WCFIA FELLOW'S ALUMNI CONFERENCE AND REUNION
- Fellows Program Director Kathleen Molony with former directors Steven Bloomfield and Les Brown at the Fogg dinner. Photo credit: Martha Stewart.
More than one hundred Weatherhead Center
Fellows, spanning several "generations" and
representing nearly forty countries, returned
to Harvard University in late November to participate
in a conference and reunion, the largest
gathering of program alumni to date. Over the
course of three days, Fellows convened in familiar
spots on and near the Harvard campus to join
in celebration of the Weatherhead Center’s 50th
anniversary and, in discussions, to consider "The
Search for Solutions to the World’s Intractable
Problems." Many friends of the Fellows Program,
including former program directors (Les Brown
and Steven Bloomfield), former Center directors
(Jorge I. Domínguez and Joseph S. Nye), and former
Center executive directors (Jim Cooney and
Anne Emerson) participated in the gathering.
The presence of the Center’s first director, Robert
Bowie, was both inspiring and a clear reminder
of the original intent of the Fellows Program, to
foster meaningful and beneficial collaboration
between practitioners and academics.
- At the Fellows' Alumni Conference: Fellows from the class of 2005–2006: Neil Francis, Gayane Afrikian, Reyna Torres Mendivil, and Stephen Clark.
The decision to focus on "intractable" problems
itself generated debate when the topic was
first announced more than a year ago. Several
people noted that intractable problems by definition
are not really solvable, that a discussion
of such problems is mostly an exercise in futility.
We felt, however, that it was precisely our
mission to take advantage of this gathering of Fellows and scholars to discuss some of the most
difficult problems in the world today. Several
roundtables considered a broad array of issues:
immigration and integration; making democracy
work; Islam and the West; our threatened environment;
religion and politics; humanitarian
crises; terrorist threats at home and abroad; and
the widening achievement and technology gap.
Three plenary sessions provided a framework
for the conference. The opening plenary on the
future of multilateralism provided a cautiously
optimistic start: although multilateralism currently
faces considerable challenges, governments
will continue to work with and through
multilateral institutions in the future. A second
plenary on peace and conflict in the Middle
East was somewhat less optimistic. Panelists
addressed the complexities of the region, particularly
with respect to the Israeli–Palestinian
situation, and conceded that peace in the region
was still a long way off. The conference’s final
plenary on twenty–first century globalization
offered a vision of an increasingly integrated
global economy—with significant growth coming
in the future from countries such as China, India,
and Brazil—and also addressed the paradoxes of
globalization.
- At the Fellows’ Alumni Conference: Robert Bowie (Center Director, 1958–1972) and Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate J.
Bryan Hehir converse during a break.
- At the Fellows' Alumni Conference: Robert Rotberg, adjunct professor of public policy, Harvard Kennedy School, and Geert-Hinrich Ahrens (Fellow, 1983–1984) co-chair a roundtable on "Making Democracy Work."
