The platform was launched as an experiment. Di Carlo concedes she didn’t realize how much work it would be, but other communities have since come on board with networks popping up in Victoria, BC, Canada, and Western Massachusetts and Monadnock, NH, USA. Placemaker seeks community partners such as business associations, municipal governments, and economic development people to get networks off the ground. These partners license Placemaker and distribute it to their independent businesses.

Scotto di Carlo says, “A customer on average, if they engage at a Placemaker business, will go to nine other businesses on the network. That’s the sort of return we’re seeing on the data.” Studies show that local businesses recirculate a greater share of every dollar in their local economy than national chains. One such study, conducted by Civic Economics in Monadnock showed that independent retailers saw a local recirculation of revenue rate of 62 percent, versus 13 percent by national chains.

Commenting on money staying local, Scotto di Carlo says, “That ability for one customer’s experience in an independent business to create community wealth is real, and it’s perhaps one of the most approachable ways that an individual citizen can create community wealth. It’s just shopping, eating local, and providing money for the people that live there – their neighbors.”


Scotto di Carlo attended The Salzburg Global program The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?, which is part of the multi-year series, the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance. The session is being supported by Shearman & Sterling LLP, BNY Mellon, UBS, Barclays, CLP Group, Goldman Sachs, and Teledyne Technologies. More information on the session can be found here.

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Building a Global Community - Salzburg Global LGBT Forum: The First Five Years
Building a Global Community - Salzburg Global LGBT Forum: The First Five Years
By: Louise Hallman 

Publication chronicling the progress, successes and impact of the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum and its Fellows is now available to read, download and share

Since 1947, Salzburg Global Seminar has challenged current and future leaders to shape a better world. For seventy years, our Fellows have tackled issues of global concern including education, health, environment, economics, governance, peace-building, the rule of law and protection of human rights. 

Since 2013, the advancement of LGBT human rights has joined that list of issues as we seek to shape a better world for everyone – including people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Founded five years ago, the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum was formed to establish a truly global space to reflect upon and advance LGBT human rights discussions around the world. 

Today, the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum is an international network that connects over 150 Fellows in 70 countries across six continents, spanning multiple sectors, generations, cultures and sexual orientations and gender identities.

This new, 200-page publication, Building a Global Community - Salzburg Global LGBT Forum: The First Five Years, chronicles the first five years of the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum: the Fellows’ stories that they’ve shared, the wide-ranging issues we’ve addressed, and the impact the Forum has had on individuals, institutions and ideas advancing LGBT human rights around the world.

The report was generously supported by the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth


“Fundamental human rights concern us all. The Salzburg Global LGBT Forum brings together queer and straight, representing gender in many expressions, in short: people with overlapping, changing identities. Whether homo-, bi- or heterosexual, cis-, inter- or transgender, our diverse backgrounds and lives are connected by our shared interest to advance LGBT equality globally.”

— Dr. Klaus Mueller, Founder and Chair, Salzburg Global LGBT Forum

Throughout Salzburg Global’s history, the rule of law and protection of human rights have played a central role in our programming and impact – as critical elements for personal dignity and well-being, equality and social cohesion, successful economies and effective international relations. With this track record, the decision to create the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum was a natural and logical, yet bold, step.”

— Clare Shine, Vice President and Chief Program Officer, Salzburg Global Seminar

“I am extremely proud of how the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum has advanced human rights... Public understanding and public policy have advanced considerably, but the challenges across the world remain great. The Salzburg Global LGBT Forum is a place where they can be addressed.”

— Stephen L. Salyer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Salzburg Global Seminar

“For our ministry, it has been very important to support the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum financially… For us, it is important to make visible these different situations as they exist in Europe and in other parts of the world, and this includes discussing the problems too. We learn from the LGBT Forum how discussions in Germany influence other countries, and how their discussions in other countries influence us in Germany.”

— Ralf Kleindiek, German State Secretary for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth


Download the report as a PDF


* LGBT: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. We are using this term as it is widely recognized in many parts of the world, but we would not wish it to be read as in any way exclusive of other cultures, groups or terms, either historical or contemporary.

 
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A Message from Our Vice President and Chief Program Officer
Clare Shine looks back on the journey traveled, new projects and horizons.
A Message from Our Vice President and Chief Program Officer
By: Clare Shine 

Clare Shine reflects on a landmark year celebrating Salzburg Global Seminar's 70th anniversary

As 2018 gets underway, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your continued engagement with Salzburg Global Seminar. In reflection of a landmark year celebrating Salzburg Global Seminar’s 70th anniversary, I wanted to look back on the journey traveled, new projects and horizons.

Our 2017 theme of “Courage” resonated throughout this turbulent year. The 1947 vision of Salzburg Global’s founders – a “Marshall Plan of the Mind” to revive dialogue and heal rifts across Europe - felt fresh as ever. Cracks widened in societies and institutions across the world, compounded by a mix of insecurity, disillusionment, and isolationism.

Yet the world should be in a better position than ever to tackle common challenges. There is an open marketplace for ideas, innovation, and invention, and opportunities to engage and collaborate are growing fast.

In Salzburg, we are privileged to meet individuals from all walks of life who have the courage to tell truth to power, confront vested interests, express artistic voice and freedom, build coalitions for change, and see through tough choices. In divided societies, people need courage to stay true to their beliefs. Leaders need courage to curb their exercise of power. Together, we need courage to rekindle our collective imagination to rebuild society from the bottom up and the top down.

Three strategies guide our own work for this purpose.

1. Given Salzburg Global’s roots in conflict transformation, our programs seek to bridge divides:

  • Our American Studies series – a discipline born at Schloss Leopoldskron – focused on Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration, including the roots of economic and racial division;
  • The Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change had its highest-ever participation on Voices Against Extremism: Media Responses to Global Populism and published an interactive playbook “Against Populism”;
  • Our Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention series is now applying tools developed in previous years to promote pluralism and tolerance and address issues of radicalization and violent extremism. Pilot projects to test these approaches are under way in five countries (Pakistan, Rwanda, South Africa, Morocco, and Egypt) with the potential to expand to other countries;
  • The Salzburg Global LGBT Forum marked its fifth anniversary with a major report assessing the influence and personal impact of a cross-sector network that now spans more than 70 countries and has inspired new partnerships and cultural initiatives.

2. Salzburg Global Seminar aims to inspire new thinking and action on critical issues to transform systems, connecting local innovators and global resources:

3. Salzburg Global seeks to expand collaboration by fostering lasting networks and partnerships:

After six years living in Schloss Leopoldskron and meeting the most diverse and talented people imaginable, I often hear myself describe Salzburg Global Seminar as “deeply human.” 2017 brought many reminders of the special bonds forged during our lifetime and the enduring need to advance trust and openness around the key issues facing today’s world. 

Thank you again for your commitment and recognition of Salzburg Global’s importance in your professional and personal development. We hope you will consider joining other Fellows who have already made a donation to Salzburg Global this year. Please click here to learn more.

With very best wishes from everyone at Salzburg Global Seminar, and we hope to welcome you back to Schloss Leopoldskron in the near future.

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The Courageous Director - Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?
The Courageous Director - Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?
By: Salzburg Global Seminar 

Report from the latest session of the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance now available to read, download and share

Within the last year, Volkswagen and several of its executives and employees have pled guilty to criminal charges stemming from a scheme to cheat environmental standards; Wells Fargo Bank received a $100 million fine for inducing its employees to secretly and illegally open unauthorized accounts; and Google grappled with how to respond to a leaked internal memo regarding diversity in the workforce that the public perceived as demonstrating male chauvinistic bias. All three corporations faced resounding criticism from shareholders, public and press alike. 

However, also within the last year, Kenneth Frazier, CEO of multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company Merck was hailed by as “courageous”, “brave” and even “heroic” when he resigned from US President Donald J. Trump’s American Manufacturing Council in August 2017 and publicly declared that his reason for doing so was in protest to Trump’s response to the racially driven events in Charlottesville, VA, days before.

In today’s world, “courageous directors” have unprecedented opportunities to serve as global influencers. Even as private sector leaders achieve fame by engaging socially and championing brands that claim to improve quality of life, consumers, investors and employees increasingly demand that corporations act in ways beneficial to society. Looking forward, boards of directors will need to remain ahead of rapidly-evolving trends and address deceptively simple questions. What does the company seek to achieve, and where does it see its place in society?

Shaping a better world - and corporate sector

Salzburg Global Seminar’s mission is to challenge current and future leaders to shape a better world. Founded in 2015, the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance seeks to deliver on that mission in the corporate sector.

The third session of the Forum,The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?, held October 2017, explored the role of the corporation as a good citizen, while assessing techniques to keep boards of directors alert, active, and effective in meeting their fiduciary duties in the current and future landscapes. It explored how directors might emerge as global thought leaders, to ensure multinational corporations can succeed both in achieving profit and in satisfying conflicting demands of the jurisdictions and societies in which they operate.

This new report from Salzburg Global Seminar highlights the significant outcomes from the discussions at the two-day high-level meeting, including breakout groups that analyzed the scandals affecting Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, and Google and offered key recommendations for the three corporations. 

The report also includes interviews from many corporate sector leaders, offering insights on what it takes to be a “courageous director”. 

As Salzburg Global Vice President and Chief Program Officer Clare Shine notes: “Today’s corporations are under ever closer scrutiny. Like the rest of society, their operations and culture will have to change radically as the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ gathers pace. Attitudes to power, progress and value are already in flux. Against this backdrop, courage in the boardroom will matter more than ever before.”

Download the report as a PDF

Request a print issue

 
 
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Life and Justice in America - Implications of the New Administration
Life and Justice in America - Implications of the New Administration
By: Salzburg Global Seminar 

Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association reflects on the first year of US President Donald Trump

In September 2017, 57 academics, professionals, practitioners, observers, and students of American Studies from 25 countries, convened at Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria for the session Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration.

As this weekend marks the one year anniversary of Donald J. Trump's inauguration as president of the United States on January 20, 2017, it is a timely occasion for the publication of the report from the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA).

Since its founding in 1947, Salzburg Global Seminar has been examining, debating and dissecting America and its culture and institutions. Drawing on the 70 years of cross-border exchange that began at Schloss Leopoldskron in the aftermath of war, the multi-disciplinary four-day program examined what the “American Dream” means in today’s world and assessed progress in the United States toward fulfilling that potential. 

Fairness and justice, immigration issues, incarceration practices, demographic changes, implications and challenges of new policies, and the fulfillment of domestic and foreign expectations were all key elements of focus for the session. The ultimate question for scrutiny and discussion was “How does the apparent reality of life and justice in America today reflect on the historic ‘American Dream’ and the ‘Promise of America,’ globally and in the United States since the founding of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in 1947?”

This report offers summaries of each of the day’s thematic discussions and a list of resources provided by the participants, as well as interviews with some faculty members and speakers:

  • Elaine T. May: Despite being preoccupied with safety, Americans have made themselves less secure
  • Lecia Brooks: Dedicated to ending injustice in America
  • Linell Letendre: Justice requires a culture of leadership, professionalism and respect
  • Dreamscape: Exploring race and justice in America
  • Asif Efrat: The new US administration has shown less interest in international cooperation
  • Nancy Gertner: “Lawyers should effect social change”
  • Chris Lehmann: American justice is still a model for the world – but a flawed model

 

Download the report as a PDF

To request a print copy, please email press[at]salzburgglobal.org

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Lecia Brooks – Dedicated to Ending Injustice in America
Lecia Brooks speaking at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies AssociationLecia Brooks speaking at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association
Lecia Brooks – Dedicated to Ending Injustice in America
By: Oscar Tollast 

Outreach director at Southern Poverty Law Center discusses events in Charlottesville and the “Take the Knee” protest

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Alabama, is committed to fighting hate, teaching tolerance, and seeking justice. Lecia Brooks, the Center’s outreach director, frequently gives presentations around the United States to put this message across to others. As a faculty member of the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA), Brooks wanted to put another thought in her audience’s minds.

“What I wanted to convey to the participants in the seminar was that these issues that they do such a good job in chronicling for academic purposes, and they spend their time researching, have real-life consequences; that they’re representative of people’s real lives; and that the threat to civil rights and civil liberties that we’re seeing thus far under the Trump administration are affecting people already. I wanted it to be more than an intellectual discourse, but I sought to put a face to some of the story, the pictures we were painting,” she says.

A few weeks before the symposium in Salzburg in September 2017, events unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia that grabbed the world’s attention. Hundreds of white nationalists and supremacists descended on the town for the Unite the Right rally: a far-right rally organized to oppose the removal of a statue of Civil War general, Robert E. Lee. The night before the rally, about 250 people took part in a torchlight procession through the University of Virginia campus, shouting phrases such as “You will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil.” The group clashed with counter-protesters and left following the arrival of police.

On the day of the rally, the violence continued. In the early hours of the afternoon, one person was killed and others were injured after a car went into a group of counter-protesters. A helicopter monitoring the clashes also crashed that day, killing the two Virginia State Patrol troopers who were on board.

Brooks, who also serves as director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center, chose to share images from the torchlight procession in one of her presentations. She says, “It was just so incredible, and it is just frightening that it happened in the United States and right in the open on a university campus. First and foremost, I wanted to document that it happened, remind people that it happened, and remind people that it could happen in their university as well.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project has led to the creation of anti-bias resources such as documentaries, lesson plans, and curricula, which are distributed to educators free-of-charge across the country. Brooks says the Center hopes to educate young people about the threat from the far right and “talk more about our aspirations to create diverse and inclusive communities and to make clear that those diverse communities are for everyone, including white males who are feeling marginalized at this time, [which] makes them particularly vulnerable to messages from white supremacists.”

Brooks wanted to attend the 15th SSASA symposium – Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration – to have a conversation about justice, civil rights, and the issues surrounding them with a global community. She says, “I thought it would be really important, and it has been.”

On the first morning of the symposium, participants woke up to remarks from US President Donald J. Trump made during a rally in Alabama. He criticized National Football League (NFL) owners for not punishing players who protested, who he accused of disrespecting the American flag. In a series of tweets posted the following day, he said, “If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem. If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”

His remarks are thought to be in reference to the actions of players such as Colin Kaepernick, who first chose to sit during the anthem in August 2016. Kaepernick sat down during the anthem to protest the oppression of people of color in the US and issues with police brutality. Following a conversation with Nate Boyer, a former NFL player and US army veteran, Kaepernick chose to kneel, not sit, during the anthem from that point onward to show more respect for the armed forces.

In response to Trump’s remarks, a movement sparked on social media with people tweeting a photo of themselves kneeling using the hashtags #TakeAKnee and #TakeTheKnee. In the NFL games that followed, several teams linked arms while other teams chose to stay in the locker room during the national anthem. More players were also seen to be kneeling.

Commenting on the origin of the “Take the Knee” movement, Brooks says, “I think that it is up to us as individuals to talk about what the movement [and] what this protest is about. The narrative, unfortunately, has been switched by the president and other people. They’re trying to frame it as a protest that is disrespecting the United States flag or disrespecting the anthem, and thus the military and [what] all of America stands for when in actuality it’s a protest.

“It’s a way of protest that was used during the Civil Rights movement with Dr [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] and others on numerous occasions…. That’s what the Take the Knee protest is about, protesting injustice, in particular, racial injustice. It has nothing to do with the flag. 

“People who have participated in the protests are veterans [and] from all walks of people. What people can do is correct the narrative. Be sure to correct people when they mistakenly think it’s about something else. Talk to people about it and decide how they can support anyone – in this case NFL players – in exercising their First Amendment right to protest.”

Brooks, who grew up in Oakland, California, first joined the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2004 as director of Mix It Up at Lunch Day, a Teaching Tolerance program which aimed to help break down racial, cultural and social barriers in schools. Before this, she worked for 12 years in several roles for the National Conference for Community and Justice in its Los Angeles office.

She says, “I grew up very much aware of the racial oppression of the United States and fortunately found a way to channel that, to help advance equality and equity for African-Americans. That has, over the course of my life, exposed me to the inequities that people suffer because of who they are. So, that’s just really important to me in my life. It’s my life. It’s my work. It’s what I’m dedicated to: trying to end injustice or call out injustice.”


Lecia Brooks was a participant of the Salzburg Global program Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration, which is part of Salzburg Global’s multi-year series Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA). More information on the session can be found here. You can follow all of the discussions on Twitter by following the hashtag #SSASA.

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Chris Lehmann – American Justice is Still a Model for the World – But a Flawed Model
Chris Lehmann in conversation at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies AssociationChris Lehmann in conversation at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association
Chris Lehmann – American Justice is Still a Model for the World – But a Flawed Model
By: Oscar Tollast 

Executive director of the Central and East Europe Law reflects on US justice system

Chris Lehmann, executive director of the Central and East Europe Law Institute (CEELI), is inspired to improve the world and spread justice. Speaking at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA), he says, “My father was an Episcopal priest, and I think he just had a very clear idea of what was right and wrong. I think you can either spend your life trying to make the world a better place or not.”

Lehmann’s decision to attend the 15th SSASA symposium – Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration – was in part thanks to Salzburg Global Program Director Charles Ehrlich. Lehmann says, “Charles has been up to Prague several times to my Institute and had been wanting to get me down here, which I was eager to do. This session seemed particularly relevant, partly because there would be quite a bit of focus on transatlantic legal issues –, European perspectives of America –, but with a lot of that focus being on our criminal justice system. So, it was kind of a perfect fit for me.”

The CEELI Institute, based in Prague, was established to advance the rule of law in the world. Lehmann, who previously worked for the US Department of Justice, has served as its executive director since 2014. The Institute works with judges and lawyers from around the world on matters relating to comparative law, judicial issues, and human rights. Reflecting on justice in the US, Lehmann says, “The US, obviously, in some ways continues to be a model for the rest of the world, but it is a very flawed model.”

Lehmann highlights the “extensive use of plea bargaining” and “police issues” as two areas in the US that require further attention. His hope in attending this symposium was to see how others around the world viewed these issues, which would help him assess where the US is today, whether the country still  has a system viewed as worth emulating.

As of September, Lehmann believes this view is a “very mixed bag.” He says. “There are theoretical aspects of the US justice system which continue to be aspirational, but I think there are some deep flaws that are making a lot of people in Europe skeptical of US solutions.”

The CEELI Institute is based at the Villa Grébovka, a historic building that dates back to 1871. The Institute was founded in 1999 and has provided post-graduate legal education and exchange to more than 5,000 legal professionals. Lehmann says the Institute has found it very valuable to bring people together for several days and allow them to step out of their lives and focus on the topic at hand.

Noting the similarity with Salzburg Global Seminar, Lehman says, “I think you’ve recognized that some of the best discussions go on at the coffee hours, at the meals, and in the evenings, and in strolling around the parks. It’s not just what takes place in the sessions.

“If you go to a conference somewhere at a hotel, you don’t necessarily have quite that sense of convening. There’s just a huge value to a serene setting like this. It puts people at ease, it relaxes them, and it just allows this sort of dawn till dusk conversation to go on in and out of formal settings.

“There are lots of different learning styles. Some people will be on their feet in the classroom, and there are other people that are much more comfortable having a quiet conversation over a cup of coffee after the session is over. This really enables everybody to kind of be drawn into the discussion.”


Chris Lehmann was a participant of the Salzburg Global program Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration, which is part of Salzburg Global’s multi-year series Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA). More information on the session can be found here. You can follow all of the discussions on Twitter by following the hashtag #SSASA.

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Elaine May - Despite Being Preoccupied with Safety, Americans Have Made Themselves Less Secure
Elaine May at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies AssociationElaine May at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association
Elaine May - Despite Being Preoccupied with Safety, Americans Have Made Themselves Less Secure
By: Oscar Tollast 

Professor at University of Minnesota reflects on her keynote speech at the 15th SSASA symposium

Elaine May is no stranger to the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA), nor is it her first time at Schloss Leopoldskron. The professor and author last attended a SSASA symposium in 2012 – Screening America: Film and Television in the 21st Century, which was her fourth time at the Schloss. She says, “I’ve been here before, and I’ve always found it very exciting, intellectually stimulating, beautiful, luxurious [and] delicious. It’s always a wonderful experience. I especially love having the opportunity to discuss issues that pertain to the United States with people from other countries, because I learn so much from their perspective.”

May was speaking having returned just under five years later for her fifth visit for the SSASA symposium, Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration to hear how other countries’ citizens perceived the new American administration under President Donald J. Trump. She also provided the key note presentation on the first evening of the symposium, titled, “The American Dream and the Quest for Security – the Promise and the Perils.”

Among the points May made was that the United States had a “crisis in democracy,” and that the American Dream has been problematic since the beginning of the Second World War. While it’s since been possible for members of the middle class and working class to achieve material aspects of the American Dream, they live in fear that dream could be taken away from them in an instant, she says.

May, Regents professor of American studies and history, and chair of the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, says, “That level of anxiety and fear – that was first manifest in the atomic age and in the Cold War – has taken various forms over the rest of the 20th Century, and now into the 21st. That has kind of conditioned Americans to live in a world in which they always feel that they are in danger. That leads to a breakdown of belief and investment in the common good, and in a kind of mistrust in the government to work on behalf of all citizens, and in a fear and suspicion of strangers – whoever those strangers are.”

This fear has changed the way Americans live their daily lives, according to May. It changed the way citizens vote and how they envisage their nation’s identity. In short, May says this has had a long-term effect on undercutting democracy. She adds, “Americans have become quite preoccupied with issues of safety and security since the early Cold War… Everything they have done to try to make themselves more safe and secure has made them less safe and secure.”

Expanding on this point, May says US citizens have become so preoccupied looking over their shoulder that they’ve failed to notice what is happening in front of them and the growing influence of the country’s elite one percent. She says, “Keeping a gun in their pocket wasn’t going to prevent [people] from metaphorically losing their shirts to Wall Street and other big money financial institutions that are really robbing them – not somebody walking behind them on the street.”

May’s keynote drew several responses from participants, one of whom suggested a hate narrative was more dominant in the US than the fear narrative. Responding to this suggestion, May says, “I think the two are very related. I think that the hate comes out of fear. If we really knew each other, you wouldn’t fear each other. Hate is a stronger more aggressive stand than fear. Fear feels weak, and hate feels strong.”

As a past president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association, May’s interest in her country’s history cannot be questioned. Her interest in US history first bloomed when she lived in Japan as a student in 1968. She says, “I hadn’t really understood how important it would be for me to know my own national history until I lived abroad as an American, and I had to speak as an American, and I had to represent a country that I was profoundly alienated from in 1968 between the Vietnam War and all the other horrible things that were happening at the time. I had to speak for my country – not just as a person who saw herself as among the dissenters within the country but as the citizen of the United States that was wreaking havoc all over Asia, including Japan.

“I thought I better learn something. I went back to the US and started taking US history courses, which I hadn’t really done much of. When I graduated a year later, I felt I didn’t really know enough. I had applied for the Peace Corps and got in but realized I had nothing to teach anybody until I knew more. I thought I better go to graduate school. Then I went to graduate school, and then I kind of just got on the train.”

Her graduate school days are now long behind her and she certainly now has a lot more to teach people. In addition to her work as a professor, May has authored several books, most recently Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy (2017) and America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (2010). Alongside multi-time Salzburg Global Fellow Reinhold Wagenleitner, she also co-edited Here, There, and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (2000), a collection of essays that originated at a Salzburg Global session.


Elaine May was a participant of the Salzburg Global Program Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration, which is part of Salzburg Global's multi-year series Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA). More information on the session can be found here. You can follow all of the discussions on Twitter by following the hashtag #SSASA

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Dragan Vukotic – We Need to Remember the Founding Principle of Journalism - Facts are Sacred and Comments are Free
Dragan Vukotic in conversation at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA)
Dragan Vukotic – We Need to Remember the Founding Principle of Journalism - Facts are Sacred and Comments are Free
By: Oscar Tollast 

Journalist at Serbia’s leading daily newspaper Politika discusses interest in US politics, culture and society

Dragan Vukotic has always been quite curious about American studies. His decision to attend the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association - Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration - was prompted by a desire to widen his knowledge about US culture, politics and society.

In his position as head of the foreign desk at Serbia’s leading daily newspaper Politika, his curiosity with the US has played to his advantage. During the 2016 US presidential election, Vukotic was tasked with explaining the events to Serbian readers. Based in the US, he spoke to some experts to provide further clarity.

Speaking at Salzburg Global, Vukotic says, “I’m pretty much interested in the division in American society, especially in the aspect of media because that’s my background... What strikes me is that the American media are so divided that you must choose: are you left-wing media or are you right-wing media?”

Vukotic suggested there was little common ground between each faction and the situation reminded him of something he had witnessed in Serbia, “where a division is so strong that you, for example, cannot be a voter for some party from the left and, at the same time, say something good about some aspect of politics from the right, which is not a good thing.” He adds, “I think that we need to remember the founding principle of journalism that facts are sacred and comments are free.”

The 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association set out to explore topics such as racial issues, immigration, populism, wealth, media, legal rights, civil rights, and criminal law. Vukotic doesn’t believe there’s one pressing issue deserving of everyone's attention, but a combination. He called for the US to focus more on bridging existing divides and to prevent the social fabric from being torn apart.

In addition to the US and Serbia, Vukotic has reported from China, Japan, South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Armenia. He is a regular contributor for several Serbian and Balkan regional radio and TV stations.

In 2017, one term that was difficult to ignore was “fake news,” defined by Collins Dictionary as “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting.” Less than two months after Vukotic spoke to Salzburg Global, Collins Dictionary named it as their official World of the Year.

Fake news is something Vukotic has experienced in Serbia. He says, “I’m a big fan of social media and all that stuff. You can read a lot of good things on Twitter and on Facebook, but those [mediums], which are [mediums] of course, helped a lot in producing fake news. One can just imagine some fake news, give it an inflammatory title, put it online, and in the course of 10 minutes, or a day, a million people will share it. It’s a dangerous trend for journalism.”

Vukotic first joined Politika as a reporter at the metro desk in October 2007. He wanted to be a journalist because he saw it as a “free profession.” He says, “You’re free to move from one place to another to talk to interesting people. It’s actually a really common profession, but you have an opportunity to talk with some uncommon people. So, that’s a privilege, and at some point in your career, you realize that journalism actually has a really big impact on society. So, that’s a really big privilege but also more challenging and a big responsibility.”

Speaking on the second day of the symposium, Vukotic confirmed he had already been left inspired by a presentation given by Elaine Tyler May, Regents professor of American studies and history, and chair of the Department of History, at the University of Minnesota. Her talk was titled, “The American Dream and the Quest for Security - the Promise and the Perils.”

Vukotic says, “She raised the questions about causes of the processes, not consequences. That’s what I’m interested in as a journalist, just to try to figure out what’s the main cause for what’s going on. We all know who [Donald] Trump is, all about his hair, his messy remarks, and everything, but we need to be more focused more on which trends led to his election.”


Dragan Vukotic was a participant of the Salzburg Global session Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration, which is part of Salzburg Global’s multi-year series Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA). More information on the session can be found here. You can follow all of the discussions on Twitter by following the hashtag #SSASA.

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Kimberly Mann – “It’s Key to Present Information to People in a Way That Allows Them to Understand the Lessons That Are to Be Learned from This Tragedy”
Kimberly Mann facilitates a workshop on Global Citizenship Education
Kimberly Mann – “It’s Key to Present Information to People in a Way That Allows Them to Understand the Lessons That Are to Be Learned from This Tragedy”
By: Louise Hallman and Tomas De La Rosa 

UN education outreach chief shares why learning about the Holocaust is so important for today’s youth

It happened in Europe over 70 years ago, but teaching about and learning from the Holocaust is still vital across the world today, says Kimberly Mann, Salzburg Global Fellow and chief of the Education Outreach Section in the United Nations’ Department of Public Information.

Speaking at the session, Learning from the Past: Sharing Experiences across Borders to Combat Extremism, Mann discussed the importance of Holocaust Education: “I think that when we look at Holocaust Education, we have to focus on two things: education and remembrance. It’s key to present this history to young people in a way that they can understand the lessons that are to be learned from this tragedy,” Mann says.

In her role with the UN, Mann devised the strategy and outreach program to be used by all 63 field offices of the UN around the world, which each has a mandate to observe the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 (the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp). In 2005, the first year of the outreach program, 10 Holocaust education and remembrance activities were held in 10 countries. By 2017, this had grown to 150 events and activities in 50 countries.

“To me [that growth] says a lot,” says Mann. “To me it says that the United Nations has taken this subject very seriously and we have been very determined to encourage Holocaust education in countries around the world, in countries that are at risk and in countries that have had absolutely or very little connection to the Holocaust as it occurred at the time.”

In April 2017, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) published Education about the Holocaust and preventing genocide: A policy guide. As Mann explains, the guide “defines what it is about the Holocaust that is universal; why it’s important for educators around the world to introduce education about the Holocaust in their classrooms; the relationship that it has not only with the preventing of genocide but [also] international law; and the role of the international community has in helping to prevent such tragedies from occurring again.”

The document, which was contributed to by 10 Salzburg Global Fellows, makes the link between Holocaust education and global citizenship education and the role that all individuals have to help promote peace and sustainable development. The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme contributed to the document's guidelines.

There are challenges in this approach. Mann attended an earlier session in theSalzburg Global Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program where she says there were many intellectual debates: “Do we teach about the Holocaust in order to protect human rights? Or do we look at human rights and then consider the Holocaust? There are some great sensitivities.”

Mann believes that “the Holocaust is a very important subject in and of itself.”

“You don’t teach about the Holocaust to learn about other genocides; you teach about the Holocaust to understand how the Holocaust came about – the specific history, the impact that it had on the Jewish people, and what that meant to the rest of the world.”

“Comparative genocide [studies are] important but you can’t compare the suffering of the victims. There is no hierarchy of suffering,” Mann explains. “But you can look at certain warning signs. You can be more aware and take action to prevent these things from happening by looking at case histories like the Holocaust, and what happened in Rwanda or other countries.”

For Mann, Holocaust education has an important role in teaching societies about what happens when there is discrimination, hatred and bigotry, and a lack of respect for minorities and diversity, as well as how communities – local, national and international – respond to such atrocities. She highlights the importance of learning how the Holocaust was perpetrated and by whom: “It wasn’t just the Nazis, it was the German people and their collaborators.”

Sharing personal experiences such as The Diary of Anne Frank has great value, says Mann, as they can help to make the atrocities feel more “real”: “It’s so important that we continue to listen to the stories of survivors, that this history has been documented.”

At a UN event in New York to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank, at which the accounts of Anne Frank and other young victims of genocidal violence were presented to an audience of than 500 13 to 18 year olds, Mann remarks that she was “very inspired by [their] reaction.”

“The reaction from the young people was to ask: ‘Why? Why do we see people who are different to us as being less than us? Why do we think that people who are different than us don’t deserve to have same treatment, the same quality of life, the same standards of living and protections under the law as we do? Why?!’ …I really think that what I see [now] versus when I was younger in school is that there is a lot of critical thinking that is happening now.”

“There is a lot of work to be done but I think the first step is for young people to analyze the information that is being presented to them and then question the assumptions that they have already made themselves or the so-called ‘truths’ that have been presented to them.”   

Ultimately, Holocaust education is not only about learning about and from the past. Mann hopes that programs like as hers will “motivate [young people] to take some sort of positive action to defend human rights.”


The session, Learning from the Past: Sharing Experiences across Borders to Combat Extremism is part of the multi-year series Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention (HEGP) Program, which is held partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and this year is funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich. Additional support comes from Mr. Ronald Abramson; the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research, and Economy; the Robert Bosch Stiftung; the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; the HDH Wills 1965 Charitable Trust; the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung; and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

More information can be found on the session here, and you can follow along via the hashtag #SGShol on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

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Learning from the Past - Sharing Experiences across Borders to Combat Extremism
Candles brought to the market square in Turku, Finland, following the knife attack in August 2017. Photo: Sullay/Wikimedia commonsCandles brought to the market square in Turku, Finland, following the knife attack in August 2017. Photo: Sullay/Wikimedia commons
Learning from the Past - Sharing Experiences across Borders to Combat Extremism
By: Mirva Villa 

Salzburg Global Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program continues building strategies for countering violent extremism

Ensuring the next generation can grow up in more resilient, open, and pluralist communities in the face of rising extremism challenges countries across the globe. Faced with a rise in violent extremism, policymakers are under pressure to invest in prevention and to show that it works. Structured efforts to reduce extremist mindsets and behaviors have existed for some time, but evidence of effectiveness is often not widely known or utilized. Many interventions require considerable time to affect change, making rigorous measurement of their success over the long term resource-intensive and in need of sustained political will around an often-unpopular topic. What works? How do we know? And will it work in different geographic, cultural and political contexts?

By providing a platform for cross-border and cross-sector collaborations, the session to be held this week in Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria – Learning from the Past: Sharing Experiences across Borders to Combat Extremism – aims to support those individuals and institutions who have taken up the challenge of promoting peace in their own communities.

Salzburg Global Seminar’s long-running Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention (HEGP) Programworks across cultures and contexts, including where perceptions and definitions of “extremism” differ widely. The 2017 session in the Program will build on work from previous years, particularly the projects launched at the December 2016 session,Learning from the Past: Promoting Pluralism and Countering Extremism. One of these projects, The Change Makers Leadership Program, created by Salzburg Global Fellows Tali Nates and Richard Freedman from South Africa, and Freddy Mutanguha and Aloys Mahwa from Rwanda, helps students between the ages of 15 and 18 in both countries understand their countries’ troubled pasts in an effort to promote peaceful coexistence and counter extremism. The first class of students graduated this summer, and it is intended that the program will expand to other African countries in 2018.

Over 40 participants from 20 countries, mostly from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, will convene in Schloss Leopoldskron for this year’s session on November 16-20. They come from many professional backgrounds including academia, museums and memorial sites, civil society organizations, government officials, and public communications experts. Many of the participants are returning Fellows from other Salzburg Global sessions, including its multi-year series on Culture, Arts and Society, the Salzburg Global Media Academy and Reform and Transformation in the Middle East and North Africa.

The session will mix interactive methodologies, plenary and small group discussions, and thematic and regionally focused working groups to explore and debate the most effective ways to combat rising intolerance and extremism. Participants will deepen and extend their collaborative work in order to identify cross-regional strategies to empower institutions and individuals with tools for ethical education, peaceful conflict resolution, and pluralist societies.

Program Director Charles Ehrlich says that “we are thrilled to have such truly remarkable people from across the world to join us in Salzburg. They share a commitment to overcoming the legacy or threat of mass atrocity, using tools developed for Holocaust education to address their countries’ own national tragedies or problematic histories in an appropriate and dignified way, so that they may provide hope for – and through – the next generation.”

The HEGP Program is held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and this year is funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich. Additional support comes from Mr. Ronald Abramson; the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research, and Economy; the Robert Bosch Stiftung; the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; the HDH Wills 1965 Charitable Trust; the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung; and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

The HEGP Program’s emphasis on grassroots activity within existing institutional budgets anchors projects in their local communities and improves chances for longer-term sustainability. Activities depend on the partners and are demand-driven: The Program provides no financial support to activity implementation, but rather facilitates networks and exchange of experiences across borders to help in-country partners achieve their own institutional mandates, and to help external partners (government, academic, civil society, and other interested parties) to have access to practical feedback from on-the-ground actors within affected countries and communities.

Since 2010, the Program has sought to develop methods for combating extremism and promoting pluralism through education and research. The Program has a network of individuals and NGOs in more than 40 countries, offering ongoing support to its members. It promotes learning from the Global South – both South-to-South exchange but also importantly transmitting lessons from South to North, to inform and influence effective policy and strategies both in the participants’ countries and in Western countries striving to address the same issues, and to determine what methodologies or tools can be leveraged in different contexts.


The session, Learning from the Past: Sharing Experiences across Borders to Combat Extremism is part of the multi-year series Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention (HEGP) Program, which is held partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and this year is funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich. Additional support comes from Mr. Ronald Abramson; the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research, and Economy; the Robert Bosch Stiftung; the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; the HDH Wills 1965 Charitable Trust; the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung; and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

More information can be found on the session here: www.salzburgglobal.org/go/589 and you can follow along via the hashtag #SGShol on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

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Chochoe Devaporihartakula – A Clean and Green Asia Needs Compliance and Transparency
Unhealthy levels of air pollution affect the lives of millions living in Asian mega-cities like Shangai, pictured, writes Chochoe DevaporihartakulaUnhealthy levels of air pollution affect the lives of millions living in Asian mega-cities like Shangai, pictured, writes Chochoe Devaporihartakula
Chochoe Devaporihartakula – A Clean and Green Asia Needs Compliance and Transparency
By: Chochoe Devaporihartakula 

Program manager for the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) shares her vision to urgently address and reduce air pollution in Asia

Devaporihartakula will be a participant at the upcoming session in the series The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation. All participants were invited to share their own vision for “the Asia we want.”

Urbanization is increasingly perceived as a serious issue that threatens to undermine recent advances towards sustainable development in Asia. Currently, 48 percent of the population in Asia is living in urban areas and is expected to grow to 64 percent by 2050 according to the United Nations. The highest rate of urban population growth is predicted to take place in Asia and Africa, which will have significant consequences on natural resources, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, while air pollution levels attributable to urban development already far exceed World Health Organization (WHO) standards and are likely to rise substantially in the coming decades.

While other regions are exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution, Asia accounts for the largest share of ambient PM2.5 and is responsible for millions of deaths. In Southeast Asia, urban air pollution is ranked among the highest in the world with many cities showing pollution levels five to 10 times above WHO limits. Those of us who live in Southeast Asia’s mega-cities know that air pollution is a problem. But the public is only now beginning to learn just how dangerous this problem has become. A recent study by the University of Chicago found that air pollution is shortening the lives of Vietnamese citizens by 1.16 years. Earlier this year, Harvard University and Greenpeace estimated that air pollution from the region’s coal-fired power plants could be killing 20,000 people per year. It is often the poor who suffer disproportionately from environmental health risks associated with air pollution effects.

The Asia we want can only be made clean and green by ensuring the effectiveness of environmental compliance and increasing transparency and accountability of all stakeholders. Every country has limited resources that must be used effectively to foster greater compliance with the law and improved protection for people and the environment. National governments, city officials, local communities, and regional cooperation through networks such as the Asian Environmental Compliance and Enforcement Network (AECEN) must collaborate to make sure steps are taken in order to regulate and monitor pollution sources at the very early stage. This would ensure fewer polluting sources, reduced health impacts, more efficient economic growth, and greater economic returns to the country. Most Asian countries currently lack advanced technology used for pollution monitoring. Therefore, proper mechanisms such as prioritizing high risk threats through regulations, incentive programs to motivate compliance, and advanced technology for more accurate and less expensive monitoring can help all countries leap forward in the effectiveness of their compliance and enforcement efforts.

Dealing with air pollution is a global challenge but the good news is that during the first Asia-Pacific Ministerial Summit on the Environment held in Bangkok in September 2017, 30 countries in Asia-Pacific committed to move towards a clean and green Asia-Pacific with highlights on the urgency of addressing environmental health risks associated with pollution and promoting resource efficiency measures and practices. Let’s hope and see if this initiative can really lead to sustainable urban development and nature-based solutions – and not just another commitment that is left on the shelf.

Chochoe Devaporihartakula is the program manager for the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and the Training Event Specialist for the Regional Resource Center for Asia and the Pacific at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT).


Session 591 - The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation I - A Clean and Green Asia - is the first session of a new multi-year series held in partnership with the Japan Foundation. For more information on the Session, please click here. To keep up to date with the conversations taking place during the session on social media, follow #SGSasia.

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Sandeep Choudhury – “The Asia We Want Should Be One Based on Equitable Growth and Not the Disparity We See Today Between the Rich and the Poor”
The growth of emerging Asian economies should be achieved in a sustainable manner, writes Choudhury. Image: Flickr/Selamat MadeThe growth of emerging Asian economies should be achieved in a sustainable manner, writes Choudhury (Picture: Flickr/Selamat Made)
Sandeep Choudhury – “The Asia We Want Should Be One Based on Equitable Growth and Not the Disparity We See Today Between the Rich and the Poor”
By: Sandeep Choudhury 

Climate change expert calls for Asia to learn from its mistakes, return to clean and sustainable land use practices and harness modern technology

Choudhury will be a participant at the upcoming session in the series The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation. All participants were invited to share their own vision for “the Asia we want.”

Two thirds of the world’s poor live in Asia. More than 850 million lack access to safe drinking water and over two billion lack access to improved sanitation. Energy demand is set to double in the coming years. Education and women’s issues remains a big concern. Already we see large parts of South East Asia and South Asia ravaged by hurricanes and floods, which has led to millions being displaced. There are other areas with droughts and food security to deal with. Ethnic and political violence has led to the creation of millions of refugees, which compounds the problem further. Set against this backdrop, it is imperative that we understand the localization of problems and come up with solutions that are inclusive as well as bottom up. Communities need to be engaged, and not in superficial ways. Time is of the essence and the bureaucracy across governments needs to streamlined for quicker delivery.

The Asia we want is a coming together of modern technology to deliver last mile development as well as draw upon the ethos and traditions of the olden days. Frugal consumption patterns and community living was the norm in Asia, before massive industrialization and population growth spurred millions to migrate and clog the cities of Asia, as well as drive up unsustainable consumption and poverty levels. Asia is comprised of agrarian economies in large parts, and it would be ideal if we could go back to days of clean and sustainable land use practices.

The Asia we want should be one based on equitable growth and not the disparity we see today between the rich and the poor. While the emerging economies in Asia are growing and energy demands set to rise, it is important that this growth is achieved in a sustainable manner and not the same way that we witnessed the developed world grow though the 20th century.

We have to learn from our mistakes and take this next growth cycle in Asia as an opportunity to grow in a manner which is not detrimental to our existence in the future.

Sandeep is a co-founder at VNV Advisory Services, responsible for the initiation and development of the climate change expertise.


Session 591 - The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation I - A Clean and Green Asia - is the first session of a new multi-year series held in partnership with the Japan Foundation. For more information on the Session, please click here. To keep up to date with the conversations taking place during the session on social media, follow #SGSasia.

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Xixi Chen – We Need Integrated, Collaborative and Bottom-Up Leadership to Build a Cleaner and Greener Asia
Businesses and communities need support in setting their goals to reduce emissions, writes Xixi ChenBusinesses and communities need support in setting their goals to reduce emissions, writes Xixi Chen
Xixi Chen – We Need Integrated, Collaborative and Bottom-Up Leadership to Build a Cleaner and Greener Asia
By: Xixi Chen 

Environmental Defense Fund manager shares her vision for new kinds of leadership needed to tackle the challenge of climate change

Chen will be a participant at the upcoming session in the series The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation. All participants were invited to share their own vision for “the Asia we want.”

2015 saw the historic successful deal of the Paris Agreement, which symbolized the unanimous determination from nearly 200 countries to fight against climate change and emphasized the climate leadership of the collaboration among all countries. But 2017 has seen this leadership transformed, if not demolished.

On June 1, 2017, the new administration of the United States announced that the country will withdraw from the Paris Agreement. It was a big setback for the green community. However, four days later, the CEO of Unilever made the announcement saying “we are still in,” followed by thousands of city mayors, business CEOs, and non-profit organization leaders. The decision of the president of the US did not change or stop the joint effort from a cross-section communities of the country and beyond to help reduce carbon emissions. This new rising leadership on climate change and sustainability, is different from the top-down national-level leadership we are used to seeing – it is a stronger integrated force, incorporating all kinds of bottom-up community-level efforts working together.

To build a cleaner and greener Asia, this is the new leadership we need and it can help bridge us into the long-term future in the face of inevitable short-term political unitability and uncertainties in many different parts of the world.

This new force of leadership on climate requires strong and effective collaboration on community level, letting leaders from cities, businesses, investors, colleges and universities, local communities, to come and work together toward the same goal: providing fresh air, clean water, safe food, affordable energy, and a healthy environment to everyone in Asia – and the world.

As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said “a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step.” Helping businesses and communities set their own big and achievable science-based goals on emissions reduction and sustainability is that crucial first step. Once we have the goals, we will need to overcome the communication barrier and build high-quality conversations to help us move forward together because Asian countries are so diverse in cultures and languages and the social and economic developments are uneven. Using advanced technologies to build the best-practice sharing platform can help strengthen the collaboration among our communities; if there is an innovative transportation solution in one city, how can we effectively share the solution with other cities? Regional high-impact initiatives need to be applauded and encouraged, and the resources and tools that can help maximize the impacts should be replicated and shared across industries and regions with lower cost and higher accessibility. Undoubtedly, market-based policies and innovative financing mechanisms will also help accelerate the collaboration and scale up positive results because the best environmental solutions are always strong business cases too.

This is not an easy pathway and there is a lot of work need to be done along the road. But the future looks more promising and exciting because a future Asia with better networked and collaborative communities will be not only cleaner and greener, but also more resilient and prosperous.

Xixi Chen is a manager at the Environmental Defense Fund based in New York with focuses on clean energy, green supply chain, and corporate partnerships.


Session 591 - The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation I - A Clean and Green Asia - is the first session of a new multi-year series held in partnership with the Japan Foundation. For more information on the Session, please click here. To keep up to date with the conversations taking place during the session on social media, follow #SGSasia.

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Wilson John Barbon – Disasters Are Not Natural Phenomena but Are the Result of Human and Social Conditions
Natural disasters, including the possible eruption of Mt. Agung in Bali, are first and for most social development issues, writes Wilson John BarbonNatural disasters, including the possible eruption of Mt. Agung in Bali (pictured), are first and for most social development issues, writes Wilson John Barbon
Wilson John Barbon – Disasters Are Not Natural Phenomena but Are the Result of Human and Social Conditions
By: Wilson John Barbon 

Myanmar Country Program Coordinator at the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction offers his vision for a disaster resilient Asia

Barbon will be a participant at the upcoming session in the series The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation. All participants were invited to share their vision for “the Asia we want.”

The imminent eruption of Mt. Agung in the tourist island of Bali, Indonesia has filled the news in Asia. A number of countries have already issued travel warnings for the island. But despite all of these warnings, I still flew into Bali at the beginning of October together with the hundreds of tourists. It seems like despite all the ominous news both (real and fake) in social media, Bali still enjoys 95 percent occupancy.

I was in Bali to facilitate two events related to disaster risk reduction (DRR); namely a two-day orientation on community-managed DRR for a number of local community-based organizations (CBO) from Timor Leste; and a learning conference on the role of local leadership in building disaster resilience in Indonesia and Timor Leste. I thought to myself this is an opportune time to talk about disaster resilience of local communities within the shadows of a possible eruption of Mt. Agung.

On the first day of my interaction with CBO leaders from Timor Leste, I had just two key messages for them about building people’s resilience against disasters and climate change.

The first message I always teach is: disasters are not natural phenomena. They are the result of human and social conditions. In the parlance of disaster risk reduction, we differentiate hazards from disasters. Hazards are the events (both natural and human acts) that have the potential to create serious disruption in the way of life of people and their communities. These disruptions we refer to as disasters. How people are affected is a result of human and social conditions.

Then the second message I teach is: resilience building starts with changing the mindsets of individual people. It’s about shifting to a new way of looking at our development challenges. A resilience mindset is having the ability to be aware of and to understand the hazards that we are exposed to; it is about having the ability to calibrate one’s exposure and vulnerability to these hazards; and finally, it is the ability to determine and act on building coping capacities to better survive and bounce back quickly from these hazards. Therefore, building community resilience is a process of capacity development. Resilience cannot be just handed over to communities. Communities, through their local leadership, have to build their own resilience.

I call on development players to shift towards a mindset that disasters are social development issues; that individuals and communities have the ability to choose whether they will be a disaster victim or a survivor. Secondly, I call on local communities that they should continue to organize, mobilize and innovate to address the social, economic and political root causes of disaster risks. And I believe local leadership plays a big role.

While Mt. Agung looms in the backdrop of our event in Bali, I hope that the voices we gathered and the relationships built among local leaders will start the ripple towards building a more resilient Asia.

Wilson John Barbon is currently the Country Program Coordinator for Myanmar tasked with leading the establishment of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) presence in Myanmar.


 Session 591 - The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation I - A Clean and Green Asia - is the first session of a new multi-year series held in partnership with the Japan Foundation. For more information on the Session, please click here. To keep up to date with the conversations taking place during the session on social media, follow #SGSasia.

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Marifrance Avila – “For Us to Achieve the Asia That We Want, We Need to Start with Achieving the Country That We Want”
Avila says residents of Makati City, pictured, make sure economic advancement does not derail efforts to protect the environment
Marifrance Avila – “For Us to Achieve the Asia That We Want, We Need to Start with Achieving the Country That We Want”
By: Marifrance R. Avila 

Makati City official offers a vision for a sustainable Philippines to reach the dream of a green Asia

Avila will be a participant at the upcoming session in the series The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation. All participants were invited to share their vision for “the Asia we want.”

The Philippines is an archipelagic country endowed with both mineral and natural resources that have the potential to meet the basic needs of the people and to support a far more prosperous and equitable society – if it were not for the historical confluence of different factors: a legacy of colonial plunder and its current-day forms, the inability to address the roots of the worsening global climate crisis, and the failure of governance to address the ecological and socio-economic realities of our times. This is not only a reflection of my own country but more of a picture of the Asia we are.

Asia is a rich continent not only of its natural resources but of its people and its culture. The Asia we dream of is a haven of cultural integration, a venue for intellectual discourse, a place of economic progress, climate resilience and a green Asia.

However, this vision is not something we can achieve in a blink of an eye. This involves hard work, dedication, and collaboration. In my country, we are keen to address issues of the environment. In Makati City, for example, we make sure that economic advancement does not derail our efforts to protect the environment we live in. Makati, as a highly-urbanized city, focuses on managing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The GHG Management Plan allows the city government to analyze the emissions produced within its geographic boundary and to identify appropriate climate change mitigation options through policies and programs. Using the inventory report as a backbone for a scientific baseline analysis of trends in GHG emissions, the plan serves as Makati City’s blueprint for climate change actions.

This is just one of the initiatives that we can impart to our neighboring countries in Asia. For us to achieve the Asia that we want, we need to start with achieving the country that we want. We need to make sure that where we live is a sanctuary not just for its people and culture, but also for our floras and faunas; a country where people are sensitive not only to their own needs but also to the needs of their surroundings. As Barry Commoner said: “The first Law of Ecology: Everything is connected to everything else.” We are but one in this world, interconnected and intertwined. What we do in our own country will ripple and multiply. This is how we can realize the country we dream of – and the Asia we want.

Marifrance R. Avila is currently the focal person for both climate change and water and the pollution section of the pollution control and regulation division of the city of Makati, the Philippines.


Session 591 - The Asia We Want: Building Community Through Regional Cooperation I - A Clean and Green Asia - is the first session of a new multi-year series held in partnership with the Japan Foundation. For more information on the Session, please click here. To keep up to date with the conversations taking place during the session on social media, follow #SGSasia.

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First Class of Change-Makers Graduate from Salzburg Global-Inspired Program to Tackle Extremism
Students from Thabo Secondary School outside the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre Picture: Catherine BoydStudents from Thabo Secondary School outside the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre Picture: Catherine Boyd
First Class of Change-Makers Graduate from Salzburg Global-Inspired Program to Tackle Extremism
By: Salzburg Global Seminar 

Students take part in pilot program to combat extremism and promote pluralism in Africa

School pupils in Johannesburg, South Africa, have become the first graduates of a Salzburg Global-inspired program to promote pluralism and tackle extremism in Africa.

Students from Thabo Secondary School recently became the first to complete the Change Makers Leadership Program, a project which grew out of Salzburg Global during Session 564 -Learning from the Past: Promoting Pluralism and Countering Extremism.

The Change Makers Leadership Program was one of several projects designed at the session. It is currently being piloted in South Africa and Rwanda and could expand across other African countries in 2018.

The Program, created by Salzburg Global Fellows Tali Nates, Richard Freedman, Freddy Mutanguha, and Mubigalo Aloys Mahwa, focuses on students aged between 15 and 18.

During these sessions, students develop the skills required to challenge extremism and encourage social cohesion. The students learn these skills by examining the past, using case studies from the Holocaust, the Genocide in Rwanda, and Apartheid in South Africa.

The Program addresses several themes, including history, genocide, consequences, and peace-building. Different concepts such as critical thinking, empathy, trust, and personal responsibility are also emphasized.

Speaking earlier this year, Nates, director of the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, said they planned to “bring our experiences to politicians, education policymakers, media, and civil society leaders.”

A final report of the program will be presented at Salzburg Global next week during Session 589 – Learning from the Past: Sharing Experiences across Borders to Combat Extremism.

This session will involve discussions on how to scale up pilot projects designed during Session 564. Projects will be further refined and modified for implementation elsewhere. Participants will also come away with new resources and leadership tools to increase their efforts to combat rising intolerance and to promote peace within their own societies.

Both Session 589 and 564 are part of Salzburg Global’s multi-year Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Program, which has been held in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2010.

The Program initially began by working with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a multilateral organization of mostly Western European and North American countries to promote Holocaust education and remembrance. Through a series of global and regional gatherings, the Program has gone onto expand its outreach by engaging with participants from more than 40 non-IHRA countries on six continents, many of which had a recent experience of mass atrocities.

Salzburg Global Seminar has created a network of individuals and NGOs across these countries and strives to help them extend their collaborative work, allowing practitioners to identify cross-regional strategies to empower institutions and individuals with tools for ethical education, peaceful conflict resolution, and pluralistic societies.

The Program is beginning to facilitate support to practitioners’ work through the Program’s expanding network, whereby a bottom-up approach can inform and influence effective public policy both in the participants’ countries and in western countries striving to address the same issues and to determine what methodologies or tools can be leveraged in different contexts.

The pilot projects launched as a result of Session 564 were made possible thanks to the support of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, with additional support from the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
 

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Bharat Doshi – "In Changing and Turbulent Times, Life Is All About Awareness, Anticipation and Agility”
Bharat Doshi speaking at one of the plenaries during the third session on corporate governance.Bharat Doshi speaking at one of the plenaries during the third session on corporate governance.
Bharat Doshi – "In Changing and Turbulent Times, Life Is All About Awareness, Anticipation and Agility”
By: Mirva Villa 

Chairman of Mahindra Intertrade discusses regulatory economic shackles and corporate governance in India pre- and post-liberalization and his positive memories of Salzburg Global

Having initially worked in a period of strict government economic regulation before experiencing the freedom of competitive markets, Bharat Doshi, chairman of Mahindra Intertrade, has witnessed freedom for business and corporate governance develop in India through changing times.

“Life is all about awareness, anticipation and agility,” said Doshi, speaking to Salzburg Global at Session 582 – The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit? This mantra, one which emits a certain air of expertise, is something which Doshi appears to have followed closely.

One look at Doshi’s resume reveals the extent of experience he has amassed and the recognition he’s received along the way. Doshi worked for over 40 years for the Mahindra Group, reputed for its high standards of ethics and values, engaged in the manufacture and provision of products and services including automobiles, farm tractors, IT services, financial services, and holiday timeshare resorts. He served as the executive director and group chief financial officer of Mahindra & Mahindra Limited, the parent company, for 21 years and one year as president of Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In 2016, he was nominated by the government of India as a director on the central board of the Reserve Bank of India.

At Salzburg Global, Doshi was one was one of 40 corporate leaders and executives from around the world brought together to draw on their internationally diverse business, legal and academic backgrounds and reflect on the challenges facing corporate governance.

In the first 18 years of Doshi’s career, the government in India had a large control over the industrial environment. Licenses were not only needed for the location of the company but were also required to specify how much of a product would be produced and what kind of product it would be.

Doshi said, “Somebody in the government would do supply and demand analysis  and would look at how many players are in the field and decide, ‘Okay, you’re a car company, but you can only manufacture 4-Wheel Drive Utility Vehicles, or you can manufacture only trucks, and you will do no more than 20,000 Vehicles. This was often described as “Licence Raj”.”

For Doshi and others, grabbing a briefcase and taking a trip to Delhi to obtain approval for business plans was a frequent occurrence. This continued even in the eighties when regulations were relaxed for minimum economic size and for the production of exports. In 1991, however, significant economic reforms were launched in India. Industrial licensing was abolished with a strike of a pen and rules on concentration of economic power were relaxed, “liberalizing the whole economic scenario”.

“This was a major change and thereafter we were free to operate, collaborate and proceed with plans that made economic sense,” said Doshi.

From a corporate governance perspective, during the strict licensing period pre 1991, some of the industrial corporations demonstrated undesirable skills to “manage” the government, according to Doshi. This changed completely in the competitive markets post liberalization and benefitted companies like the Mahindra Group which believed in its core values. He added that India, now, despite the competitive market environment, has sufficient labor laws and sufficient mechanisms to encourage social responsibility. For example, the amended Company Law has a new clause on corporate social responsibility, which came into effect in 2014, requiring companies in India to spend at least two percent of their profits on social development monitored under the principle of 'comply or explain'. The law has been criticized by some but the spend for social and environmental causes of the private sector did increase in the two years after its introduction.

In addition to this measure, there are also requirements in place for 50 percent of the company board to be independent – if the chairman is independent, a third will suffice. Doshi sees this measure as a good thing and a sign that the business culture is becoming more transparent. “I believe getting different and external viewpoints on the table improves governance,” said Doshi. On the subject of increase in the level of disclosures in annual reports, Doshi commented that requirement of disclosures leads to discussion and therefore a conversation, which by itself has its merits.  He however cautioned against voluminous disclosures which become ‘weapons of mass distraction’ and may be undesirable.

To stay competitive in a global market, a business director has to adapt with the times and have the courage to change from what they’re familiar with. While it is important to refine practices, Doshi said it is important for professionals to know their core values – values which they won’t give up under any circumstances.

“I learnt in my career that you should be agile, you should be flexible, but your set of values are like the North Star. They should remain steadfast,” said Doshi.

Many participants at this year’s Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance were making their first trip to Schloss Leopoldskron. Doshi, on the other hand, was retracing his steps and following a path trodden twice before.

Doshi had a “wonderful experience” in 2000 as a participant of Session 384 – Asian Economies: Regional and Global Relationship. He said, “I still have a few friends from that group of 30 with whom I am in regular touch with, and that bond and sharing memories also makes a difference.”

In 2015, he made his second visit, attending Salzburg Global’s first session on corporate governance. What makes him keep coming back?

“Salzburg Global Seminar is where your mind is free from your day-to-day world and you are able to concentrate your thoughts on a defined topic, you are able to understand and appreciate global practices and above all, you are able to evolve in your own mind the principles and the theory behind the topic you are discussing.”


Bharat Doshi attended The Salzburg Global program The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?, which is part of the multi-year series, the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance. The session is being supported by Shearman & Sterling LLP, BNY Mellon, UBS, Barclays, CLP Group, Goldman Sachs, and Teledyne Technologies. More information on the session can be found here.

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Susan Revell – A Workplace That Doesn’t Reflect Society Won’t Attract the Talent It Needs
Susan Revell participated in the third session of Salzburg Global forum on corporate governanceSusan Revell participated in the third session of Salzburg Global forum on corporate governance
Susan Revell – A Workplace That Doesn’t Reflect Society Won’t Attract the Talent It Needs
By: Mirva Villa 

BNY Mellon executive talks about organization’s Women’s Initiative Network and diversity in the workplace

“‘Courageous director’ for me would be somebody who is willing to speak up, stand out, take a path maybe less traveled,” said Susan Revell, general counsel and chief controls officer for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at BNY Mellon.

Revell, who leads the Legal, Risk, Compliance and Corporate Project Management Office and regional area management teams across EMEA, reflected on the role while attending the third session of the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance.

“Courage and independence may actually be quite similar bedfellows in a way,” she added. “I think you need to be courageous if you want to constructively challenge or if you want to be respectfully confrontational in the boardroom.”

Passionate about improving diversity and inclusion in the workplace, Revell is the EMEA executive sponsor for BNY Mellon’s Women’s Initiative Network (WIN).

Revell revealed she’s been fortunate never to have felt like her gender was a constraining factor in her career.

“I’ve hopefully been enabled by my sponsors and my mentors to get involved in things which have seen me grow and develop at the companies I’ve worked for. I think society perhaps hasn’t changed as much as I would have hoped over the last 20 years,” Revell said.

After speaking with some of the young women in their regional offices at BNY Mellon earlier this year, Revell found a lot of stereotypical responsibilities - such as looking after children or caring for elderly parents - still fell on young women.

By sponsoring the network, Revell has been able to show her support for female employees by giving them tools and helping them seek out real role models they can relate to or aspire to be professionally.
Revell said, “It's ensuring that the females in our employee population have fulfilling careers and that they can see the next stage of development.”

To improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace, all parties have to be involved in the conversation.

“I try to encourage the men in our group to engage and learn and not be fearful of the gender diversity discussion,” said Revell. “I'm very keen on ensuring that men are advocating for real change too, whether it's because they know it's the right thing to do naturally, or whether they want to ensure that their daughters have that satisfying and fulfilling career experience… I don't mind where they come from, but together we can make change.

“My challenge to us all is to bring the society forward.”

Earlier this year, BNY Mellon was recognized for their efforts in increasing its commitment to gender equality in the workplace. It received a perfect score in the 15th edition of the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which rates workplaces on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. It was also included in the Times Top 50 Employers for Women.

Commenting on the latter achievement, Revell said, “I think that says something about our culture. Hopefully, something around it being a fulfilling place to work, with strategies and resources in place that enable rather than constrain.

“I think it is a place which appreciates difference and leveraging difference, but in a collegiate and collaborative way and looking to build consensus, at the end of the day. I think those are some of the things that make BNY Mellon an attractive place… I joined four years ago, and I'm very pleased I made that decision.”

Concern for the diversity of the workforce has recently been brought up in discussions related to Brexit. Revell says she believes that any geo-political fragmentation, where people behave more exclusively, is likely to be somewhat damaging.

“But my professional job is to ensure that we make the best of the hand of cards that we've been dealt and look after our employees and our clients, and ensure the management is thinking creatively about how we use the opportunities that Brexit provides to our company, as well as thinking about how do we limit some of the more damaging aspects.”

Participants at this year’s Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance considered several key questions. Among those was: Should board composition reflect the nationalities and demographics of the shareholders, employees, customers, communities served, and supply chains?

When asked why diversity is important, Revell said, “I think you need to reflect society, and if a workplace doesn't reflect society then it isn't going to be able to attract and retain the talent that it needs - that we all need in a world where there isn't enough talent to go around it.”


The Salzburg Global program The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit? is part of the multi-year series, the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance. The session is being supported by Shearman & Sterling LLP, BNY Mellon, UBS, Barclays, CLP Group, Goldman Sachs, and Teledyne Technologies. More information on the session can be found here.
 

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Stephanie Bertels – Companies Need to Think About Their Long Term Strategy, Not Just Their Quarterly Returns
Stephanie Bertels participated in the third session of the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance.Stephanie Bertels participated in the third session of the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance.
Stephanie Bertels – Companies Need to Think About Their Long Term Strategy, Not Just Their Quarterly Returns
By: Mirva Villa 

Embedding Project founder on why sustainability is important for corporate governance

Toward the end of 2015, leaders representing more than 200 nations approved a set of goals to transform the world for the better. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed to tackle issues such as poverty, education, hunger, and climate change. It was agreed at the time – and remains the case – that for these goals to be achieved, everyone will have to play a role.

The topic of how corporations have embedded sustainability to their agenda came up in discussion during the third session of the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance. This was in part thanks to Stephanie Bertels, the director of the Centre for Corporate Governance and Sustainability at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business and founder of the Embedding Project.

The Embedding Project, founded and led by Bertels, is a community of practitioners and researchers who are working together to help companies include environmental and social factors into their operations and decision making.

“The partner companies come to us with their needs what they’re grappling with and then using rigorous research methods we help support their understanding of those issues,” Bertels said. The Embedding Project team will help organizations to re-determine their core strategies with their new goals in mind.

“By that I mean, what would your core strategy look like if you took seriously the idea that you, as a company, need to meet and help contribute to strong social foundations, and that you need to adhere to a set of planetary boundaries?” said Bertels. The tools created by the community assist the company in deciding what their thinking is around a social or environmental issue, and what kind of commitments the company will need to adhere to reach their long term goals.

While big companies have often taken part in philanthropic efforts in one way or another, the concept of corporate social responsibility first started to take form in the 1950s, with companies beginning to be seen obligated to address the social issues around them. Since the early 2000s the movement has grown into a global phenomenon, as consumers and job seekers are increasingly pushing for companies to take steps toward more ethical behavior. Sustainability’s place in today’s corporate governance is “pretty fundamental”, according to Bertels.

“As fiduciaries of a company, you need to be thinking about not just the quarterly returns, but the longer term strategy, the survival and thriving of the organization. Understanding societal expectations and how environmental constraints are going to shape that strategy is completely crucial.”

According to Bertels, the environmental constraints on business have become increasingly clear in the recent years. Issues such as climate change present both challenges and opportunities – and boards are starting to understand that they have to be aware how these issues might impact their business.

“It’s hard in this day and age to manage a company, direct, oversee, provide a strategic oversight to an organization without asking questions about – and expecting good quality disclosure about – the risks and opportunities of social and environmental issues.”


The Salzburg Global program The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit? is part of the multi-year series, the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance. The session is being supported by Shearman & Sterling LLP, BNY Mellon, UBS, Barclays, CLP Group, Goldman Sachs, and Teledyne Technologies. More information on the session can be found here.

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Salzburg Global Fellow Randal K Quarles Confirmed as Member of Us Federal Reserve Board
Randal K. Quarles at Session 563 - Financing the Global Economy: How Can Traditional and Non-Traditional Sources Be Integrated?
Salzburg Global Fellow Randal K Quarles Confirmed as Member of Us Federal Reserve Board
By: Oscar Tollast 

Former Treasury Department official will help oversee U.S. banking system

Salzburg Global Fellow Randal K. Quarles has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a member of the Federal Reserve board.

Quarles, 60, was nominated by President Donald Trump in July to serve as the Federal Reserve's vice chairman for supervision.

Last week he won confirmation by a 65-32 vote in the Senate and became Trump's first confirmed Fed nominee.

Quarles is also the first person to serve in the role and become part of a new approach to financial regulation, as highlighted by The Economist.

Mr. Quarles previously worked in the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush between 2002 and 2006, serving first as assistant secretary for international affairs and then as under secretary for domestic finance.

In 2014, he helped establish the Cynosure Group, a Salt Lake City-based company which makes long-term equity investments in private companies across a range of industries.

Mr. Quarles has taken part in several programs at Salzburg Global. He first attended Schloss Leopoldskron in 2013 for Session 516 - Out of the Shadows: Regulation for the Non-Banking Financial Sector.

The following year, he was a participant at Session 546 - The Future of Banking: Is There a Sustainable Business Model for Banks? He took part in his third Salzburg Global Forum on Finance in a Changing World in 2015 when he attended Session 552 - The Future of Financial Intermediation: Banking, Securities Markets, or Something New?

His most recent appearance at the Forum, and Salzburg Global was in 2016 when he attended Session 563 - Financing the Global Economy: How Can Traditional and Non-Traditional Sources Be Integrated?

The Salzburg Global Forum on Finance in a Changing World is an annual high-level program convened by Salzburg Global which addresses issues critical to the future of financial markets and global economy in the context of key global trends. 

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In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?
In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?
By: Salzburg Global Seminar 

Report from the Public Sector Strategy Round Table addresses constraints and opportunities for the sector's future

Rapid global transformations place governments under intense pressure to perform to ever-higher expectations at a time of shrinking public budgets. Populations are aging, countries are urbanizing, and technology is transforming the future of work. Many citizens have lost trust in the ability of public officials to cope – let alone to excel – under these changing dynamics and constant media scrutiny.

How can governments transform their culture and operations to address such challenges and disruptions? What radical changes lie ahead for the design, delivery and funding of core public services? What is the role of government in helping to change mindsets and prepare citizens for the “new normal”?

It was these questions and more that a high-level group of politicians, civil servants, and private sector experts came together in Salzburg to answer at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table. The report from this session - In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics? - is now available to read, download and share. 

The report addresses three key concerns raised by the participants:

Urgency

The dramatic pace of change and the growing number of disruptive influences are creating a situation wherein governments need to be prepared for challenges they do not yet understand or even know will exist. Three particular areas of unknowns with which governments are grappling are future-proofing societies for changes to jobs and skills; harnessing advances in technology to deliver public services more effectively; and increasing tax revenues from new forms of economic activity.

Trust

Levels of trust in government institutions and elected officials have dropped to unprecedented lows, restricting the public sector’s ability to innovate and take risks with new approaches. A shrinking tax base, combined with rising expectations from citizens and the need to balance demands for greater transparency with effective communication techniques are putting on a strain on states’ ability to uphold their end of the social contract.

Complexity

Finally, the public sector must employ a complex array of responses and strategies to cope with this environment, whether through adapting internal structures, undertaking large-scale efficiency reviews, establishing new external partnerships or experimenting with new policy intervention approaches. 

Interviews

The report also includes several interview features, offering participants' insights on private sector innovation and risk-taking in the public sector, e-governance in Estonia, peace-building priorities in Colombia, and the need to "humanize" governments. All these interviews and more can also all be read on the session page.

Looking ahead

The intensive two-day session concluded with an agreement to transform the Round Table into a more formalized Public Sector Strategy Network. The Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court, Salzburg Global Seminar, apolitical, and other partners are now taking the next steps to develop the terms of reference for the Network. You can read more about the plans for this new Network in the report. 

Inquiries about how to become a member of this new Public Sector Strategy Network should be directed to Salzburg Global Program Director, Charles E. Ehrlich: cehrlich[at]SalzburgGlobal.org

Read the report online.

Download the Report as a PDF.

Order a print copy: press[at]SalzburgGlobal.org


Salzburg Global Seminar convened the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table – “In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?” - in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House. More information on the session can be found here.

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Third Salzburg Global Session on Corporate Governance Reflects on the Need for Courage
Participants of Session 582 - The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?Participants of Session 582 - The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?
Third Salzburg Global Session on Corporate Governance Reflects on the Need for Courage
By: Mirva Villa 

Corporate leaders and executives explore range of issues in plenary sessions and break-out groups

What does it take to be a courageous director? That’s the question participants of the third Salzburg Global session on corporate governance sought to answer earlier this week.

Around 40 corporate leaders and executives convened at Schloss Leopoldskron, in Salzburg, Austria, to take part in Session 582 – The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit?

In a series of plenary discussions, participants explored topics such as the corporation as a good citizen and the role of shareholders. Smaller break-out groups saw participants discuss their views in further detail.

Navigating between long-term and short-term goals, meeting shareholders’ expectations, and maintaining corporate responsibility requires certain attributes from directors: the courage to ask difficult questions, a high level of alertness, and the confidence to tackle issues head-on.

During discussions, participants reflected on issues such as sustainability and diversity and agreed both were important constituents in their own right. Some argued corporations inherently hold an ethical responsibility, which sometimes means risks have to be taken. 

One participant highlighted electric car manufacturer Tesla as a shining example of a risk-taker which has shown signs of success despite initial uncertainty around the venture.

Ahead of the session, participants were divided into groups to research three timely case studies: The Volkswagen emissions scandal, the fake accounts scandal at Wells Fargo, and the Google anti-diversity memo.

During the three-day program, break-out sessions took place for each case study to be reviewed.

The group discussing the case of fake client accounts at Wells Fargo concluded there were no proper control functions in the company.

While the board may not have been aware of what was happening, participants thought they should have been responsible for requesting adequate and transparent reporting on the sales results.

The board should understand why a certain product is doing well. “If you’re outperforming your competitors, it should be a yellow flag (if not red),” one of the participants commented.

The group discussing Volkswagen’s falsified emission results drew similarities between their case and the Wells Fargo case study.

Participants suggested Volkswagen’s “authoritarian culture” –  with a very heavy sales pressure on low-level employees –  resulted in a lack of trust in verification and ethics. Participants suggested this materialized in the attempt to sell in the U.S. at any cost.

The group said Volkswagen needed a culture of compliance, one that started from the top down in order for change to happen as it is boards rather than people at the bottom who hold the cards.

Rules and regulations are in place for a reason, but there must be a willingness to apply them.

The final case study participants explored concerned the Google anti-diversity memo and asked participants how they would have responded to the memo.

The break-out group who looked at the incident said there was a “missed opportunity” for Google to talk about the value of free expression but also the importance of diversity and why the memo was not well reasoned.

During the group’s discussions, one participant suggested Google’s response and the manner in which the incident was handled had failed to reassure anyone.

On the final day of the three-day program, participants made suggestions for topics to be covered in future sessions.

A wider discussion on the best practices for a board, including bringing in positive role models to talk about their experience, were seen as important steps moving forward.

The impact of technological transformation and effective ways for corporations to be “good citizens” and carry their social responsibility in a globalizing world were also seen as useful discussion topics.

One participant suggested markets aren’t created to be fair, so it can’t be left to the markets to create fairness. Corporate governance will continue to require business leaders to adapt to new challenges. The next generation of directors will need the courage to learn, question, and innovate in the face of obstacles that come their way.


The Salzburg Global program The Courageous Director: Can Corporations Better Serve People, Planet, and Profit? is part of the multi-year series, the Salzburg Global Forum on Corporate Governance. The session is being supported by Shearman & Sterling LLP, BNY Mellon, UBS, Barclays, CLP Group, Goldman Sachs, and Teledyne Technologies. More information on the session can be found here.

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Asif Efrat – The New U.S. Administration Has Shown Less Interest in International Cooperation
Asif Efrat at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies AssociationAsif Efrat at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association
Asif Efrat – The New U.S. Administration Has Shown Less Interest in International Cooperation
By: Mirva Villa 

Israeli professor reflects on efforts to stop transnational crime and explains how US justice system is seen from abroad

In 2010, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published a report on “The Globalization of Crime.” The report examined 16 crime problems, 13 of which were deemed intercontinental. An extract from the report’s conclusion reads: “From a global perspective, national or even regional efforts made in isolation can be worse than ineffective, they can be counterproductive, as the problem is pushed from regions that pose resistance to those that do not, or cannot.” More can be achieved from working together than by working alone.

The buzzword of the time, however, is “sovereignty” – something which does not align well with international cooperation. That’s the view of Asif Efrat, an associate professor of government at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), in Herzliya, Israel. He spoke to Salzburg Global while attending the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA).

At various points in recent history, the United States has been considered the world policeman but rhetoric expressed by President Donald Trump during his election campaign and first months in office have prompted many people question whether this role would change. What effect might this have on the efforts to limit transnational crime?

Efrat, author of Governing Guns, Preventing Plunder: International Cooperation Against Illicit Trade believes it will take time for the implications to reveal themselves. Commenting in general, however, he said, “This administration has signaled that it has less interest in international cooperation .”

In his book, Efrat focuses on the illicit arms trade, the trade in looted antiquities, and human trafficking. He said, “There are some people who say that globalization has a ‘dark side’: the rise of global crime. This is one of the undesired side effects of globalization and in the recent years, governments have been trying to work together to try and address problems of transnational crime. These efforts of suppressing transnational crime are the center of my analysis.”

Since taking office, despite his rhetoric on the campaign trail, President Trump has reaffirmed the US’s commitment to NATO. He also made his first address at the UN general assembly where he said countries must “work together and confront together” others who threaten with chaos, turmoil, and terror. On both occasions, however, Trump also referred to the cost burdens the US has carried. The  concern remains that diminishing international cooperation is still a possibility. The picture remains unclear.

Most of the international initiatives against international crime have been led by the US, says Efrat. If there is less leadership shown from the US, Efrat believes this will not bode well for international cooperation in general. “The international regime against drugs has been led by the United States since the beginning of the early 20th century. International efforts against money laundering, international efforts against human trafficking – these are all American initiatives. [They are] very important American initiatives in my view, and I’m concerned that the new administration has much less interest in international cooperation.”

The US justice system as seen from abroad

In addition to assessing the international role and responsibilities of the US, this year’s symposium – Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration – saw participants reflect on the US justice system in several ways. There were rich discussions around issues of legal rights, immigration policy and discrimination, and changes in policy over the past seven decades. During the symposium, Efrat led a small group discussion on how the US justice system was perceived from abroad, drawing on his current research examining ethnocentric views on legal standards and justice. In his work, Efrat examines how countries view foreign legal systems and the extent they are willing to cooperate with them.

The US justice system is not looked upon favorably by other countries, Efrat has found: “There are various attributes of American justice that are seen as completely unjust to foreign audiences. One is the very harsh American attitude towards criminal justice.

“The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world… America locks up many people for very long periods of time. American sentencing policies are seen as very unjust.”

Efrat said the use of juries during trials also raised eyebrows among foreign audiences. He said, “For Americans, a trial by jury is the ultimate expression of justice: you’re being tried by your peers. But for foreign audiences, juries are sometimes the exact opposite of justice .” In many countries, a judge or panel of judges decide the guilt of a defendant – seen as some non-Americans as fairer than a jury of non-professionals.

Salzburg Global spoke to Efrat the day after the symposium’s keynote presentation was given by Elaine T. May, Regents professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota. The talk was titled “The American Dream and the Quest for Security – the Promise and the Perils.” Reflecting on the keynote, Erat says, “It identified this kind of broad theme of fear in American society, and the interests that are driving this fear. It helped to put the current administration – the current mood in the United States – into a broader perspective, and I think this is one of the nice things about this seminar.”

“We tend to think of our times as very unique, and very special, but you can see that this is actually part of a much broader historical trend.”


Asif Erat was a participant of the Salzburg Global session Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration, which is part of Salzburg Global’s multi-year series Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA). More information on the session can be found here. You can follow all of the discussions on Twitter by following the hashtag #SSASA.

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Judge Nancy Gertner - "Lawyers Should Effect Social Change"
Judge Nancy Gertner in conversation at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA)Judge Nancy Gertner in conversation at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA)
Judge Nancy Gertner - "Lawyers Should Effect Social Change"
By: Mirva Villa 

Former U.S. federal judge reveals love of public policy issues and new details on her latest book

Known for her work in advancing civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights in the United States (U.S), Judge Nancy Gertner remains a trailblazer for women working in the legal profession. Her work, first as a criminal defense lawyer and later a federal judge, received many acknowledgements from her peers, not least the American Bar Association who awarded her the Thurgood Marshall Award in 2008.

Her appearance at the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association was a perfect fit for the program’s topic – Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration. Alongside others, the now retired Judge Gertner spent five days discussing issues of justice, discrimination, criminal law and legal rights. For Gertner, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, the experience was “remarkable.”

“When I came, I had only read the biographies of the people who were invited – both the other participants and the seminar leaders – and I don’t think I fully understood how accomplished, cosmopolitan and interesting they were,” said Gertner. “So, the ability to talk to people and get a sense of the depth of their background was wonderful.”

Gertner has had an extensive career in the legal profession and has written widely about employment, criminal justice and procedural issues. But what was the original spark that inspired Gertner to enter the profession in the first place?

“Well, I think I wanted to run for president of the United States. Then I figured that you had to be a lawyer in order to get to be a senator first. I got stuck at the first stage!” Gertner laughed. “But you know, I love public policy issues. I went to law school at the time that the civil rights movement was at its height, and women's movement, and anti-war movement –  and lawyers were the vehicle for social change. So that's how I became interested in it.”

Mass incarceration was one of the issues that was discussed at this year’s SSASA symposium. Toward the end of 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union reported more than 2.2 million people in the U.S. were behind bars. Gertner spoke to participants about mass incarceration and the structures in the justice system that had exacerbated it.

“For a 100 years, the principal purpose of sentencing was rehabilitation. Rehabilitation was essentially using a medical model to deal with crime. Other kinds of professions also went through this. The judge was looking for a cure. The belief was that everyone could be cured, and the idea was that he would come up with ways of solving the crime in a way: not just finding the perpetrator but solving the criminal - and that judges had virtually unlimited discretion to figure out what the appropriate sentence would be.”

Things changed in the 1980s, due to a whole host of factors. There was a spike in the crime statistics and the implications of the Vietnam War stayed in the American people’s minds. The public were concerned about discrimination in sentencing and the discretion of judges to cast sentences. The media became increasingly focused on covering crime. Toward the end of the decade, the phrase “If it bleeds, it leads” appeared in the lexicon and became a mantra for many.

“Suddenly, we essentially rejected rehabilitation as a rationale for sentencing, and moved to retribution,” said Gertner. “So, rehabilitation asks, ‘What will help the offender not offend anymore?’ Retribution asks, ‘What does the crime deserve?’ So, it was a very different question and it led to different answers, and the answer is that retribution led to mass incarceration.”

The concern over the discretion of judges and inconsistencies between sentences issued across the U.S. led to the creation of a set of guidelines that provided objective standards for sentencing. “That essentially is to wish there was no judgment, no discretion.  So, you focused on the nature of the crime, and you focused on the nature of someone's criminal record,” said Gertner.

That would, for example, lead to drug-related cases being judged on the basis of the quantity of the substance and past convictions alone, with no regard to the individual’s situation and the judge’s discretion on whether they thought the accused was likely to re-offend.

Gertner said, “You focused on objective factors that [some] believed could be objectively enforced. Of course that wasn't true. Those objective factors were often the product of decisions made by others down the line, which we're not so objective.”

In 2011, Gertner published her memoirs, fittingly entitled In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate. Now, she’s working on another book about judging –  not an aspirational one but one on the "hard work of judging." More specifically, she will be reflecting on her own experiences as a judge, working in a system that she didn’t always deem to be fair.

For her book, Gertner reached out to some of the people she had sentenced to find out what happened to them. “I found it easiest to write about the people I had sentenced because that was a situation in which I was most acutely aware of the difference between my beliefs and what the law required,” Gertner said. “I was obliged to impose mandatory minimum sentences. I was obliged to use mandatory guidelines. And I felt the difference between what I was obliged to do and what I believed in all the time. So, this book is about the men that I sentenced.”

The book paints the portraits of several men, who they were, what Gertner learned about them and the legal framework she had to use to evaluate them. Moreover, the book discusses how they should have been sentenced in a “humane system”, according to Gertner. “These are portraits that will help us understand how punitive and inhumane the system became.”

Gertner was appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. Since retiring in 2011, she has continued to teach subjects including criminal law, criminal procedure, forensic science and sentencing, and has written about women’s issues around the world. Whether she’s in the court room, the lecture hall or writing her book, her work continues to be a source of inspiration for Gertner.

“I believe that lawyers should effect social change. That's what animates me as a lawyer, as a judge, as a professor. These are remarkable tools and a remarkable education that should be used to serve the public good.”


Judge Nancy Gertner was a participant of the Salzburg Global program Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration, which is part of Salzburg Global’s multi-year series Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA). More information on the session can be found here. You can follow all of the discussions on Twitter by following the hashtag #SSASA.

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Dreamscape – Exploring Race and Justice in America
Rickerby Hinds at the Salzburg Seminar for American Studies AssociationRickerby Hinds at the Salzburg Seminar for American Studies Association
Dreamscape – Exploring Race and Justice in America
By: Mirva Villa 

Rickerby Hinds brings award-winning play to Schloss Leopoldskron for SSASA 15

Ahead of the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA), participants were warned to expect a “highly participatory” four-day program. Daily thematic presentations, plenary discussions, and panels on topical issues were all designed for participants to debate life and justice in the US. at a theoretical and analytical level. A special performance of Rickerby Hinds’Dreamscape in Schloss Leopoldskron’s Great Hall midway through the program helped bring these issues further to life.

The play depicts the final moments of a young African-American woman shot by the police while sleeping in her car. Mixing the elements of beat-boxing, hip hop, dance and poetry, the award-winning performance tells the life story of Myiesha Mills, who dreams through the impact of the 12 bullets that kill her. The play is a meditation and reimagining of the shooting of Tyisha Miller in 1998 in Riverside, California.

Hinds, the writer and director behind Dreamscape, revealed the incident inspired him to tell a wider story. “In 2004, I decided to write a play that would address that issue of the relationship between the African-American community and the police,” Hinds said.

“I went back to the Tyisha Miller incident and decided that this will be a good vehicle for exploring this issue, for a couple of reasons. One, because she was a young woman, and two, because there was enough information for there to be a dramatic exploration of the relationship, so it wasn’t so black and white. There were gray areas to allow the conversation to be a little more nuanced.”

 

Prior to the performance, participants at this year’s SSASA symposium had already begun to reflect on legal rights, justice, and racial issues in the US. The fact Dreamscape was performed at a symposium discussing the very issues his play was addressing made Hinds a “little bit more nervous than usual.”

Hinds said, “As the director, you’re always thinking about how the play would land on your audience who have studied these issues, who are scholars and experts on the field. Plus, we had met our audience, so we knew them! It’s very unusual!”

Dreamscape’s current cast includes Natali Micciche and John “Faahz” Merchant. Both have been performing the show for about five years, both in the US and abroad.

Discussing her performance as Myiesha, Micciche said: “It was absolutely beautiful. It was a great interlude, sitting in the presentations, talking about this subject and the topics, and then [to] go and perform, because the energy is heightened around the subject and everybody is fully invested.

“The reception was great. It’s more than I could ask for. It’s always moving. In a space where I can see the audience it’s super effective because you watch people and their emotions. Afterwards it was just great to hear feedback on my movement and my artistry.”

Merchant, who played the role of a police officer and a dispassionate coroner, incorporated his beat-boxing talents to help create the play’s unique soundscape. “It was probably one of the most exciting and exhilarating feelings,” Merchant said. He added it was great to see their work transcend across different audiences – even 6,000 miles away from home.

“It’s a great feeling because it means that our work over the past years has been doing what it’s supposed to do.”
 


The Salzburg Global program Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration is part of Salzburg Global’s multi-year series Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA). More information on the session can be found here. You can follow all of the discussions on Twitter by following the hashtag #SSASA.

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SSASA Symposium Reflects on Implications and Global Reactions to Trump Administration
Participants and faculty members who attended the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association
SSASA Symposium Reflects on Implications and Global Reactions to Trump Administration
By: Salzburg Global Seminar 

15th symposium focusing on life and justice in U.S. reaches a conclusion

Academics, legal profession representatives, and others working to protect and improve life in the U.S. have considered the implications and global reactions to the new U.S. administration.

The conversations took place on the final day of the 15th symposium of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA), which took place at Schloss Leopoldskron. 

This year's program - Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration - included presentations and conversations on racial issues, immigration, populism, wealth, media, legal rights, civil rights, and criminal law. 

These issues, which will be covered further by Salzburg Global in the coming days, were considered alongside a broader topic of what "the American Dream" means in today's world, whether it still exists, and what this dream represents. 

The program was split into three themes: 70 years of trends and events; quality of life and opportunity; and fairness and justice.

In the last presentation of the session, three speakers provided comments on President Donald Trump’s administration before taking questions from the audience.

Participants heard from one speaker that U.S. prosperity was partially dependent on the Asia-Pacific region and political relations had improved under President Barack Obama, particularly in Myanmar and Vietnam.

The same speaker said President Trump’s win had come as a shock to many in Southeast Asia and countries in the region were now looking forward to see how the U.S. maintains its commitment to the region.

Anne Mørk, an assistant professor of American history at the University of Southern Denmark, said when one looks at the rhetorical presidency theory, it is no surprise President Trump won the election.

Trump has used social media to communicate with the public. When he makes statements on Twitter, he is speaking to his followers without a filter. Mørk described the role of the president in the 19th century as that of a manager - a role she believes President Trump appears to have little interest playing.

Mørk suggested President Trump’s “angry” and “macho” rhetoric almost became a form of entertainment similar to wrestling. She concluded by suggesting the rhetoric had become a policy in itself.

Alex Seago, dean of communications, arts and social sciences at Richmond, The American International University in London, said he pursued American studies because he was enamored by the country and culture. Seago, who’s also a professor of cultural studies, suggested President Trump was making a deliberate attempt to undermine America’s soft power. 

While “the American Dream” may still exist, Seago believes the U.S. has become less attractive to people. He later said the U.S. had a global image of a nation acting as a leading light for people to follow. This image showed the U.S as democratic and a country which gave people opportunities. However, the sense of “you can do anything if you work hard” is a lot less apparent now. 

In his concluding remarks, Ron Clifton, chair of the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA), said two things had really struck him during this year’s program – one being how fairness and justice can depend on factors such as social status and race. The other thing which he felt was left to consider were the implications of the changes underway in the U.S., especially under the new administration.

He said, “I like the phrase that [a participant] just came up with which is, “At this moment it would seem to me that America is looking less good.” The question is what does that imply for the future and when and where will the turn occur? Of course, being an American, we are optimistic and hopeful, we have a burden to carry and that burden we carry is to make things better and to invite people to join in with us and progress.”


The Salzburg Global program Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration is part of Salzburg Global’s multi-year series Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA). More information on the session can be found here. You can follow all of the discussions on Twitter by following the hashtag #SSASA.

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John Edge - Change Will Not Occur in Public Sector Services Without Everybody Being Involved
John Edge at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round TableJohn Edge at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table
John Edge - Change Will Not Occur in Public Sector Services Without Everybody Being Involved
By: Oscar Tollast 

Co-founder and chairman of ID2020 discusses bringing an entrepreneurial perspective to public sector discussions

John Edge, the co-founder, and chairman of a public-private partnership called ID2020, came to Salzburg Global Seminar to provide an entrepreneur’s perspective to the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table - In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel under Changing Dynamics? At the Session, Edge wanted to explore the opportunities for applying private sector innovation, entrepreneurial strategies and tactics to public sector transformation.

In Edge’s mind, the public sector “by nature” does not transform as quickly as the private sector. Speaking to Salzburg Global prior to the Session, he said, “There are very good questions to why that’s the case… One of the challenges is how do you explain to your public that you have taken a risk and failed? [The way] the public sector can and do breakthrough transformation is inhibited by [its] ability to take risks.”

If the public sector is unable to take risks, it is unable to change quickly. One way to resolve this, according to Edge, is to look at how new public-private organizations could be created, which take on the requirements of the public sector’s mission but also have the ability to take risks in the way a private sector company does. As things stand, Edge said the compensation models within the public sector do not incentivize risk taking.  

As governments come to terms with the rapid pace of the digital revolution, Edge put forward an alternative proposal: “You look at it and go, ‘Well, everyone’s got a mobile phone in their hand – give or take – so that’s infrastructure that’s already out there. So, why do we have to go through the government to get new services?’ Maybe we should be building new services that citizens want and asking the government to integrate or let those services run in a free market. It’s a very good question.”

Edge said he had asked himself what the role of government was and, for the time being, had settled on an answer from the Greek philosopher Plato: “Plato goes with [the theory that] the government’s job is the distribution of scarce resources. That’s about as good as I’ve found. That can make perfect sense to me. If you’ve got a population and you only have a limited amount of resources, then if it is the strongest resource, you’re going to have a tale of the weak who get nothing and that creates inequality in society. Inequality in society creates problems. That’s where you end up in war.” Edge said if it came down to the distribution of scarce resources, then the question concerned whether the model of government was up to the distribution of said resources.

Speaking ahead of the Session, Edge discussed what he hoped to learn from his fellow participants. “There’s no substitute for experience,” he said. “It’s important to come to these forums to get an understanding and insight into how the world’s currently working now. It’s all good and well to come up with a model for change but if you don’t have context on what’s going on in the current environment then you won’t get effective outcomes.”

Recently, Edge has been working with the U.K. government through a private sector start-up, which has built a system for the distribution of digital cash. Commenting on this project, Edge said, “That is at a fraction of the cost. It’s more accessible and provides better services for citizens. That is a good example of building a new way of doing things using digital technologies.” By doing something new and efficient, you are affecting something older and less efficient, Edge believes, adding that the challenge of improving the public sector is to make the incumbent people feel incentivized to make it happen.

In his position at ID2020, Edge is looking to solve a problem that affects more than one billion people – the lack of an official recognized identity, which is especially vital for accessing online public services. He said, “I founded ID2020 because I saw a technology emerging – or a set of technologies emerging – that indicated they could be very useful in the provision of identities for vulnerable children – specifically stateless vulnerable children. The idea that if you happen to be not born in a state, how do you get a birth certificate when there’s no one to issue it to you? Yet, if you look at refugee camps, everybody’s got a phone. If everybody’s got a phone but no one’s got a birth certificate, there’s something in that.”

With ID2020, Edge hypothesized creating an alliance similar to Gavi – the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations. He said, “If we have 1.2 billion people without [an official] identity, the chances are that the current way of doing things has a problem. [We’re] creating a specific organization to look at improving the efficiency of a public sector gathering of organizations to get a better outcome. Gavi has proven it – and there are a number of others – and that’s what ID2020 is aiming to do for identity.”

In addition to his work with ID2020, Edge is the co-chair and founder of the Whitechapel Think Tank, through which the Bank of England, the U.K. government, regulators, and the private sector have come together to collaborate on the potential for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Edge said, “The outcome of that was the U.K. managed to establish itself – for a time – the leading player in this space because the government understood it to be a transformative technology quicker than other governments did.” The purpose of the forum was to enable stakeholders to feel comfortable to ask the question: what is this?

Discussing the benefits of these forums involving different sectors, Edge said, “I think that it is valuable at the start to make sure that topics don’t get killed. It becomes challenging when you talk about actually getting stuff done because you run straight into the blocks of, ‘Why would we do this? What’s the upside? Why should I take this risk?’”

For the past three years, Edge has been focused on bringing private sector innovation and an entrepreneurial approach to the public sector, something which Edge describes as “darn difficult, to say the least.” However, our approach toward this moving forward is what might make all the difference. He said, “We can either look at it negatively and say society is going to break, or positively in that there’s a whole new model of technology-led services on the way and maybe we could look at what roles the public sector plays and [ask] do they need to be playing all those roles?”

As the Public Sector Strategy Round Table goes forward as the new Public Sector Strategy Network, Salzburg Global Seminar, its partners and Fellows will continue to address these fundamental questions – and develop coherent answers.


John Edge attended the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table – “In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?”. This meeting was convened by Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House. More information on the session can be found here.

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Wanja Michuki - Learning Can Be Acquired by Bringing Different Sets of Actors Together
Wanja Michuki at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round TableWanja Michuki at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table
Wanja Michuki - Learning Can Be Acquired by Bringing Different Sets of Actors Together
By: Oscar Tollast 

Business coach reflects on lessons she learned at sixth Public Sector Strategy Round Table and how to apply to her career

Wanja Michuki’s main interest lies in coaching leaders. It’s an interest not too dissimilar to the mission of Salzburg Global Seminar: to challenge current and future leaders to solve issues of global concern. It made her attendance at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table - In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics? - even more appropriate. For two days, the managing director of Be Bold Consulting and Advisory Ltd was one of 28 participants exploring public sector leadership and innovation for national governments.

Michuki, based in Kenya, came to be at Salzburg after a chance meeting with apolitical at the Women in Public Service Project. She said, “This is how I came to be here because apolitical partnered with Salzburg Global Seminar this year in public service. When [Salzburg Global] reached out to me, I said, ‘This is fantastic.’ What a relevant conversation to what I had now also extended into my business, which is coaching.”

Be Bold Consulting and Advisory Ltd is an independent financial consulting and executive coaching firm based in Nairobi. Fulfillment has a strong influence on the advice she provides. Michuki said, “I strongly believe that if you live life on purpose, if you are clear about your values, and you make decisions that are congruent with your values, and this defines your purpose, what it is that you do and also brings purpose, then you are fulfilled in what you do, which is your experience in the time that you are here.”

In Michuki’s opinion, a lot of executive leaders are not thinking about their values. She said, “There are a lot of things then that can take place where people are just so focused on the outcome that it’s not like, ‘What’s my value in this process? What are my values?’” Michuki indicated at a time where complex environments are prevalent - both at a local and global level - it is even more important for people to be clear about their values so they are able to navigate through the challenges that come their way.

“Something that’s been emphasized here is the importance of collaboration across sectors that may not seem to be related – that the learning [which] can be acquired through just bringing together different sets of actors is huge,” said Michuki. Other participants, who highlighted their experiences and provided anecdotes for people to learn from, had a “very profound impact” on Michuki. She said, “For me, it was a mind shift about the level of complexity that we’re dealing with. It’s globally but it’s everywhere because we’re so interconnected.”

During the session, Michuki and others were challenged about the future we might be stepping into. It’s something she’ll have to consider when dealing with her clients and the advice she provides. She said, “What I’m taking away - and something that I’m going to reflect on a little bit more - is how to present these issues in front of decision-makers and manage the anxiety that these issues [bring].

“This will be part of my coaching journey with the people that I work with. It raises a lot of internal fear. How do you deal with these issues? Presenting these issues - also presenting the fact that there are these types of forums for people to work through these issues - I think that’s what I’m going to be taking back.”

Michuki has had a varied career. She is a former trade, investment, and multilateral diplomat, having served in the government of Kenya for six years. Before this, she was an entrepreneur in New York City, where she founded and ran The Highland Tea Company. Her career began in finance and led her to work for Barclays and Merrill Lynch. During this time, she became a chartered financial analyst. When asked whether this was the career path she expected to follow when at school, she replied, “Definitely not,” before laughing to herself. She added, “It’s interesting. I sort of look at where I am now in my journey and everything that I’ve done before makes sense.”

While Michuki’s main interest is to coach leaders, she’s inspired by the belief to make a positive difference. She said, “It’s knowing that I’m using the best of my skills in what I do. I’m using the best of my skills. What I’ve also learned is that it’s important for me to enjoy what I’m doing. Where I am now, I’ve gone through so many experiences - both positive and negative - to sort of have clarity around that to know what my values are. Just coming back to, again, that, ‘Why is coaching also important to me?’ I know what my values are. I have a sense of purpose. It gives my life fantastic meaning. I’m fulfilled.” 


Wanja Michuki attended the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table – “In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?”. This meeting was convened by Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House. More information on the session can be found here.

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Nitika Agarwal - Public Sector Challenges Are a Web of Interconnected Issues
Nitika Agarwal in conversation at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round TableNitika Agarwal in conversation at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table
Nitika Agarwal - Public Sector Challenges Are a Web of Interconnected Issues
By: Oscar Tollast 

apolitical’s chief operating officer explains her role and hopes for Public Sector Strategy Round Table

In her role as apolitical’s chief operating officer, Nitika Agarwal has a special focus on growth through partnerships. Her responsibilities include thinking about how the platform and its network can best serve public servants all over the world. As a participant of the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table - In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics? - Agarwal was provided the opportunity to speak to these officials face-to-face and make observations on how to reach better solutions.

Speaking to Salzburg Global during the session, Agarwal recognized the value of having different voices represented. She said, “This is a very unique forum where it is grounded in the belief that exchanges between peers - across different sectors - but working toward common public sector challenges are valuable and can lead to change in the public sector.”

Agarwal believes there are many dimensions that need to be taken into account when thinking about a specific problem, which really highlights the complexity of the challenges facing the public sector. Reflecting on the conversations between participants, she said, “It really reinforces the point that you can’t think about these things in a silo because public sector challenges are essentially a web of interconnected issues.”

When asked what these challenges included, Agarwal replied, “Where do you start?” She mentioned the changing nature of work, expanding populations, and climate change as examples but refrained from listing them all. She said, “What is fundamental to addressing any of those [challenges] is the capability of the public sector and its capability to change, and that is one of the most difficult things in organizations which have been established for so long.” Once you implement change management in an organization, then you can begin to tackle everything else.

Ahead of the two-day program, Agarwal said she was looking for a set of valuable and enduring connections with people who were trying to tackle many of the same challenges apolitical is thinking about. Midway through the session, she told Salzburg Global, “It’s been completely fascinating to see what people get when they’re in a room of peers coming from diverse backgrounds because it is really instructive in helping us figure out how we can continue to serve those needs beyond a two-day seminar.”

Before joining apolitical, Agarwal served as a senior policy advisor at the UK Treasury where she performed a number of roles. This included advising ministers on financial sector reform and EU budget issues. She also represented the UK in EU negotiations and acted as chief of staff for the UK Ambassador to the European Union in Brussels.

Commenting on her career path, Agarwal said, “I was kind of obsessed with the issues of social justice from a very young age, which drove me to really want to understand the systems which drive certain outcomes, which sometimes feel very unfair. That led me to work in governments to try and understand how that works. How do you run a country?

“Having been in government for several years, I realized that so many other sectors have their place to play in the overall ecosystem of creating change and felt that if I was to understand how change is driven across all of those sectors, I needed to be part of it in another place. That’s what led me to apolitical, which is really thinking about how to facilitate the collaboration between sectors to help systemic change happen.” 


Nitika Agarwal attended the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table – “In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?”. This meeting was convened by Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House. More information on the session can be found here.

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Mona Hammami - We Hope to Establish a Public Sector Network
Mona Hammani at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round TableMona Hammani at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table
Mona Hammami - We Hope to Establish a Public Sector Network
By: Nicole Bogart and Oscar Tollast 

Director from the office of strategic affairs at the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court discusses future of Public Sector Strategy Round Table

Mona Hammami returned to Salzburg Global Seminar with two objectives in mind. Taking part in the sixth Public Sector Strategy Round Table – In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics? – Hammami sought to establish a network of cross-government entities at the center of governments who had the ability to see different portfolios – and to look for solutions to some of the challenges the government in the United Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi is facing experiencing.

Hammami, a director from the office of strategic affairs at the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court, previously came to Schloss Leopoldskron, the venue for the 2017 Round Table and home of Salzburg Global Seminar, in 2015 for Salzburg Global’s June Board Meeting. It was there that Hammami first became aware of the institution’s potential to act as a host and facilitator.

An agreement was later reached where Salzburg Global, for the first time, would act as a politically and geographically neutral host for a meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table, working in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House.

Here, at the sixth meeting of the Round Table, Hammami and her colleagues searched for further answers on how governments could react to changing dynamics – both on the policy side and on the technical side. Hammami said: “We wanted to be able to get different parties without having preconceived opinions. That is exactly where we are right now, and that’s why we wanted to bring the Round Table here.”

In her position at the office of strategic affairs, Hammami is responsible for analyzing social and economic developments, globally and locally, in addition to drafting publications and white papers to influence policymaking. Discussing the role of the office further, she said, “We’re sort of the executive office in a way. The idea behind the office is that it is an internal consultancy for His Highness that also plays the role of a think-tank, and at the same time, we’re the arm that creates functions and incubates them and let them grow on his behalf.”

During this year’s Round Table, participants discussed policymaking and the machinery of government. Hammami said, “That is a core business for us because we as a government entity are struggling to figure out how we become super agile. How do we transform ourselves to deal with many of these issues?” One area Hammami described as “very, very thin” was higher education. She said, “It’s the one area we’re struggling with – and I think every country is struggling with – but also one which has major effects on many other portfolios such as the future of work.”

While education is core to some of the concerns and challenges being faced, governments are also having to come to terms with the rapid pace of technological change. A citizen’s ability to communicate with, engage with, and criticize their government has completely transformed. Social media enables citizens to express themselves and provides opportunities for governments to receive feedback. Hammami said, “That’s one area we’re grappling a lot with – to what extent to allow this sort of expression which could backfire on you as a government if you open up too much. What is the right level of engagement? What’s the right level of feedback? What’s the right level of listening? That’s another area we see as a government but also: how do we allow for collaboration by using those digital platforms?”

Discussing the next steps for the Public Sector Strategy Round Table, Hammami said, “I think where we go next from here is establishing what we would hope to call – rather than a Public Sector Round Table – a Public Sector Network. [This is a network] we hopefully can expand a bit more but also have some form of commitment from the partners of this for the future, both in terms of the path leadership but also in terms of the ability to partner together cross-borders for bigger causes – helping governments figure out things.”


Mona Hammami attended the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table – “In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?”. This meeting was convened by Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House. More information on the session can be found here.

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Lisa Witter - The More We Humanize Governments, the Better We Will Be at Supporting Them
Lisa Witter at the sixth Public Sector Strategy Round TableLisa Witter at the sixth Public Sector Strategy Round Table
Lisa Witter - The More We Humanize Governments, the Better We Will Be at Supporting Them
By: Oscar Tollast 

Co-founder and executive chairman of apolitical discusses role of platform and bringing together different public servants

At a time when challenges for governments – and the complexities surrounding them – appear to be growing exponentially, one could be forgiven for being wary or overawed when deciding where to begin to solve them. This does not apply to Lisa Witter, co-founder and executive chairman of apolitical. Indeed, it is something she thrives on. Attending the sixth Public Sector Strategy Round Table – In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics? – she told Salzburg Global, “I’m a bit epicurean in that I really try to enjoy everything I do. I think one thing I’m really committed to is enjoying it when it is hard as well, which is something I think I share as a former person working in government. I like the hard stuff.”

At apolitical, Witter and her team look to serve people in government, find ways to solve problems faster and bring people together from all over the world. Apolitical provides an online platform for public servants to find ideas, people, and partners to solve the hardest challenges facing our societies. Witter said, “We are trying to bring a bit of a different sensibility – trying to bring both behavioral science and the best of technology to solving problems. It’s happened in every other sector from TripAdvisor for travel, from Bloomberg terminals for finance, so why shouldn’t that same peer-to-peer beautiful technology platform happen for the public sector?”

Designing apolitical involved asking potential users what they needed and what they thought the platform should look like. Witter said, “Some of the things they asked us [included], ‘Make it beautiful and more delightful.’ ‘Make it simple and really easy to use.’ ‘Make it look and feel like news so that it has a sense of urgency and salience.’ ‘Tell me how long it is going to take to read it.’ ‘Help me connect to the people behind it.’” Witter said apolitical wasn’t in the habit of building silos, and the technology has enabled them to show how policies connect and impact different parts of people’s lives. This, in turn, improves policymaking.

Apolitical first became involved with the Public Sector Strategy Round Table in 2016. It has invited people from around the world to take part in the conversation, all of whom keen to design an agenda to meet the needs of governments. It has used its online platform to share ideas and allow participants to remain connected. Witter said, “We also offer them what we call a concierge service. We support them by answering questions around policy like, ‘I need to find someone who’s an expert in blockchain and government.’ Or one question last year was, ‘What other governments are using cloud computing?’ We were able to connect them to someone else so their governments can consider it.”

In line with this, Witter describes apolitical as “bridge builders with impact” – something which is not just connecting one-to-one, but something which is connecting many to many others. She said, “There are some geopolitical things which I think have made us more prescient between Brexit, Trump, [and] rising populism. People are looking for what’s working – people of all types of political parties. This isn’t just for one party. It’s for everyone.”

Apolitical was recently listed as one of 100 companies considered to have the most potential to influence, change or create new global markets. Witter, however, doesn’t see the platform as disruptive. She said, “We see us as building a platform to help government disrupt itself by being more efficient about finding ideas. You would never in the private sector bring an idea in front of your board or CEO and not have done some due diligence around it. We hope this is both an inspiration platform for people in government but also a due diligence platform that they can find other people and be able to say, ‘Hey, you did that there, we want to do this here. Help me do it.’”

Apolitical has covered more than 800 stories looking at what is happening in different governments. These trends included tech connectivity, intense citizen engagement, big data, policy labs and design thinking, partnership procurement, and behavioral insights. “Partnerships have always been important in government, but we could hear today that as tax dollars go down, and problems get more complex, governments need more and more to partner with the private sector – especially the start-up world,” explained Witter. “Start-ups are often innovating around the edges and that’s where a government is needing partners, which has a whole domino effect on how we do procurement. I definitely brought up this procurement point because I think every country is struggling with procurement.”

Witter said the caliber of people attending the sixth Public Sector Strategy Round Table reflected well on Salzburg Global, but it also reflected well on public service in general. She said, “There’s sort of a feeling that the best and brightest go into business and they don’t go into government but if you were sitting in that room today, you would think the best and brightest went into government, which gives me a sense of relief that we have such smart minds.” Witter said she was hoping to focus much more on the solutions, not just diagnosing the problems.

Every government is at a different place when it comes to innovation. Governments can be better supported, Witter believes, once they are more humanized. She said, “I think the more we humanize government, the better we will be at supporting governments. It’s not the government’s job to solve the problem. We are citizens and we have to be in a collaboration with them to do that.”


Lisa Witter attended the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table – “In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?”. This meeting was convened by Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House. More information on the session can be found here.

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Liis Kasemets - So Many Countries Are Searching for Solutions for Quite Similar Problems
Liis Kasemets on the Schloss Terrace during the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round TableLiis Kasemets on the Schloss Terrace during the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table
Liis Kasemets - So Many Countries Are Searching for Solutions for Quite Similar Problems
By: Nicole Bogart and Oscar Tollast 

Senior advisor on governance at the Government Office of Estonia discusses the digital solutions the Baltic nation is applying to its public sector challenges – and what others can learn from them

When it comes to good governance, Estonia is often held up as an innovative example for other countries to follow. As the e-estonia.com government website declares: “We have built a digital society and so can you.” So it was natural choice that a public sector representative of the small Baltic country be invited to take part in the sixth Public Sector Strategy Round TableIn the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?

That representative was Liis Kasemets, the senior advisor on governance at the Government Office of Estonia. As part of a team, she is responsible for developing and coordinating the system and principles of good governance in the government decision-making process, fostering the quality and openness of policy-making, and encouraging civic engagement and regulatory impact assessment. She said, “Our task is to translate the political agenda into an actionable government program which means that we have to cover quite a lot of issues and try to take into account the longer perspective as well.”

Her main focus, however, is fostering good governance, which includes raising the standard of the policymaking process. She said, “This also [concerns] the broader and longer perspectives, as well as the everyday workings of the government. [This involves] institutionalizing or rooting deeper into everyday workings of the government: the impact analysis, the good engagement practices, and instituting it well into the government decision-making process.” Hearing what other participants had said about long-term issues piqued her interest.

The feeling has been mutual, with other participants equally interested to hear about Estonia’s experiences and its growing reputation for efficiency when it comes to practices in e-governance. Discussing its origins, Kasemets said, “It was, in the beginning, quite a conscious political choice to go along with it. One of the reasons behind it was that we saw a great efficiency gain in that – time-wise and in financial terms. Also, while we do it, we can see greater transparency and openness for the citizen. In this sense, we kind of gain two things at the same time. So, maybe this is one of the reasons why we have stuck to that, trying to develop it further.”

Kasemets said as Estonia’s population is lower than others, the government has been able to interlink and keep the citizens at the center of the work which takes place. She said, “Of course, this remains to be judged by the citizens whether we are good at it or not, but this is something we would strive for. Maybe this is one of the reasons behind this e-governance as well.”

Despite this openness and transparency, Kasemets highlighted a few challenges the government is facing. She said, “One of the main things is that we have a population that is aging and decreasing… Our working population is annually decreasing by one percent. This is quite a noticeable decrease. This is one of the main challenges of how to create a better tomorrow for our citizens. We also have to look at the economy and the prospects for people to really have fulfilling lives to uplift their well-being continuously.” In order to provide good opportunities for its citizens and attract new ideas, Kasemets suggested the Estonian government has to keep up with the pace of development.

During the two-day program, there was an opportunity for a free flow of ideas from people with different backgrounds, a positive outcome noted by many of the participants, including Kasemets. She said, “I think that when you put into a session people with so different backgrounds and so different experiences, this is where we can create innovative or new solutions to the things that we seek solutions for.

“At the moment, globally, so many countries are searching for solutions for quite similar problems. We’re all tackling the same things but how can we do it better. This vibrant environment is very good to seek out whether we can find some of the solutions we can try out.”


Liis Kasemets attended the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table – “In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?”. This meeting was convened by Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House. More information on the session can be found here.

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Paula Acosta - The “Tremendous Challenge” of Implementing Peace, Fighting Fires and Thinking Long-Term
Paula Acosta in conversation at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round TablePaula Acosta in conversation at the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table
Paula Acosta - The “Tremendous Challenge” of Implementing Peace, Fighting Fires and Thinking Long-Term
By: Nicole Bogart and Oscar Tollast 

Director for government and strategic areas in Colombia discusses balancing the challenges facing the public sector after decades of conflict

In June 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest rebel group, signed a ceasefire and disarmament agreement, a forerunner to a peace deal that was later signed in September. This formally brought to an end more than 50 years of armed conflict. One month later, voters were asked whether the peace deal should be approved. In a surprising turn of events, this deal was rejected by the people, some of whom believed the conditions to be too favorable toward FARC. The agreement was revised and signed again in November. In June this year, FARC formally ended their existence as an armed group.

This is one of the myriad challenges the Colombian government has had to face, but the implementation of this agreement is “only one issue,” according to Paula Acosta, director for government and strategic areas in the Office of the Presidency of the Republic of Colombia. Acosta is responsible for monitoring the strategic goals of the president and the cross-cutting coordination of his regional strategic initiatives. While she described the implementation as a “tremendous challenge,” she also recognized there were other areas which required attention.

Acosta made this observation while attending the sixth Public Sector Strategy Round Table – In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics? Speaking to Salzburg Global Seminar during the session, she said, “I believe once you’re in government, you get to focus on the day-to-day. I see this [session] as a great opportunity to actually be able to look a little bit ahead. That’s also part of what public servants are supposed to do. It’s not only attending the fire that’s in front of them.”

The implementation of the peace agreement with FARC has already begun. Acosta said, “The main priority today in Colombia is to actually implement the agreement and to continue with all of the other policies. Although [the peace agreement] is probably the most important issue, it is only one issue. Then you have to keep on governing all of the other sectors and all of the other programs.”

Acosta said this was a “very hard balance” as it presented a question of how you distribute resources. Gaining credibility to the implementation of the agreement is as important as being able to sign the agreement itself. While the implementation began more than seven months ago, Acosta said it was too soon to draw any lessons from the process.

The main focus remains on keeping the government running. Acosta said, “Peace is such a big issue in Colombia. We have this over 50-year conflict, so everyone wants to work in peace, but it’s not the only thing.” Acosta said Colombia’s main cities had faced the “truths of the conflict” for many, many years but the government had to maintain its focus on running all of the other departments. She said, “Finding that balance, it is I think the main challenge that I have to help to coordinate because it is a network for many different parts within the government.”

The discussions at Salzburg Global provided participants the opportunity to hear of similar, and different problems faced by the public sector in other countries.

Acosta said, “There are a number of different countries here but most of the representatives come from very developed countries that pose a set of questions that we usually do not formulate ourselves.”

Remaining part of the network was “the most important thing,” according to Acosta, and to fully understand the consequences and the deep causes of the challenges being faced by the public sector, more time would be needed than just one – albeit very fruitful – weekend in Salzburg.


Paula Acosta attended the sixth meeting of the Public Sector Strategy Round Table – “In the Spotlight: How Can the Public Sector Excel Under Changing Dynamics?”. This meeting was convened by Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court and apolitical, and with the support of Chatham House. More information on the session can be found here.

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