EPIIC: Problems Without Passports (EXP 0079 XF)
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:00-5:00pm Dr. Abi Williams Director, Institute for Global Leadership. All interested students must come to the first class on Thursday, September 9.
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatized what Kofi Annan called “Problems Without Passports” and the inadequacy of global governance mechanisms. Despite many challenges, globalization continues to be the overriding reality shaping international relations in the 21st century. Technological innovations now ensure that events in any part of the world are not only instantly reported but can have immediate and tangible effects on the lives of people everywhere. In this era, it is inevitable that the major problems facing humanity are global – from pandemics to terrorism, from climate change to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, from systemic racism to drugs and organized crime, from migration to violent extremism. These global issues are beyond the capacity of any country, however big or powerful, to solve by itself. Globalization has also produced not only linkage between different parts of the world but closer linkage between different issues. This is an additional challenge for many governments and international institutions which are highly compartmentalized into separate, issue-specific agencies, with little capacity for strategic coordination of goals, and still less of activities. Global cooperation is vital to solve “Problems Without Passports." INSTRUCTOR: Abi Williams (F’87) is the Director of the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL), and Professor of the Practice of International Politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Dr. Williams brings to both positions thirty years of experience in leadership roles in the varied worlds of think tanks, the United Nations, and academia. He received his M.A.L.D. in 1986 and his PhD in International Relations in 1987 from The Fletcher School. He is an alumnus of IGL’s flagship program, Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) and in 2001 received the EPIIC Alumnus Award. In 2012, he was recognized for his global service and received the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award. He joined Tufts in 2017 after a four-year tenure as the first President of The Hague Institute for Global Justice. Prior to leading The Hague Institute, Dr. Williams served at the United States Institute of Peace as Senior Vice President of the Center for Conflict Management and as the Director of Strategic Planning for United Nations Secretaries-General Ban Ki-Moon and Kofi Annan in New York.