The Elizabethtown College Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking (CGUP) held its most recent U.S. foreign policy leadership session Wednesday, March 17. CGUP grew from a generous grant by Judy and Paul Ware and has since worked to provide a focus on the importance of international affairs and how they affect everyday life. This includes prestigious peace talks, support for international students, study abroad programs and general efforts to increase awareness of both the center itself and ways that individuals can help advocate for peace, dignity and social justice.
The Peace and Global Scholars’ program helps students advocate for peace by working through the center and plans to be recruiting a new cohort for Fall 2021. These roundtable discussions are an excellent but only small glimpse into all the work the center does, be sure to check out the website at https://etown.edu/centers/global/index.aspx.
The past weeks’ round table discussion focused on the humanitarian issues surrounding the ongoing Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and the potential solutions leaders in the U.S. can enact to help. In Myanmar there have been multiple human rights abuses against an ethnic group of Muslims known as the Rohingya. The Burmese military justifies these abuses by citing the violence by Rohingya rebels against Burmese police forces.
The Burmese military also claims that its attacks are focused on rebel groups and not civilians. Yet despite this claim, there are approximately 750,000 Rohingya living as forced refugees in nearby Bangladesh, a population so large that they are considered the world’s largest refugee camp.
In response to this, the U.S. has provided over $500 million to the refugees since the beginning of the attacks in 2016 and placed heavy sanctions on the state of Burma. Unfortunately, due to ongoing world issues this one has become slightly less in the public eye than other current events. Interestingly, similar sanctions were imposed on Burma years before the violence against the Rohingyas occurred and were due to the authoritarian nature of the Burmese government at that time.
These U.S. foreign policy leadership sessions began in the Fall 2020 semester and have been quite popular among honors students. These sessions are biweekly and give interested students the opportunity to discuss a variety of pressing issues in U.S. foreign policy today. Through these discussions, students gain invaluable insights into policymaking in both foreign and national security areas. Ambassador John Craig leads these sessions, with Dr. Oya Dursun-Ozkanca moderating. Students can choose the next session’s topic, with Craig usually giving a 15 minute presentation to start and the remaining time devoted to student-lead discussion.
While similar enrichment programs have existed in the past, the pandemic and safety measures put in place posed a new and unique challenge. The decision to move these meetings to Zoom came quickly, but with it also came a time change to better accommodate students’ needs. Craig mentioned an interesting niche benefit of the new online meeting format, saying, “you don’t realize it when you’re face-to-face, but if you have a round table of six or so people those who aren’t talking can go and research in real time in order to come up with ideas and questions.” This is an unexpected benefit to a meeting format that has become the default choice now for holding any type of safe gathering.
Whether or not this meeting style will continue to be used after it is safe to gather in large groups again is still an open question. However, Craig notes, “our goal is to maximize participation; if the students like Zoom I don’t have any trouble with that.” Perhaps that question itself could be a worthy topic for a discussion, assuming it could be tied into U.S. foreign policy.
