The Dominican Republic, as it did nearly 80 years ago when offering Jewish refugees visas after the dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered an ethnic cleansing at the Haitian border, is trying to polish its international reputation after carrying out human rights violations condemned around the world. This time, it still has a chance to do the right thing by changing its policies on deportation and denationalization. My thoughts in Foreign Policy on October 8, 2015, about the country’s attempt to gloss over 11 counts of violations of the commitments it made under the American Convention on Human Rights, on which it has reneged and on what it could do to make things right (and make its public relations consultants’ job easier).
Category: Writings
Articles and other written publications
Huffington Post: It’s Not Too Late to Save the Rhino
World Rhino Day is a reminder each September of the way we often don’t address crucial problems until it is too late, as is the case for the four remaining Northern white rhinos, a sub species facing extinction. But that doesn’t have to be the fate of the rest of the rhinos still walking the earth, as I argue in the Huffington Post.
Davos 2014: Takeaways for the Year to Come
I was honored to attend the 2014 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which wraps up a season of predictions for the year ahead and helps set the coming agenda for world business, civil society and political leaders. Continue reading “Davos 2014: Takeaways for the Year to Come”
CNN: Lean In to Learn from Global Examples of Women
CNN In America asked me to put the brouhaha over Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In, into a global context. Here’s what I came up with:
Opinion: Lean in to learn from global examples of women
March 8, 2013
(CNN) – The courage of women like Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old student leader in Pakistan who was shot and nearly died for fighting for girls’ right to education; Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who endured nearly 15 years of house arrest because of her stand for democracy in Myanmar; and of precedent-setting presidents like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is inspirational.
America’s women and work discussion could take a lesson from other countries.
Americans make plenty of pronouncements about why countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia should let women go to school, drive cars and have many of the rights American women take for granted.
But focusing exclusively on the extreme examples of restrictions on women’s rights elsewhere provides a convenient way to overlook the ways we could do better here at home.
Davos 2013 -Balance Short with Long Term Thinking
My biggest takeaway from the 2013 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos was that we need to find ways to encourage long-term thinking -and acting. Read more HERE in this February 5th post to the World Economic Forum blog.
Down with Short Termism; Long Live the Long Term
If only I had a nickel for every time during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2013 that participants held up short-term thinking and actions as the bogeyman standing in the way of the Meeting’s Holy Grail: dynamic resilience.
Delivering a scathing assessment of the European Union’s response to the euro crisis, especially in the early stages, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Monti blamed it for short-term thinking when “leadership is the opposite of short termism.” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde similarly urged longer-term policy strategies: “If we look beyond the short term, we would indeed move past the crisis,” she said.
This is hardly the first time anyone has criticized short-term thinking as a danger. But the chorus of voices creates a real opportunity to move from talking to doing. Let’s use it to create the right incentives to encourage politicians, businesses, investors – and, for that matter, individuals – to think and act for the long term as well as for immediate priorities.
Continue reading “Davos 2013 -Balance Short with Long Term Thinking”
Closing the Gender Gap
The media frenzy over the naming of YGL Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo drew attention to the challenges women leaders face, as personal decisions become fodder for other people’s agendas. It also set the stage for the second Silicon Valley Summit July 24-27, in which I participated with about 100 other World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders.
Discussions on two panel sessions and throughout the gathering took up the challenge of closing the gender gap –a particularly salient issue in the tech industry. Not just a women’s issue, the gender gap affects business competitiveness and the health and success of every single man, woman, and child everywhere in the world.
Read more on the World Economic Forum blog
2011 Outlook on opendemocracy.net
The editors at opendemocracy.net, one of my favorite websites, asked me and a group of writers from around the world, “Where are the sources of inspiration that can improve global and national prospects in 2011?”
Here are my thoughts:
Citizens of every country need to see their self-interest more broadly instead of pitting themselves against other groups, nationalities, religions, and classes. If people were to embrace this one idea in 2011, we’d see a world of greater cooperation and prosperity instead of the polarisation and malaise that affects so much of the world today. When your neighbour is better off, it’s more likely that you will be too.
We do not live in a zero-sum world. Yet if the xenophobes and hate-mongers have their way, we’ll be in a less than zero-sum world: everyone will be worse off, not only the purported targets. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the mega-rich while leaving less than crumbs for the working class destabilises society and shrinks purchasing power that could create more wealth for everyone. A country or community that cracks down unfairly on immigrants and minorities is biting off its nose to spite its face; it pulls the rug out from under families, economies, and communities instead of supporting new communities and economies. Demonising another religion instead of seeking dialogue puts precious energy into destruction instead of building. An extremist political party that puts up roadblocks, no matter what the issue, ends up destroying people’s trust in the political process instead of creating positive change.
The unintended consequences of division undermine the very goals that politicians and leaders invoke to justify actions intended to punish the few instead of to reward the whole. It’s time to change that dynamic.
PublicAgenda.org -Immigration Reform and Climate Change
Immigration Reform & Climate Change: Two Hot-Button Issues Intersect cross posted at www.publicagenda.org and the World Policy Blog
In the days following the earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince and killed over 200,000 people, the United States granted temporary protected status (TPS) to those undocumented immigrants from Haiti who were living in the United States prior to the date of the quake. It was the right thing to do after such an “act of God.” Yet, it stood in stark contrast to the failure of the United States to use its migration policy to help Haitians in 2008, when the island was struck by a series of natural disasters that were arguably man-made—a series of storms made increasingly more frequent and violent by rising sea levels and temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
Posted March 19, 2010. For the full article visit the links above.