As the world struggled to make sense of the three-day terrorist attacks this past November in Mumbai, India, Bruce Hoffman, professor of security studies, spoke to a Mortara Center for International Studies audience about how the violence had ushered in a new age of terrorism.

“In the seven years since 9/11, there remains an absence of a truly major, innovative attack… Mumbai now falls very much into that category,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman was one of three Georgetown scholars who helped people understand the issues surrounding the attacks – and what they mean for the future – at the December discussion. This harkens back to the airline hijackings of the 1970s and 1980s, but the difference is that then the purpose of seizing hostages was for negotiation,” Hoffman said. “The purpose this time was for pure, cold-blooded murder.”

Shareen Joshi, visiting assistant professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, organized the Mumbai discussion as part of Mortara’s new India Forum. Joshi, Hoffman and Tristan Mabry, visiting assistant professor of government and politics, talked about what led up to the attacks, how India is coping with the aftermath and what the attacks mean for antiterrorism efforts in the future.

Though some news accounts have called the Mumbai attacks “India’s 9/11,” Joshi rejects the comparison. An economist by training who also studies South Asia, she said comparing Mumbai to 9/11 takes the analogy too far.

“You have to look at this not from a global or American perspective of terrorism, but a regional perspective,” she said. “Terrorism has a long history in India. India on Nov. 25 had a very different perspective of terrorism than Americans did on Sept. 10, 2001.”

The discussion is one of many arranged by the Mortara Center, which is located within the Walsh School of Foreign Service. The center is a place for scholarly research that addresses broad issues of global change and American foreign policy choices. It is designed to stimulate and support internationally oriented university research, and it combines the expertise of scholars with that of seasoned practitioners.

The discussion on Mumbai was no exception.

At the time of the talk, a wave of Indian officials already had resigned in the face of public criticism over security and intelligence lapses. Joshi said she believes the country will continue to demand accountability and express outrage, but not push to go to war over the attacks.

Going forward, I think they will need to toughen security measures and toughen the relationship with Pakistan,” she said. “They will need the U.S. to help be the arbitrator.”

She also predicted new security methods in India.

“It’s very important in a nation of 1 billion people that you can translate information from local to national authorities in something equivalent to the FBI,” Joshi said. “If America offers to help with that, I believe India will take them up on it.”

Kathleen McNamara, associate professor of government and the international relations field chair, says working with the Mortara Center allows her to strengthen the theoretical basis of her research.
McNamara studies a hot topic – international economic relations.

Focusing on the political and social processes that led to the European Union’s creation and acceptance as an authority, she also explores the role of symbols in EU policy areas, such as economics, foreign policy and citizenship.

“The nature of policymaking is that you have to make decisions very quickly. You don’t always have the luxury of standing back,” McNamara says. “Unfortunately, the highest premium is not always on logical thinking and systematic consistency. I find that the best work in political science and international relations really is extremely disciplined in its logical rigor and the evidence that is used to support arguments.

“That kind of work is a luxury,” she adds. “But it’s also really important. We need to make sure there’s always a place for that basic research so our policy recommendations and analyses are proceeding on a solid foundation. This helps create an engine of scholarship that ultimately translates into better teaching.”

School of Foreign Service Dean Robert Gallucci says the Mortara Center “examines broadly issues of policy, but also creates a space where faculty and students can study international affairs from the academic side,” he explains.

Among the topics Mortara Center looks at are the HIV/AIDS crisis, foreign aid, international trade treaties, bridging the digital divide and bolstering America’s foreign policy.

Gallucci recalls that director Carol Lancaster (F’64), a former deputy administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, envisioned the center as an intellectual hub.

“She recognizes that international relations theory is an important part of what Mortara does, but her approach is more inclusive of international studies as a whole,” he says. “The concept Carol has pursued is the view that international studies includes many different areas – international development, organizations, culture, politics and so on – and she has sought to extend the scope of what the Mortara Center focuses on.”

Since it opened in 2003, the center has been the backbone of Georgetown’s international affairs efforts, sponsoring symposia, conferences, speaker series and research support. As the world progressively globalizes, academics are finding it increasingly necessary to step outside of traditional disciplines to confront society’s most challenging problems. Nowhere is this more apparent than in international affairs, a broad field that encompasses everything from studying how countries relate to each other to carrying out on-the-ground development projects. At Mortara, both scholars and practitioners are able to regularly expose themselves to people and ideas from outside their immediate expertise.

Walk into the Mortara Center for International Studies on any Monday morning and you’ll find former Secretary of State and Georgetown professor Madeleine Albright leading a seminar on national security. Students are gathered on the couches debating a research proposal on increasing foreign aid. Faculty members are meeting for a weekly lunch to critique each other’s latest academic papers. These are common sights around Mortara, where no two days or two subjects seem to be the same.

“Intellectually, it brings people together in a way no other entity in the school does,” Gallucci says. “It’s a comfortable place. If you want to hold a series of seminars on China, for instance, the Mortara Center is a good home for that. It allows us to link the intellectual activities from around the school in an interactive way.”

The center co-organized Georgetown’s conference in recognition of the first World Malaria Day – an event that brought together people from a dozen fields to discuss malaria, a disease that continues to ravage countries. Epidemiologists, scientists, policymakers, public health care workers, lawyers and diplomats all looked at one of the most serious issues of our time.

Lancaster loves the fact that faculty members who take advantage of Mortara don’t just come from SFS. They are drawn from Georgetown College’s government and economics departments, the McDonough School of Business, the Law Center and the Medical Center. Almost any faculty member or student at Georgetown can find a place at Mortara, Lancaster says.

“My sense in running this center, which I consider a start-up, is to reach out as broadly as I could and see what was wanted by the faculty and the staff, and try to fill that role as best I could,” she says. “That means you will see research, projects and events that come from all corners of Georgetown.”

McNamara says she likes the idea of Mortara as an intellectual gathering space for all of the individuals and groups on campus that conduct international studies. “It makes me appreciate more broadly the university as a whole, since I’m not just tucked away in my own little world,” she explains.

The professor makes herself part of the academic rigor as well. Working on a book about the European Union, she is using the Mortara Center to hold critique sessions. The critiques are made through the center’s GUITARS series, or the Georgetown University International Theory and Research Seminar, co-sponsored by Georgetown College’s government department.

Marc Busch, the Karl F. Landegger Professor of International Business Diplomacy at SFS, also uses Mortara Center resources to get feedback on his work. Busch founded a biweekly political economy lunch group of about 15 faculty members from many of Georgetown’s schools. Busch asked the Mortara Center to host the group and provide a light lunch. Since then, the Tuesday group has grown into a motivating gathering for academics in the middle of research projects, papers and books.

It’s invaluable,” says Busch. “It’s rare at a research university that you’d get all of this contact across fields; there’s usually a silo approach. This has been terrific because it’s put together, for example, political scientists with economists – and within those groups there are people who specialize in development, comparative and international political economy. It’s a tremendous opportunity for everyone to meet each other and get a very different point of view.”

The multidisciplinary approach to scholarship makes for a more holistic end result, Busch says. When a professor specializing in American politics comments on a piece about international trade, or a microeconomist weighs in on comparative political studies, faculty members have the ability to fine-tune their scholarship to have the broadest reach and therefore the biggest impact.

“We all go back to the classroom with a broader view. It’s not just that we’re exposed to another discipline – we’re exposed to how another discipline thinks about the research that we love,” Busch says. “If you think about what really makes a professor magical in a classroom, it’s a love of their research and conveying what they do to their students.” 

A Boon for Students

Though Mortara does not run classes directly through the center – most of the affiliated professors have joint appointments in SFS and the government department – reaching out to students and improving their scholarship via Mortara’s resources is a top priority. Many of the opportunities come through speaker series and the informal gathering with experts and policymakers. Students interested in international development frequently attend Mortara’s Development Practitioners’ Fora lunch lecture series to hear speakers from USAID, the World Bank and nongovernmental organizations.

But alumni also point out how faculty members use the center’s mission to improve their educational experiences.

Teddy Svoronos (F’08) was a student of Lancaster’s. Both student and professor held a deep interest in international development, and Svoronos used his connection to Lancaster to not only learn more about the field, but also to translate his passion into action. He is on the board of OurMoment, an organization started by Georgetown students as a locus of campus groups, academics and nongovernmental organizations working to improve the lives of people around the globe.

“Dr. Lancaster wasn’t directly involved since this was a student group, but anything I wanted to do, any idea I had, I ran by her first,” Svoronos says. “She always made herself available for that. There aren’t too many universities when you can just pop into the office of a top expert in international development and get her opinions and ideas.”

In the classroom, Svoronos says Lancaster helped make him more sensitive to the plight of impoverished people around the world – something that is considered key for future international development practitioners.
“From the beginning, she would stress how important it is to be adaptable. You need to pay constant attention to how your work is affecting the people you’re with,” Svoronos says. “Dr. Lancaster wouldn’t just say these things though. She had stories from her time in the field that would drive home her points. It made it more real for me.”

Shortly after graduating from Georgetown, Svoronos left for Tanzania on a Fulbright scholarship to participate in HIV/AIDS work. But he helped leave a lasting legacy at Georgetown, thanks to the classroom lesson he took to heart. OurMoment represented the student community when the new undergraduate Certificate in International Development was being developed in SFS. The certificate follows a larger university initiative of involvement in programs to support human development.

Students participate in research as well. Kelly Doley (G’08), who graduated from the Masters of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program, served as a sounding board for Lancaster on an upcoming project about evangelical Christians’ influence on foreign aid. Lancaster invited Doley and several of his fellow students over to her house for dinner to discuss topics around evangelicalism and foreign aid.

“How often do you get an invitation to a potluck at a professor’s house? But that’s part of being at Georgetown and part of who Dr. Lancaster is. She’s always looking to help us get ahead, whether it’s in the classroom or introducing us to someone in the field,” Doley says.

During his time at MSFS, Doley focused on foreign affairs, striving to learn more about the donor side of international development. He put research into practice immediately following graduation by spending three months in the Sudan with CHF International, a Maryland-based nonprofit group that runs economic development projects in 30 countries around the globe. Doley spent his time assessing various projects, including some in the tumultuous Darfur region.

“You can take a class and learn how these things work on paper. But the great thing about Georgetown is that I got the opportunity to translate that into on-the-ground experience,” he says.

Like Svoronos, Doley found a way to incorporate service into his time at Georgetown. He founded MSFS’ Help the Homeless, a monthly volunteer event for students in the program. Doley is now back at Georgetown as a research assistant to Andrew Natsios (a distiguished professor of foreign service and former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Develop-ment) on the professor’s upcoming book “Thinking About Foreign Aid.”

Alyce Ahn (G'10, L'10) has turned to Mortara during her time as a graduate student, attending as many lectures as possible. Inspired to focus on international development, Ahn now is pursuing a joint MSFS and J.D. at Georgetown. Ahn used her legal and international expertise this past summer interning for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. Stationed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with the refugee status determination unit, Ahn helped assess asylum claims. During the academic year, she also manages to combine women’s issues into her studies, participating in the Law Center’s International Women’s Human Rights Clinic. Many of these issues arose in her studies at Georgetown.

Attracting Experts

One of Mortara’s many strengths, students and professors say, is its ability to draw in top names in international studies for speaking engagements and conferences. Sometimes Mortara need not look further than Georgetown’s own faculty – Albright spoke this past fall to a packed Gaston Hall auditorium about foreign policy goals for the new administration.

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, drew from her three decades of World Bank experience to talk about global crises, such as rising food and energy costs, and how to keep decision makers focused on international development. Victor Cha, the university’s director of Asian Studies and the D.S. Song-Korea Foundation Chair in Asian Studies and Government, talked about North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il’s influence on the six-party talks about nuclear proliferation. Cha returned to Georgetown in 2007 after a period serving as director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council.

Just as often, Mortara guests are drawn from outside of Georgetown, and represent the highest caliber of international affairs experts and officeholders. After serving at USAID, consulting for the United Nations and working for the U.S. Department of State, Lancaster is not star-struck. But she cites two recent Mortara guests as among the most moving speakers she’s witnessed.

One was Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who started Grameen Bank. The bank specializes in microcredit, or very small loans to people unable to receive credit from a larger bank. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, which have revolutionized development concepts worldwide. Lancaster calls him “simply inspirational.”

The other was the president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. “She is trying to bring back to life a country that was deeply damaged over many years of civil war and is doing as good a job as anyone could hope,” Lancaster says. “She’s strong and capable and a real leader.”

During Johnson Sirleaf’s visit, the first female president of an African country insisted she have the opportunity to meet with students. Lancaster arranged for about 25 students from all of Georgetown’s schools to participate in a special discussion with the dignitary.

Taking a cue from the success of the Liberian president’s meeting with students, Mortara is focusing on more intimate gatherings. Sitting face-to-face with experts and decision makers is invaluable for both students and faculty, Lancaster says. Mortara began hosting a series in 2007 called the Illuminati Dinners. Master’s degree students are invited to dine with and bend the ear of high-level international affairs professionals. Guests have included former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski and James Kennedy, an emergency relief expert.
“We’re lucky – Georgetown can call on scholar-practitioners in a way that most universities cannot. Being in Washington, many of them live right here,” Lancaster says.

“Georgetown has one of the most well-known international relations programs in the world, so it makes sense for us to have such high-caliber guests here for our faculty and students to learn from. That is a prime element of the Mortara Center’s vision.”

As the Mortara Center prepares to transition its leadership (Lancaster steps down from her position in June), she hopes the focus stays on Georgetown’s global initiatives. Lancaster will take over as interim dean of the School of Foreign Service on July 1, when Gallucci leaves Georgetown to become the president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Recognizing two emerging centers of world power – China and India – Mortara has begun regularly sponsoring fora on each country. The meetings provide updates about university initiatives in both countries, highlight related faculty and student work, and offer an opportunity for the Georgetown community to weigh in on Mortara’s future endeavors.

Busch, the SFS professor, says the Mortara Center helps him with his research on the political economy of trade, protectionism and on World Trade Organization issues, such as its dispute settlement system. He co-edited a book, “The WTO, Economic Interdependence and Conflict,” in 2007 that studies the relationship between international institutions, foreign trade and interstate conflict, and how economic disputes are settled within the WTO.

“Mortara has done a tremendous amount of good things in its short time of existence. The center makes an investment in research, which ultimately makes the university a better environment for scholars, which makes them better in front of students in the classroom,” Busch says. “That is an exciting prospect for any scholar, young or old. It’s important for the faculty and it’s important for students, and ultimately it’s important for the students before whom our faculty present.”


Origins of an International Affairs Center

The Mortara Center opened in 2003 thanks to a gift from the late Michael Mortara (F’71) and his wife, Virginia. Before he unexpectedly passed away in 2000 of a brain aneurysm, Mortara was a power player in the financial world and president and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Ventures. School of Foreign Service Dean Robert Gallucci remembers meeting Mortara during the dean’s first days on campus 13 years ago. Always involved in Georgetown, Mortara served on the SFS board of visitors.

From early conversations, Gallucci says Mortara and his wife were eager to support Georgetown’s international initiatives.

“I recall one particular conversation, shortly before his firm went public, when we discussed what he and Gina might do to help the school and the university. I told him that I had some ideas, but that I wanted to know what he wanted to do, what he thought would have the most impact,” Gallucci says.

But Mortara demurred.

He said he had noticed that I never suggested to him how he should structure mortgages, and he didn't feel comfortable telling me how to run the school,” Gallucci recalls.

With that open invitation to devise a plan that would most benefit Georgetown and its students, the university and theMortaras agreed to establish the Mortara Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy position. Madeleine Albright was the top choice for the professorship and still holds that appointment today.

After Mortara’s passing, family members and university leaders continued to work toward building an international affairs center, which he had earlier supported for Georgetown. What was to eventually become the current day Mortara Center developed over the years. Speaker series and symposia evolved into the fully realized center with its own building two blocks from Healy Gates and across the street from the Walsh Building at 36th and N Streets N.W. Virginia Mortara still lives nearby and is a regular presence at events.