The 5th Annual Fletcher Doctoral Conference, held at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on September 30, 2011, featured current doctoral students, alumni, faculty and distinguished guest speakers. This year, the conference was centered on contemporary issues in international relations, and began with introductory remarks from various members of The Fletcher School and Tufts University communities, including the new president of Tufts University, Anthony Monaco.
The keynote speaker at this year’s conference was Gregory Unruh (PhD99), professor of global business at the Thunderbird School of Global Management and director of its Lincoln Center for Ethics in Global Management, who spoke on the topic: “Changing Our Minds About Sustainability.” “Sustainable development,” in his opinion, was a diplomatic term coined in the 1980s to forge consensus among policy-makers arguing over the social benefits and environmental costs of economic development. “Many now consider [the term] to be an oxymoron,” he said. Through the course of his presentation, Prof. Unruh sought to demonstrate how the business world has been trying to operationalize the concept of sustainability for nearly every industry, business and product class. He illustrated how this process was forcing a dialogue between conflicting worldviews, which in turn could change the way we think about sustainability in the future.
A series of concurrent panel discussions followed the keynote address. Presentations at the conference ranged from frontier research areas such as cyber strategy, and the future of sustainable development, to more traditional concerns like peacebuilding, domestic politics and its impact on international affairs, and the progress towards the Millennium Development Goals.
Some panelists joined the conference from remote locations via videoconference tools like Skype. Obaida El-Dandarawy, an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official (PhD11) who is working on the new Egyptian constitutional amendments, joined the panel from Cairo. Jim Shyne, a current PhD student at The Fletcher School who is conducting field research in Brazil, joined the conference from Rio de Janeiro, and his presentation elicited a lively discussion on the success of social programs on preventing violence.
Proceedings of the conference were published in mid-November and will be available at http://fletcher.tufts.edu/Doctoral-Conference-2011.