Returning the spotlight to our faculty, today we’ll feature Professor Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu, who graduated from Fletcher in 1992.  Professor Moghalu is Professor of Practice in International Business and Public Policy and currently teaches Emerging Africa in the World Economy.  Also note that Professor Moghalu will be one of the keynote speakers at the TEDGlobal 2017 conference to be held in August in Arusha, Tanzania.

I arrived in Boston from Nigeria in the fall of 1991 as a mid-career student in the Master of Arts program at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.  It was a dream fulfilled: to imbibe interdisciplinary knowledge in international affairs at the fountain of one of the world’s most prestigious institutions in that field.

Today, I am in my second academic year as a professor at The Fletcher School.  As a starry-eyed young man at Fletcher, I had been taught by such larger-than-life professors as then-Dean Jeswald Salacuse, international law professor Hurst Hannum, and diplomacy professor Alan Henrikson.  I could not have guessed that one day, these great minds and I would become colleagues on the Fletcher faculty.

It has been a long road from then to now, but the Fletcher student experience prepared me for every step of the way.  From a 17-year career in the United Nations, straight out of Fletcher, to founding Sogato Strategies, a global risk and strategy advisory firm in Geneva, Switzerland, and to my return to Nigeria in late 2009 after the late Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua appointed me as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

In all these phases, my earlier time at Fletcher prepared me “to know the world.”  At every turn, the depth and blending of the interdisciplinary curriculum — which reflects how the world really works — and the bond between members of the Fletcher community, have proved to be simply superior.

Being both an alumnus and a member of the faculty is a privileged experience.  I teach the course “Emerging Africa in the World Economy” in the Economics and International Business division.  This course focuses on the intersection of business, government, and economic growth in Africa and on the continent’s place in the global economy.  I can connect in a very personal way with the dynamics in the lives of the students I teach and advise, as well as the challenges they face.  As always, the global outlook and diversity of Fletcher students and classes continue to give the institution a unique vibrancy.  Students’ intellectual curiosity is energizing, their insights amazing in ways that have helped me keep an open mind and also learn from them.

My path to becoming a professor at Fletcher began while I was still serving at Nigeria’s reserve bank.  The School’s Institute for Business in the Global Context (IBGC), headed by Professor Bhaskar Chakravorti, had invited me on two occasions to speak at Fletcher and then at the Inclusive Business Summit IBGC organized with Mastercard in Bellagio, Italy.  A conversation began with Bhaskar and with Ian Johnstone, Professor of International Law and Academic Dean at the time (and, full disclosure: a friend since our time as rising young officers in the UN headquarters in New York in the early 1990s), about the possibility of joining the Fletcher School faculty when I completed my five-year tenure at the Nigerian Central Bank.

The inspirational warrior-scholar and Dean of The Fletcher School, Admiral (Dr.) James Stavridis made the decision to bring me on board and offered me a faculty appointment after I completed my national service in Nigeria.  Fletcher is fortunate to be led by this remarkable alumnus who previously served meritoriously as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

The Fletcher School increasingly recognizes Africa’s role in the world as a place of promise and opportunity.  It has also made developing teaching and research on the continent part of its latest strategic plan.  I know that Fletcher students are increasingly interested in this part of the world, and I support them in their belief that the School should develop courses and faculty on Africa in a sustainable manner.

Twenty-six years ago, I was awarded the Joan Gillespie Fellowship for individuals from developing countries who have the potential for future leadership.  I had been recommended by a distinguished Fletcher alumnus, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nigeria.  Little would I have known that my path afterwards would lead me not just around the world and back to my country, Nigeria, but also back again to The Fletcher School as a professor on its faculty.  The uniqueness of this very “Fletchered” path has been one of my most profound pleasures.

Have you browsed through the posts in the Faculty Spotlight feature?  Not yet?  Well, I hope you will.  To make your reading more systematic, I’ve divided the posts according to Fletcher’s divisions.

EIB (Economics and International Business):

Lawrence Krohn
Steven Block
Bhaskar Chakravorti
Michael Klein

DHP (Diplomacy, History, and Politics):

Julia Stewart-David
Andrew Hess
Sulmaan Khan
Ayesha Jalal
Cheyanne Sharbatke-Church
Antonia Chayes
Leila Fawaz
Christopher Tunnard
Kelly Sims Gallagher
Alex de Waal
Miguel Basáñez

ILO (International Law and Organizations):

John Burgess
Jeswald Salacuse
Joel Trachtman
Michael Glennon

In the final Faculty Spotlight post for this academic year, the subject is Julia Stewart-David, who spent this past year at Fletcher as a visiting fellow.

I am about the twelfth visiting European Union (EU) Fellow at The Fletcher School (records are a bit patchy) but we can thank Professor Alan Henrikson for having reached out to set up the EU Fellowship at Fletcher somewhere back toward the end of the last century.  So what is a visiting EU Fellow?  Well, there are around ten of us each year, mid- or senior-level career officials in European Union institutions, who are given the opportunity to have a sabbatical year in a select few universities worldwide.  While we are visiting fellows, we have a dual mandate of pursuing research and of educating about the European Union and its policies through outreach and teaching.  We each bring a different area of practitioner expertise.

The Fletcher School was my first choice destination, mainly because professionally I knew of its strong interest in human security issues, through the influential research work of the Feinstein Center.  My “usual” job is a policy role in the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department, co-managing a team working on evidence and disaster risk management.  I’ve been in the humanitarian sector for over a decade now, working closely with the UN and international NGOs on quality of aid.  But being in a sector whose business is crisis leaves little time for deeper reflection on the world and the interlinked complexities of power, politics, poverty, and human potential.  One of the dilemmas of disaster risk management is how to get better investment over the long-term to help communities prevent or better cope with crises, when the immediate humanitarian response is so constantly overwhelmed by the need to respond to the emergencies of the present.  Most of these are prolonged conflict-related “complex emergencies.”

So imagine my sense of opportunity at having an academic year where my professional life is focused upon thinking, reading, and contributing to a longer-term process of reflection on change in the humanitarian sector.  While at Fletcher, I have been researching how humanitarian organizations learn.  This is a time when the sector has undergone much soul-searching ahead of the recent World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul.  Failure takes its toll in lives; which leads perversely to risk-aversion in organizations trying to provide assistance, when bold action, or maybe even a radical new approach, could be what’s needed.

I have found life here at Fletcher a wonderful privilege.  There is a strong sense of community and a core of thoughtful people who care about the world and how they can best contribute to it.  The most remarkable learning resource is the diversity of student experience and interest.  As to the professional experience I have been able to share, it has covered a wide range of topics: from strategies to address violent extremism, to the forthcoming UK referendum on the European Union; from humanitarian financing and use of evidence and evaluation, to tips on combining motherhood and management in an international organization that has still not reached gender parity.  I have also enjoyed explaining my passion for “participatory leadership” practice in policy-making, or put another way: bringing diverse people together to co-generate future action based on collective wisdom.  In my mind, international and community leadership to address the challenges of our times requires multi-disciplinary reflection, adaptability and an ability to host difficult conversations on questions that really matter to society.  I see these qualities in abundance at Fletcher.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if traditional educational approaches and curricula would value and develop those kinds of skills at all levels from a young age?

My family and I will be taking many happy memories from Boston back with us to Brussels when we head home this summer.  I also have a head full of ideas of things we should try to do better in the humanitarian sphere.

Professor Jeswald W. Salacuse, the subject of today’s Faculty Spotlight feature, has had a long and varied career at Fletcher, starting in 1986 with eight years as dean, and continuing as he transitioned to a teaching role.  Currently, as the Henry J. Braker Professor of Law, Professor Salacuse teaches International Investment Law, Corporate Governance in International Business and Finance, Law and Development, and a new course Negotiating International Leadership, but in his post below, he tells us about one of his out-of-Fletcher activities.

I moonlight as an international judge.  For the past several years, while teaching full time at the Fletcher School, I have served as president of an international arbitration tribunal, hearing cases brought against Argentina by foreign investors in that country.  The investors have claimed that the Argentine government had not treated them as it had promised in various bilateral investment treaties made with the investors’ home governments.  A principal purpose of investment treaties, of which there are now about 3000 in the world, is to protect and promote investment between the countries that sign them.  Under these treaties, each country promises, among other things, that it will not expropriate investments from the other country and that it will treat them fairly, provide them with protection and security, and will not discriminate unjustly against them.

Promises are only as good as the mechanisms to enforce them.  The enforcement mechanism in investment treaties is international arbitration, a process that allows investors to sue a foreign government before an independent international tribunal, to obtain compensation for injuries caused by that government’s failure to give the investor the treatment promised under the treaty.  Granting a private party the right to bring an action against a sovereign state in an international tribunal is a revolutionary innovation that now seems largely taken for granted.  Yet its uniqueness and power should not be overlooked.  A similar remedy does exist in most other areas of international law.  It is this mechanism that gives important, practical significance to an investment treaty, and truly enables investment treaties to afford protection to foreign investment.  As a result, aggrieved foreign investors are bringing increasing numbers of arbitration claims when they believe host countries have denied them treaty protection, and in some cases tribunals have awarded them damages in the tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars.  Fearful that they may be subjected to “home-town justice” in national courts and will therefore receive prejudicial treatment, investors have preferred to plead their cases before an independent international tribunal rather than take their chances in national courts under the control of the government they are suing.

Most investor-state tribunals consist of three arbitrators, one named by the party bringing the claim, another appointed by the party defending against the claim, and the third, usually, the president or chair of the tribunal, appointed by agreement of the two sides.  The tribunal members are not the representatives of the parties but are to exercise their judgment independently.  If arbitrators have not maintained their duty of independence, they may be challenged and removed from the tribunal.  Each side is represented by lawyers, often major international law firms because of the amount of money at stake, and the whole process functions according to strict rules of procedure and elaborate principles of international law.  Many investor-state cases take place under the facilities of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an independent international organization affiliated with the World Bank and located in Washington, D.C.

Although the United States is a party to almost fifty investment treaties, all of which provide for investor-state arbitration, and though it has even been a defendant in a few cases, public attention suddenly focused on this process only in the past year as a result of projected U. S participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a twelve-nation trade and investment treaty that will provide investor-state arbitration for claims in the event of treaty violations.  TPP opponents have railed against investor-state arbitration in particular, expressing fears about lost sovereignty and the machinations of “secret and sinister tribunals.”  Much of the opposition to that agreement has been based on unsubstantiated fears and ignorance of the nature of the process and how it functions.  The actual record of investor-state arbitration over the past twenty years has been good.  As of 2013, 274 investor-state cases had been concluded.  Of that number, 42% had been decided in favor of defendant states, 34% had been decided in favor of investors, and 27% were settled by agreement of the parties.  The record by no means shows, as some would claim, that tribunals have an investor bias and that investor-state arbitration is a threat to national sovereignty.  On the contrary, I would argue that the investor-state arbitration supports the international rule of law.  Governments sometimes violate international law.  When they do, they should be held accountable.  The essence of the rule of law is the ability of a private person to sue a government for violation of the law and obtain a fair hearing.

My experience moonlighting as an international judge has enriched my teaching of Law and Development and International Investment Law at Fletcher, as well as my scholarship in those areas.  The tribunal over which I have presided has included Professor Gabrielle Kaufmann-Kohler, a Swiss national, and Professor Pedro Nikken from Venezuela, both exceptional lawyers who have diligently and knowledgeably worked to render fair decisions on innumerable procedural and substantive issues in the years we have worked together.  Far from being a “sinister tribunal,” our association has been most congenial.  In support of that proposition, I offer the attached photo of the three of us showing up for work one summer morning as Exhibit A.

Our next post in the Faculty Spotlight series comes from Andrew Hess, Professor of Diplomacy and Director of the Southwest-Central Asia and Islamic Civilization Program.  Professor Hess currently teaches Southwest Asia: History, Culture, and Politics, The Globalization of Politics and Culture for Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and The Globalization of Central Asia and the Caucasus.  In his post, Professor Hess describes the curriculum changes he has needed to make to keep his courses current.

The courses I offer in the fall semester deal with an explosion of complex conflicts from Eastern Europe to China.  Happily this should improve employment opportunities for future diplomats!  But the down side of all this violent activity means I need to constantly adjust course curricula.

In the interest of keeping up with all the turmoil, I am going to describe the additions to our previous semesters’ battles by trying to understand radical change in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the emerging nation states along the southern edge of the former Soviet Union.  I, however, offer no guarantee on including all that may happen in Southwest and Central Eurasia: I find this region has indeed earned its reputation for being a land of unpredictability.

Diplomacy 265 (The Globalization of Politics and Culture for Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan) was originally dedicated to understanding the international and internal politics related to key diplomatic issues of the three non-Arabic language speaking nation states east of Iraq, south of Central Asia and west of India. Alas, the power of twenty-first century global change makes it ever more difficult to explain what is happening in this region on the basis of only a national analysis.

The big issue is: Why so much violence and so little in the way of diplomatic solutions in this huge chunk of Eurasia?  The answer is, no doubt, going to be complex; and among the various new explanations for this bleak situation I suggest that the intensified impact of three global trends in this sub-division of Southwest Asia have added to the forces of instability already underway in this strategically important portion of Eurasia.

Very briefly these “trends” are:

• The absence of a balance of great powers for Eurasia as a whole has intensified powerful regional struggles on a global level (think about the states and-non government organizations who might want to take advantage of weak states);
• Second, the widespread inability of Middle Eastern and Southwest Asian governments and societies to cope institutionally with a global acceleration of social and cultural change is certainly behind recent upheavals (which terrorist group do you follow on Pakistan’s northwest frontier);
• Finally, what to do about a new geopolitics of energy (there is an ongoing gas revolution) for a region (the Central Eurasian Energy Ellipse) that provides, maybe, seventy percent of the world’s oil and gas resources;

And while we are talking about diplomatic problems involving commerce, we should not forget that Afghanistan is probably the world’s largest producer of heroin.

The Globalization of the South Caucasus and Central Asia (Diplomacy 267) course came to the Fletcher curriculum as a response to the increasing strategic importance of this slice of Eurasia during the period of the Cold War (1953-1991).  But the politics of the old bipolar struggle in Eurasia has now been replaced by conflicts between of new nation states now emerging from within the former body of the Soviet Union and the effort of the ruling elite of the Russian Federation to restore in some fashion the prestige of the Russian state.

Meanwhile huge technological forces associated with the economic development of all of Eurasia are linking the heartland of the Continent with the global economy: starting in the last quarter of the twentieth century the almost simultaneous growth of global oil production in the Soviet Union and the transfer under European control of high level petroleum skills into the Persian/Arabian Gulf arena set the stage for the modern geo-politics of energy in Eurasia.  So the two courses (Diplomacy 265 and 267) complement each other in the sense that great and small powers have to develop policies to defend their strategic interests in the production, processing, and transportation oil and gas.

Starting last fall, I have expanded the coverage of the 267 course to include a wider range of states along the edge of the southern frontier of the former Soviet Union.  In the west, we will argue that the Russian seizure of the Crimea is part of the larger political struggle for political power in the center of Eurasia; and it is an event that should be included within the wider Eurasian geo-politics of energy (gas supply for Europe).  At the eastern edge of former Soviet frontier we need to study the diplomatic problems of Russia’s new energy relations with China, in relation to the interests of Eurasia’s Turkish speaking states and societies.  (Uyghurs!).  And of course, I have added some new material concerning the technical revolutions taking place in the petroleum sector, where the international impact is not so clear at this time.

Finally, my current research asks, what role does the sectarian dispute between the Sunni and Shi’i versions of Islam play in the contemporary politics of Southwest Asia?

Outside of the classroom, the Southwest-Central Asia and Islamic Civilization Program involves students in the selection of speakers and the generation of discussions of key events involving Southwest and Central Asia.  When there is student interest, the Program sponsors the online journal (Al Nakhlah) as an effort to encourage students to publish their research papers.  We usually employ two student editors for this project.  And the program also supports summer research efforts for those students who are in the MALD or PhD programs and are working on a topic related to the Southwest and Central Asian courses.  Last, during the fall semester, we celebrate social and cultural cohesion at an annual picnic.

With today’s post, I’m returning to our occasional Faculty Spotlight series.  These posts are designed to bring out an aspect of the professor’s background or experience at Fletcher that goes beyond the basics of a c.v.  Today we’ll hear from Lawrence Krohn, Professor of Practice of International Economics, who currently teaches Introduction to Economic Theory, Macroeconomics, and Macroeconomic Problems of Middle Income Countries: Focus on Latin America.

I was smitten at 17.  Deeply in love.  The University of Pennsylvania’s economics faculty, however eminent, was not my inspiration; in four years, I hardly ever saw them.  It was the subject matter itself that seduced me.  Only much later, over the years, did I discover that this strange passion, this way of viewing the world, was shared by economists of wide-ranging personalities, nationalities, political persuasions.  I suspect that my colleagues in economics at Fletcher feel just as I do.

Many individuals of humanistic persuasion, knowing economics only by reputation (often as the “dismal science”), might well wonder what sort of person could be enthralled by money and finance.  Therein lies the error: economics is only superficially about money and finance.  Its ultimate domain is that of human wants and our world’s highly constrained ability to satisfy them.  Many emotions are thereby touched; economics is about people.

The so-called economics “imperialists” among us maintain that most issues that do not appear economic in nature are indeed so at their core. I don’t share this extreme position, as it implicitly depreciates other perspectives I respect, such as the political, social, and psychological.  But I do agree that few real-world phenomena are without important economic aspects, so the tools of economics remain indispensable to all thinking persons, not least those pursuing a curriculum of international affairs!

Economic modeling daunts some students – but without good reason.  Modeling is a tool of simplification, not complication.  It reduces often complex issues to their essentials by paring away the irrelevant, while retaining strict logical consistency.  Yes, at modeling’s highest professional levels, complex math is unavoidable.  But models a Fletcher student will encounter rely on basic accounting (high school algebra with some clothes on) and a few simple, but powerful, assumptions about the behavior of consumers, firms, and governments.  Thus, fear of models is unwarranted and the intellectual reward to a modicum of concentration on them is high.

I’ve been doubly fortunate: first, to have had two entirely complementary careers — the longer one, as international economist for several global banks, sandwiched by two stints (including the present one) in academia.  As a former academic, I was well equipped for the simplification required to explain complex economic phenomena to portfolio managers who, their energy and intelligence notwithstanding, were in no way trained economists.  Conversely, at Fletcher since 2005 (full-time since 2008), I have been able to draw amply on my real-world experience in global finance.

Second, I was lucky as well to have stumbled fortuitously onto Latin America in the 1980s, despite the lack of any ethnic or other association with the region.  What a laboratory for economists that continent has always been and remains!  Its problems, like those of other middle-income nations, have been related to, but still distinct from the more familiar ones of industrial nations.

With hindsight, it is relatively easy to identify policy errors that have been made; more difficult to define optimal policies.  Whenever I deal with economic policy — even in a developed-nation context — I start from the premise that governments almost always execute policy inefficiently (often corruptly as well).  Alas, given the myriad real-world departures (called market distortions or imperfections) from market fundamentalists’ Smithian ideal, unfettered market forces also prove notoriously inefficient, and are often, moreover, perceived as unfair (admittedly, a subjective notion).

So the question becomes for each contemplated policy, how much state intervention is desirable.  Where should the line be drawn between the completely planned economy and laissez-faire?  Honest and well informed observers can legitimately disagree on the answers, which is what makes economic debate so endlessly fascinating.

Continuing this spring’s installment of the Faculty Spotlight series, today we hear from Prof. Ayesha Jalal, who holds a dual appointment between Fletcher and the Tufts University History Department, and is the Mary Richardson Professor of History.  Prof. Jalal is spending the year teaching in Lahore, Pakistan, but when on campus she teaches Contemporary South Asia, and Islam and the West.

Misconceptions about history abound and one result has been a growing dissonance between the historian’s perspective and the more presentist views generally favored by policy makers.  Teaching “Contemporary South Asia” and “Islam and the West” at the Fletcher School enables me to interact with a diverse group of students with varied interests, ranging from development, security studies, conflict resolution, international business, and South West Asia.

Several of the Fletcher students I have taught have gone on to assume positions in the policy-making hierarchy as well the non-governmental sector.  A better understanding of history, and appreciation of the value of the historical method in particular, can help navigate the often confused and confusing nature of politics in our troubled world.

Fletcher’s vibrant international community of students, scholars, and practitioners is a perfect setting to discuss the complex issues that are bedeviling the contemporary world, whether the presence of Al-Qaeda in the tribal badlands of north western Pakistan; the specter of chaos symbolized by the rise of ISIS; or the persistence of poverty, discrimination and abject deprivation in a nuclearized South Asia.