Future of Diplomacy Project to Focus on Negotiation, Communication

As the international need grows for nations to overcome challenges from climate change to terrorism to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Harvard Kennedy School is responding with a new Future of Diplomacy Project. Based within the Belfer Center, the project will prepare current and future leaders to focus more effectively on diplomacy, grand strategy, and negotiations. The initiative intends to make diplomacy a greater focus of teaching and research at the Kennedy School and will create several new areas of engagement.

Nicholas Burns, Harvard Kennedy School professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics and member of the Center's board of directors, will direct the diplomacy project. Burns, a former ambassador of NATO and Greece, served until 2008 as under secretary of state for political affairs responsible for negotiations on the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement and Iran's nuclear program.

"Few American universities focus on the study and practice of diplomacy," Burns said. "We believe Harvard and the Kennedy School are well-positioned to make the study of diplomacy a central focus of our thinking and research."

The diplomacy project will include several new initiatives, including expanding course offerings on modern diplomacy. Beginning in the fall semester of 2010, a new Fischer Family Fellows Program will recruit distinguished former world leaders to spend time at the Kennedy School to write, teach, and speak about diplomacy.

Career diplomat Marc Grossman became the first diplomacy fellow this spring. Ambassador Grossman, a former under secretary of state for political affairs and assistant secretary of state for European affairs, has spent the spring semester teaching, meeting with students, and writing a book on the utility of modern diplomacy.

Other Future of Diplomacy Project initiatives include a joint project with Harvard Business School to stimulate research, case studies, conferences, and speeches about the nexus between diplomacy and negotiations. The diplomacy project also plans a major conference in the coming year that will bring together world leaders to focus on the  importance of diplomacy in global politics.