Last year, we turned the blog’s focus to members of Fletcher’s faculty.  Kicking off the Faculty Spotlight series for 2015 is Antonia H. Chayes, Professor of Practice of International Politics and Law.  Prof. Chayes currently teaches Civil-Military Relations and International Treaty Behavior: A Perspective on Globalization.  Her post is a timely piece that demonstrates how professors can redirect their research focus when world events require.

The news story about hacking Sony Pictures dominated the holiday news.  North Korea, allegedly, with its vast cyber skills, brought a major corporation to a dead halt, and moreover, exposed its seamier corporate life to a public, always voracious for gossip.  President Obama promised a proportionate response — and put blame on Sony for pulling the picture from theaters after North Korea threatened dire consequences if the picture, a silly spoof on CIA assassination efforts in the hands of bumbling journalists, were released.  Sony, and its independent theaters reconsidered, and a limited theater showing was made, accompanied by widespread home availability.  Then North Korea’s internet went down, and it has suffered short spurts of blackout.  The attribution has remained cloudy, and speculation has abounded, including the notion that a Russian group engineered the original Sony cyber exploitation simply to stir up trouble.

Then come the pundits and analysts — is this cyber-terrorism or cybervandalism?  Should this be considered another step toward cyberwar — part of the spreading inkblot of a grey area that is neither peace nor war?  In fact, this is just a minor episode in an ongoing set of cyberattacks and counterattacks throughout the world.  Banking firms have been hacked; cyber espionage from China has caused the U.S. to indict specific members of China’s military (in absentia, of course) for cybercrimes.  Have we forgotten that Estonia was brought to its knees by a cyberattack by the Russian youth group Nashe in 2007 over the removal of a statute of a Soviet soldier from the central square in Talinn?

The United States has spent billions preparing for cyberwar, yet the government lacks control of its critical infrastructure, which is most likely to be the target of an attack.  85-90% of that infrastructure in the United States and Western Europe is in private hands.  The Department of Homeland Security has been anointed to take charge of private infrastructure, and an Executive Order and a Presidential Directive have been the only means to secure support from the private sector.  Several bills were introduced in Congress to legislate minimum standards for private infrastructure, but these were defeated — even the mildest form of regulation.  Thus private industry is expected to do on a voluntary basis what it managed to defeat as a matter of regulation.  Nor it is clear which agency would run the show in a crisis — civilian or military.  The disparity between the Department of Homeland Security, whose 2015 budget request was $1.5 billion, and the combined Cybercommand and NSA, request of $5.1 billion — is enormous.

Both agencies have engaged in real world simulations, and the results have not been exactly transparent.  Some public reports, whose language is rather bland, suggest room for improvement.  And further, U.S. Supreme Court precedents such as the “Steel Seizure” case under President Truman cast a long shadow, should the U.S. government try to seize control of private infrastructure in a crisis.

The problems posed by the whole range of cyber exploitation, from cybercrime to espionage, up to attacks — are international as well as national.  There has been some progress in the NATO alliance — a Center of Excellence in Talinn, reinforcing broad concern over the attack on Estonia in 2007 and the Cyber Defense Management Board, where political, military, operational and technical staff operate at the working-level.  The Talinn manual fits cyber issues into the vast canvas of international law, and is now under revision.  At the NATO summit in Wales, September 2014, NATO announced an enhanced cyber strategy recognizing that a cyber attack might be as harmful as a conventional attack.  It affirmed that cyber defense “is part of NATO’s core task of self defense.” but added that the decision to intervene would be made on a case-by-case basis.  There is a fairly weak EU directive that urges states to take protective measures.

The Budapest convention addresses cybercrime, but in the context of urging state uniformity.  These measures, admittedly weak, represent a beginning of international cooperative action.  Many regional organizations are at similar stages.

At Fletcher, Professor Martel had been working with a group of faculty and students on several Codes of Conduct — for states, corporations, and individuals — at the request of Lincoln Laboratories.  This kind of work is the essence of Fletcher’s interdisciplinary experience.  We must honor Bill’s memory by continuing the work he so cared about.

A Code of Conduct is not yet regulation — it is a pledge of behavior whose aspiration is to change norms.  For those of us participating in the project, we hope to get widespread adoption and will be seeking foundation funding to do so.  Fletcher’s strength in both international law and cyber studies puts us in a good position to move forward.  And my forthcoming book, Borderless Wars: Civil Military Disorder and Legal Uncertainty concludes with a chapter on cyberattacks seeking more robust regulation, stating “Regulation of offensive cyberattacks cannot provide the same level of reassurance that intrusive verification of visible chemical or nuclear weapons production provides.  But the very process of engaging in a widespread international cooperative effort has a deterrent effect, and may reduce, if not eliminate the threat of attack.”

Today’s post comes from Leila Fawaz, Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies.  Prof. Fawaz holds a dual appointment between Fletcher and the Department of History at Tufts.  She currently teaches The Arabs and their Neighbors and War and Society in the Middle East in Historical Perspective.

When I started my teaching career in the early 1980s, I used to tell my students that Turkey was not a Thanksgiving dinner, but a country of great importance.  Today, I do not need to worry about our students knowing where Turkey or other countries of that region are.  The Middle East is at the center of world affairs and every high school student, and certainly any advanced student, knows of its crucial importance to the United States and to the rest of the world.  It is unfortunate that perennial conflicts have triggered much of our current awareness of the interdependence of all parts of the globe, yet I find it deeply rewarding to teach at The Fletcher School, where students and faculty are committed to global awareness, and where we can pursue further knowledge at the highest level of scholarship.

I love Fletcher because of its openness to different viewpoints and its commitment to internationalism.  Faculty and staff are aware that our students, who come from all over the world, are our most prized charge.  Students learn from one another, expose one another to different cultures and ways of thinking, and learn to respect viewpoints that they do not necessarily agree with.  All of us at Fletcher are exposed to diverse cultures on a daily basis and are better teachers, and people, for it.  We, the faculty, come from different disciplines, which adds a rare and important intellectual dimension to our ability to communicate with colleagues who, at other schools and institutions, are dispersed throughout departments and do not have the privilege of working together closely, on a continuous basis, as we do.

Not that I ever thought I would devote my career to education.  I came to the United States in the 1970s to complete my graduate education, as so many people from other countries do, fully expecting to return to my home country of Lebanon.  I never planned to have a career, and there was no pressure on me to get more education.  Very simply, I loved to read and continued to do so until I found myself with the highest degree I could possibly get, a Ph.D.  After that, I discovered that research continued to fascinate me and teaching energized me, so I forged forward, a bit haphazardly, in a wonderful career that brought me many rewards.  The primary reward is the privilege of getting to know students who are as international and as challenging as ours are.

In graduate school, I sometimes thought that what I had to say was not important enough to express loudly, only to hear the student next to me express similar ideas with confidence.  I learned that we cannot wait for perfection to get involved and that the best way to improve oneself and others is to do just that, by following one’s passions.  Do not worry about taking “practical” courses that will improve your career.  Study what you love; you will excel, and then you can learn how to acquire any additional skills you need.  By studying at Fletcher, you’ll learn to follow your passion intellectually in a rich and energizing community, united in its love of the School and its trust in your future.

Returning to our Faculty Spotlight series, today’s post comes from Christopher (Rusty) Tunnard, Professor of Practice of International Business.  Prof. Tunnard currently teaches Field Studies in Global Consulting and  Social Networks in Organizations, a two-part modular course.

What’s the connection between identifying competition and cooperation between Somali warlords, discovering patterns of collaboration in the global arms market (pictured below), finding the right people to help start a business in Tanzania, shaping the media coverage of conflict in Syria, and helping teenaged girls from Islamic countries find ways to connect and to share information on gender-based issues?  Besides being very “Fletcheresque” in their geographic and intellectual breadth, these are all topics that have been tackled by students in my class on Social Networks in Organizations, a course that I have been teaching at Fletcher since 2011.

If you had told me ten years ago that I’d write a doctoral dissertation on the development of resistance networks in Serbia during the Milosevic era using social network analysis (SNA) and would later create courses in this fledgling discipline appropriate for a graduate school of international relations, I might have suggested that you seek professional help.  But that is exactly what I did, and I thank my lucky stars—and my advisors and students—for making it possible for me to undertake this journey.

One of the many fascinating things about SNA is that it is truly multi-disciplinary.  At the annual meeting of SNA practitioners, you’ll find doctors, intelligence and military analysts, mathematicians, physicists, sociologists, business consultants, anthropologists, financial analysts, political scientists, and many more.  Everyone, it seems, is interested in examining how people are connected, how they influence the networks they’re in, and how those networks shape the thinking, behavior, and actions of the individuals who comprise them.  SNA has played a major role in uncovering bin Laden’s location, reducing the spread of AIDS in Africa, and identifying the key players in dodgy financial schemes (starting with the Enron case.)  Although SNA has been around in academia for a few decades, it was a very simple network map of the 9/11 terrorists that rocketed it to prominence.  This map, constructed from open-source data, showed that all the terrorist hijackers were within one step, or directly linked, to two individuals with direct ties to bin Laden, whom the government had been investigating for a year before the attack.

Since 2005, the incredible growth of social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter has redoubled the effort to understand how social networks form and can be used to promote political action (think Twitter and the Egyptian resistance) and increase the effectiveness of viral marketing (think Facebook, Google and Amazon).  Images such as the one pictured here depict how Twitter users disseminate ideas and issues quickly around the world through mentions and retweets.  In this case, it’s a conference hashtag that has, by midday of a full-day session, spread well beyond the core group of conference attendees and followers clustered in the middle.

Two recent developments further illustrate the pervasiveness of SNA.  The Snowden revelations have, for better or worse, led to a wider appreciation of how network analysts can identify potential people of interest by looking at patterns of mobile-phone calls without using any of the content.  Elsewhere, people are using a combination of SNA and sentiment analysis (ranking the relative “temperature” of words used to describe something) to look at both the spread and intensity of ideas in such diverse applications as new-product marketing on social media and identifying potential political hot-spots before they develop, by examining how issues are being discussed and mapping their velocity and geography.

While SNA is only one diagnostic tool in the arsenal of analytic techniques, it is fast becoming a must-have skill for analysts and managers alike.  Its broad appeal may be due to the fact that it employs both left- and right-brain skills first to visualize and then to analyze often counter-intuitive networks of connections that cannot be easily addressed by other means.  And SNA can be done using data that governments, NGOs, and companies already collect.

This is an exciting field to inhabit, both academically and professionally, and Fletcher provides me with the opportunity both to teach this new set of skills and to learn from students whose passions and interests span the entire range of international relations.

This entry in the Faculty Spotlight feature comes from Bhaskar Chakravorti, Fletcher’s Senior Associate Dean of International Business and Finance, and the founding Executive Director of Fletcher’s Institute for Business in the Global Context. He is the author of The Slow Pace of Fast Change.  He currently teaches Strategy and Innovation in the Evolving Context of International Business and Strategic Management, a module offered during the August pre-session attended by all students in the Master of International Business program.  Dean Chakravorti here describes his real-world business education and his perspective on contextual intelligence that resulted.

From 1994 to 1995, I was traveling across Africa, exploring interest among various governments and telecommunications service companies in investment in the continent’s first undersea fiber-optic network.  This would be a breakthrough communication technology, with the power of connecting an excluded and fragmented continent with itself, with the world, and to this newly emerging phenomenon — that none of us quite understood at the time — called the Internet.

Given its economic heft, South Africa was among my first ports of call.  Those were exciting times for the country.  The ANC had just assumed power and Nelson Mandela had made history as the country’s first black president.  The world was suddenly considering how to connect to this hitherto isolated country and embracing a potential economic and political powerhouse.

I made what I thought was a brilliant presentation to senior bureaucrats and technologists.  In my view, I had quite convincingly made the case for South Africa to be the key anchor for a fiber-optic ring that would encircle the continent with branches taking off toward other continents.

Turns out, my case wasn’t as rock solid as I had imagined.  A senior minister took me aside the next day and asked if we could scrap the plans for a ring around Africa and just do a single cable that linked South Africa to …. Malaysia.  That’s it.  Just Malaysia.  But that makes no business sense whatsoever, I protested.  The minister explained that Mandela had visited Malaysia the previous year and had struck up a close friendship with Prime Minister Mahathir.  The two had agreed on cooperation on many fronts.  Most significantly, Malaysia had pledged help in providing voter education to South Africa, a country where nearly 18 million out of the 20 million citizens would cast their ballots for the first time, with half of the 18 million illiterate.  And now, post-election, it was critical that the bonds be strengthened further.

“But consider the economics,” I continued.  “A single link to Malaysia would be frightfully expensive and would not have the traffic to justify it.  You would forgo the chance to connect with the rest of Africa.”

The minister politely, but firmly, let me know that while I seemed smart enough, I was not as clever as I thought I was.  “You do not argue with Nelson Mandela,” he said.

Trained as an economist, this was my first small step toward an appreciation for contextual intelligence.  The linear logic of business and all its analysis could not — and should not — ignore the momentum of emerging geopolitical alliances.  Malaysia was already among the first of South Africa’s allies; there was a stronger relationship to be built.  Mandela had personally asked for this cable as a symbol and a conduit.

Still frustrated, I walked the corridors of South Africa Telkom and ran into the old guard.  These were engineers and network planners; surely, they understood economics and net present value analysis.  I told them my story.  They agreed that the Mandela proposal was nonsense.  What was needed was a fiber-optic link directly connecting South Africa to Northern Europe.  “What about connectivity to the rest of Africa?” I asked.

“Who cares about the rest of Africa?” was the universal opinion.

This was my second lesson in contextual intelligence.  The old guard was all white.  They were frightened about what was going to come next as their secluded reality had come to an end.  While their argument was couched in business terms (after all, Northern Europe was where the business would be), their real reason was history: They desperately wanted a conduit back to the old days and to some semblance of a world that they had known all their lives.  They were ready to make a “business” argument that was, in reality, an agenda that harkened back to a colonial legacy.

Yes, I was there at a true inflection point, armed with the finest analysis possible, elaborate layers of spreadsheets, and well-crafted presentations.  However, real decisions are based on myriad other factors.  In this case, there was, first, a big future envisioned by a master politician — and already a living legend — who could imagine the unimaginable.  And second, there was a past that, while it had become politically irrelevant, still had the technocratic expertise to exert a pull in an opposite direction.  If South Africa was to develop, it could not afford to ignore the technocrats entirely.

I redid the analysis.  We modeled-in the geo-political assumptions, accounted for different connectivity scenarios and their socio-political ramifications as well as economic impact.  We resumed the debate in a more holistic manner.  Context is, indeed, king.  You should embrace it, understand it, and make it central to your business model analysis; most importantly, you should not ignore or fight it.

I have taken this lesson to heart, so much so that I now run Fletcher’s Institute for Business in the Global Context.  Many students arrive at Fletcher with deep life experience that guides their understanding of centrality of context, but they aim to strengthen their business skills.  Others have rich business and technical skills, and they seek to develop their contextual intelligence.  Together, we are building a new approach to international business, one that factors in how business decisions connect with non-business factors, such as politics, history, and the human condition.

Today’s post in our Faculty Spotlight series comes from Joel P. Trachtman, Professor of International Law, who describes his special perspective on his field.  Prof. Trachtman currently teaches International Law in International Relations, International Business Transactions, International Investment Law, International Financial and Fiscal Law, and Legal and Institutional Aspects of International Trade.

I first became interested in international law in 1975, when, as a student at the London School of Economics, I had the opportunity to study with Rosalyn Higgins, who later served as a judge on the World Court.  After my undergraduate studies, I studied international law and then practiced for nine years in New York and in Hong Kong before joining the Fletcher faculty.

It is great to be a law professor at Fletcher, where law is one of several areas of international public policy study.  While the disciplines of history and political science specialize in the study of how and why governments take particular actions, and economics specializes in the study of the consequences of government and private sector actions, law specializes in the implementation and interaction of government policies, and in how businesses interact with governments.

My research has two streams:  (i) economic analysis of international law and (ii) international trade law.

First, I have been one of the early adopters of economic methods in the study of international law.  The field of law and economics has revolutionized legal study during the past 30 years, but it took a bit longer to get to international law.  My 2008 book, The Economic Structure of International Law (Harvard University Press), explored and consolidated some of the ways in which economic analysis helps us to understand the causes and effects of international legal rules, using tools from price theory, public choice, transaction cost economics, and game theory.  I’ve been at Fletcher since 1989, and have now been thoroughly Fletcher-ized, so as to see international public policy and business problems as multidimensional issues, requiring interdisciplinary analysis.  My 2013 book, The Future of International Law: Global Government (Cambridge University Press), extended this way of thinking to look at changes in globalization, democratization, demography, and technology in order to suggest the ways that these changes would result in increasing demands for international legal solutions to international cooperation problems.  That book won the International Studies Association’s prize for best book on international law for 2013.

By placing international law in a social scientific context, I am able to explain it better, and critique it better, in the classroom.  Traditional legal analysis and scholarship looks only for consistency and internal logic.  A social science-based legal scholarship examines more broadly the links between social ends and legal means, and demands intellectual rigor in critiquing legal rules.  For example, my courses in international trade law and international investment law begin with a careful analysis of the economics and political economy, and an analysis of the economic and political roles of law, in these fields.

My second stream of research is international trade law.  This is an area of international law in which economics and politics are extremely important.  One focus of my work within international trade law has been on the relationship between trade liberalization and national regulatory autonomy.  This is the central issue of globalization:  how can we attain greater integration for efficiency, while maintaining the maximum ability to achieve local public policy goals?  I recently wrote a short paper on this topic for inclusion in a book of recommendations for trade ministries on how to proceed in WTO negotiations after the December 2013 Bali Ministerial Conference and the rather modest agreement it produced.  My paper was entitled “Unleashing Recognition in International Trade,” and was included in an e-book entitled Building on Bali: A Work Programme for the WTO, edited by Simon Evenett and Alejandro Jara, former deputy director-general of the World Trade Organization.

I enjoy making the tools of legal analysis and argument available to Fletcher students, and showing how these tools complement and incorporate social scientific and historical argumentation.  Based on my experience revealing and explaining these analytical tools and arguments to students at Fletcher for the past 25 years, I recently published a book that succinctly explains how lawyers analyze and argue.  It is entitled The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win.

The next post in our Faculty Spotlight series comes from Miguel E. Basáñez, adjunct professor and director of the Judiciary Reform Program, who describes his path to Fletcher.  Prof. Basáñez currently teaches Culture, Human Values and Development, in addition to directing the Judiciary Reform Program, which is generally offered in the summer.

Prospective Fletcher students are nearly always afflicted with a severe case of wanderlust, and have usually racked up an impressive record of traveling, working, and studying abroad.  As such, I’m sure that all of you have experienced the collision of different values, beliefs, and ways of life that we call “culture shock.”  My own experiences with culture shock — primarily as a Mexican graduate student in Great Britain in the 1970s — were so powerful that they never left me, and indeed inspired me to make the study of cultural values the basis of my academic career.

After many years in government and running my own public polling firm, I came to Fletcher, where I research human values and teach the seminar “Culture, Human Values and Development.”  In my course, we seek to answer some of the deepest questions around culture: Is it even possible to talk about national cultures?  How can cultures be studied and measured?  How do particular cultural traits impact the development of economic, political, and social systems?  Should policymakers seek to influence people’s values and beliefs, and if so, how can it be done?  Fletcher’s great diversity is a huge advantage in these discussions, as even in a small seminar we usually have students from many different parts of the world, and they bring new and valuable perspectives to the conversation.  In fact, sometimes I think I’ve learned more from my students than they have from me!

As an outgrowth of my work on culture, I’ve also started to do work on judicial reform, since a country’s legal system is both a cause and a consequence of its culture.  I currently direct the Fletcher Judiciary Reform Program, which brings policymakers and professionals to our school for executive training programs on how best to manage the transition from an inquisitorial to an adversarial justice system.  To date, we have trained almost 200 Mexican professionals, judges, and lawyers in week-long crash courses in comparative law.  In addition, the program does research and puts on events related to security, rule of law, and prosperity in Latin America, such as immigration reform and promotion of innovation.

There are opportunities for Fletcher students to be involved with each of these programs, and I continue to be impressed by their dedication, intelligence, and intellectual curiosity.  Fletcher students have so much to offer, and mentoring them is one of the best parts of my work.

In the second Faculty Spotlight post, Michael Glennon, professor of international law, describes the origins of his interest in international relations and how it has developed at Fletcher.  Prof. Glennon currently teaches The International Legal Order, Public International Law, and Foreign Relations and National Security Law.

My interest  in international law and relations was probably sparked long ago by the Vietnam War.  I interned for three summers for a member of Congress who was a leading critic of the war, and afterwards, arguments in law school about the scope of the presidential war power convinced me that this was an area in which I wanted to work.  Most of what I’ve done professionally has related in one way or another to seeking to understand how the use of force can be subjected to the rule of law.

I’ve found, at Fletcher, the ideal place to continue that study.  In the end, this question is not purely legal — it raises interdisciplinary issues that fall within the expertise of numerous Fletcher students and faculty colleagues.  Virtually all my written work has benefited from their advice and counsel — and in the case of students, from their research assistance.  Fletcher students make for a great sounding board.  An article I’ve just completed on national security law benefited hugely from comments conveyed over pizza by a group of students.  They were thorough, insightful, worldly-wise and candid — just the reality check that every author needs before committing to print.  Recent congressional testimony turned into an article co-authored jointly with my Fletcher research assistant.

When I first arrived at Fletcher ten years ago, a colleague pointed out that no matter what an instructor talks about in class, there’s almost always a student in the room who knows more about it.  I’ve found that it’s the rare class that doesn’t produce some insight that ultimately influences my own thinking.  It’s this synergy between faculty and students, striving together to understand, that energizes Fletcher’s intellectual community.  It’s enriching to be a part of it.

In the first of our new series of posts by members of the faculty, Michael Klein, William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs, tells us about his experience at the U.S. Treasury and how it has shaped his teaching and scholarship since he returned.  Prof. Klein currently teaches International Finance, International Economic Policy Analysis, Finance, Growth and Business Cycles, and Quantitative Methods.

In March 2010 I received, completely by surprise, an email from the Assistant Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury asking me whether I would be interested in serving as Chief Economist in the Office of International Affairs.  This was a novel opportunity for me.  I had served as a visiting scholar at a number of institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York, and San Francisco), but had spent my entire career in academia.  I was excited by the prospect of using the skills and knowledge that I have developed through teaching and scholarship in a government position.  I was also curious to see how policy was developed and executed.  And, not inconsequentially, I was happy and proud to serve my country.

The eighteen months that I spent at Treasury were a very exciting time; it was a period during which there was a halting recovery from the Great Recession in the United States, a re-evaluation of the international monetary system (especially with regards to the use of capital controls), an on-going crisis in the euro-area, and international tensions over exchange rates (during this time, the Finance Minister of Brazil declared that the United States was engaged in “currency wars” and there was continuing controversy about the renminbi/dollar exchange rate).  I analyzed these issues, as well as many others, writing memos that drew on my research and teaching experience.  I also participated in high-level meetings with officials from other countries.  My time at Treasury was one of the high marks of my professional career.

Since returning to Fletcher in the autumn of 2012, I have been able to draw on my experiences at Treasury in a variety of ways.  I developed a new course, International Economic Policy Analysis, which teaches students to use economics and statistical skills and frameworks in a practical policy setting.  My teaching in two other courses, International Finance and Finance, Growth and Business Cycles, has been enriched by my interaction with policy and experiences in government.  And the trajectory of my research was also influenced by my time at Treasury; over the past two years, I have focused on the topic of capital controls, a subject that I became interested in while working in Washington.  My research on this topic now includes a 2012 article for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, another article that was presented at the IMF’s Annual Research Conference in November 2013 and will be published in the IMF’s flagship research journal, and a third that is currently under review.

Like other Fletcher faculty members, I am able to draw on scholarship as well as policy experience to provide students with an education that is both deeply informed by theory and scholarship and well-grounded in practical, real-world experience and concerns.