Announcement

SIPA Inaugurates Institute of Global Politics

By Lionel Beehner MIA ’02
Posted Oct 05 2023
Many of the Inaugural Carnegie Distinguished Fellows were present for the IGP Summit, joining Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, and Dame Louise Richardson of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [photo: Shahar Azran]
Many of the Inaugural Carnegie Distinguished Fellows were present for the IGP Summit, joining Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, and Dame Louise Richardson of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [photo: Shahar Azran]

 

Columbia SIPA raised the curtain on its much-anticipated Institute of Global Politics (IGP) on October 3, drawing a list of luminaries from across the world to its Inaugural Summit. The event featured a full day of panels, conversations, presentations, and more.

Columbia President Minouche Shafik opened the summit. “As I look around this room I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of excitement and optimism and urgency,” she told the capacity crowd in IAB 1501. “There is a magic sauce that I’ve seen everywhere I’ve worked, which is you bring incredibly smart people together and you give them an interesting agenda, and good things will happen.”

IGP will be a hub to connect the world’s leading policymakers, political leaders, and academics to produce cutting-edge research and world-class programming aimed at advancing solutions to today’s pressing global challenges. The Institute is guided by three pillars —bridging the gap between scholars and policymakers, thinking locally as well as globally, and modeling civil discourse to reverse polarization.

“IGP is the living embodiment of SIPA’s mission, our global ambition, and our commitment to evidence-based solutions and meaningful dialogue,” said SIPA Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo.

Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, who joined SIPA as a professor in January and now chairs the IGP Faculty Board, picked up on that theme in her opening remarks.

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A panel on“Women Shaping Diplomacy” was one of the Summit’s highlights. [photo: Shahar Azran]
A panel on "Women Shaping Diplomacy" was one of the highlights of the Summit. [photo: Shahar Azran]

“There were ideas — there was research that was being done — that could have informed our decision-making that we didn’t connect with,” she said. “So we want to do everything we can to uplift the work of the faculty here, to make it not just available, but impactful.”

Clinton also underscored the vital role women play in IGP leadership roles and in crafting foreign policy. “We can’t afford to let half our team sit on the sidelines,” she said in her welcome remarks. “Women’s participation is strategic and necessary. It is not a partisan issue. It’s a human issue. A rising tide of women's rights and ideas can lift entire nations.”

One of the Summit’s highlights, a panel titled “Women Shaping Diplomacy,” embodied the same spirit. Featuring Deborah Cahn, the creator and showrunner of The Diplomat — currently streaming on Netflix — and moderated by Errin Haines of the popular blog on policy and gender, The 19th, the panel emphasized the urgent need for more women to enter careers in foreign service.

“The thing to keep in mind is it’s better to have greater variety at the table,” said Ambassador Beth Jones, a longtime US diplomat, “whether it’s more women, more ethnicities, more races, more gender identifications, whatever it is — that conversation is going to be richer and the result, I believe, is going to be better.”

Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States’ current representative to the UN, observed that male diplomats had traditionally seen compassion as a sign of weakness. But, she noted, “I've seen it work with other women who are dealing with issues that are important but also require a sense of compassion and kindness and openness to the other side.”

IGP is the living embodiment of SIPA’s mission, our global ambition, and our commitment to evidence-based solutions and meaningful dialogue.

— Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo

When her predecessor Madeleine Albright served three decades ago, Thomas-Greenfield noted, she was then the lone woman sitting on the UN Security Council. Today, in contrast, the Council’s permanent five members are all represented by women, and Thomas-Greenfield said she sees overlap among them on issues related to the role of women in peace and security. 

Another throughline of the various discussions was the transformative role of artificial intelligence on US foreign policy. Timothy Wu, a Columbia Law professor who has worked at the White House as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, said the internal debate among policymakers was whether generative AI is more like nuclear fission or general computing. “If it’s like nuclear fission, you don’t necessarily want a lot of startups getting into it and seeing what they come up with,” he said. “In fact we locked down nuclear fission after we saw some of the results of atomic weaponry.”

Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament who is now the international policy director of Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, said the lack of transparency and access to data and algorithms was inhibiting regulation and research about the potential harms of AI. She also flagged the lack of good ideas and policy solutions. “All around world, AI is on the political agenda and there is enormous political will to do something,” she said. “But there is an enormous vacuum of ideas of what to do. The problem is we are incapable of assessing what we are dealing with.”

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To kick off the “Across the Aisle” series, Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland (at left), joined Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York (at right). Andrea Mitchell of NBC News moderated. [photo: Shahar Azran]
Across the Aisle: Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland (at left), joined Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York (at right), for a discussion moderated by Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. [photo: Shahar Azran]

A central pillar of IGP is modeling civil discourse. To that end, IGP will host regular “Across the Aisle” discussions between leaders on opposite sides of the political spectrum and from across the world. To kick off the series, IGP featured Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, and Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland, in a discussion moderated by Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. The governors emphasized the need for more bipartisan consensus on issues like law enforcement, gun rights, and the integrity of voting. 

Another one of the day’s key moments came when IGP introduced its inaugural cohort of Carnegie Distinguished Fellows. This group of world-renowned practitioners — which includes several high-profile former ambassadors, a Nobel laureate, and a number of activists, journalists, and thought leaders — will partner with SIPA faculty to produce publications on urgent and rapidly evolving global issues. Most of the Fellows hail from outside of the United States and their expertise spans a wide range of complex global issues, from generative AI to refugee resettlement to conflict resolution.

The Summit closed with an installment of another IGP signature series, the Spotlight Interview, for which Clinton interviewed Rt. Hon. Dame Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand.

The launch of IGP also saw the reopening of SIPA’s 15th floor after several months of renovations. Highlights include a remodeled Dag Hammarskjöld Room, which now features a floor-to-ceiling LED screen to serve as a backdrop for events, and the refurbished office suite that IGP now occupies.

Claire Shipman MIA ’94, cochair of the University Trustees, spoke briefly at the program’s conclusion. “The strength of our universities will be measured not only by the ability to pursue knowledge and graduate exceptional leaders of course, but also to be able to engage and to be part of the solution,” she said. 

Shipman also saluted IGP’s two cofounders. Clinton and Yarhi-Milo, she said, are “serious, brilliant women — curious and optimistic. Like the IGP, they are fluent in theory but committed to getting things done. And that sensibility, in many ways, has always in fact defined SIPA.”

Watch the complete event — or access a list of highlights by clicking the icon at the top right of the video below: