Global Futures Initiative

To these advantages, I would like to add or highlight one more: At GU and SFS, many important conversations about social and economic development, governance, and institutional reforms are already taking place across the boundaries of academic disciplines and in the context of international affairs. Here at the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) Program we have courses and clinics that encourage students to examine not just the economic challenges facing, for example, a post-conflict region, but to take into account how our “best practice” examples for institutional reforms may fail miserably considering the region’s history, its ancient enmities, and the modern, geopolitical conflicts surrounding the region. We have courses that consider the possibilities, as well as limits, of a new kind of capital investment that can produce financial returns as well as social and environmental benefits across countries. We are organizing “service learning opportunities” that will allow MSFS students to acquire new technical skills, while bringing to bear their experiences in the private, public, and nonprofits to identify and test solutions to a particular development challenge facing, for example, a global nonprofit.

In this environment where we discuss development issues in the context of international affairs, it is often humbling to realize how badly we underestimate complex development challenges. At the same time, such a discussion can serve to emphasize the  interdependence of a multipolar world: how today’s fragile state may be tomorrow's global conflict zone; how international migration can bring tremendous economic benefits to migrant workers and their families while also helping meet the growing demands for both skilled and unskilled workers in aging economies; how the experience with development interventions, both good and bad, in lower-income countries—such as new instruments of social protection—can inform and have informed programs and institutional reforms in more advanced economies; and how, as my former colleague at the World Bank once put it,  “We are all developing.”

As Georgetown University students, faculty, and practitioners work hand-in-hand with colleagues and counterparts around the world, it is clear that the problems of the “peripheries” that we seek to solve are, in the end, also our problems and that we truly are in this together.

Erwin Tiongson is a professor in the practice of international affairs and concentration chair, international development.