Politics and Governance
EWI holds its first Board meeting in Beijing
Engaging Jordan and the Arab World
Engaging India
Politics and Governance
EWI defuses tensions and builds trust in the world’s most volatile neighborhoods by fostering economic stability, encouraging cross-border cooperation and preparing a new generation of policy influencers, with special focus on empowering women leaders.
Strong Leaders for Democratic States
Every night Najila Ahrari saw ten to thirty badly injured children pass through her pediatric ward in Kabul, Afghanistan. Najila was dealing with the consequences of America’s war on terror against the Taliban, struggling to help save children injured by rockets.
Najila saw bodies of children so ravaged by war that they would die because it was too late to save them; she saw children carrying their own arms wrapped inside a cloth. Najila could have fled Afghanistan, but she stayed in the hopes of rebuilding her country.
In 2002, Najila Ahrari participated in the Central Eurasia Leadership Alliance (CELA), an EastWest Institute initiative founded to bring together young leaders from Central Asia and the Caucasus. At Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, she joined forty-five men and women from former Soviet Republics and other Central Asian countries, including historic rivals like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Aimed to build a future for both young leaders and young countries, CELA included workshops about business practices in the West. With CELA, the EWI aimed to create a network of individuals bound to contribute to their societies, a generation of leaders dedicated to regional cooperation.
At CELA, Najila met participants like Rahat Toktonaliev who entered Kyrgyz State University Law at just 16 and went on to study at Moscow State University. After the end of Soviet regime, Rahat returned home to a newly independent Kyrgyzstan, which he helped become the first CIS nation to join the World Trade Organization in 1998. Other participants included Maia Tavadze from Guria, Georgia who, despite a dire lack of local opportunities for education, managed to attend the American Institute of Public Administration. Maia became the Chief Advisor on international relations to the Georgian Governor, and won a scholarship to earn her master's degree at Duke University.
CELA also included leaders like Halim Fidai, who came from a small village called Sultani in Afghanistan’s Paktika province. Because of Paktika’s violent reputation, the government did not set up elections in the region. In response, Halim became a local advocate, creating an elected executive council to deal with contentious issues like water rights. Thanks to Halim’s efforts, Karzai’s’s government granted Paktika voting rights and gave it the funds to build three new wells and a school—a big improvement for the province.
With CELA, the EastWest Institute sought to celebrate and support these young leaders—people who, with their bravery and drive, made their own worlds safer and better places. The program ran for five years, but its effects are still being felt today in the ideas that were shared, in the friendships made across cultures and borders.
Embracing Our Third Decade
For twenty years, the EastWest Institute has boldly responded to the challenges of a world in transformation. Its current areas of heaviest involvement, the Balkans, Russia, Ukraine and neighboring states have a huge unfinished agenda. The EWI Board of Directors has made clear its commitment to have EWI remain deeply engaged for decades more until the struggle of transition is assured.
As we look to the future, it is clear that the EWI transatlantic partnership of Europeans and North Americans continues to widen as Europe itself enlarges and the Eurasian bridges of Russia, Ukraine and Turkey and their neighbors continue their transformation. The challenges to the values that are core to EWI will be no less daunting. In fact the challenge will be more difficult as EWI continues its movement eastward over the coming decades.
A new dimension is growing in EWI's work, Eurasia. Here is the prime space where the 21st Century fight for democracy, peace and economic prosperity will be waged. Here Europeans and Americans from Vancouver to Vladivostok join hands with colleagues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and parts of the Middle East.
This 20th story shall remain unfinished. It is the story of how an independent group of men and women of diverse nationalities, religions, professions and experiences come together united in their values and prepared to make a commitment to work together as agents of change.
In 1962, John Mroz was in his second year in high school in a small town in western Massachusetts. His father, a dentist, asked his three sons at the dinner table what they wanted to do with their lives. John's answer perplexed his Dad for years. He answered—“to be a global change agent."
Every person who has become involved in the work of the EastWest Institute for these twenty years should add "global change agent" to his or her resume, for indeed the story of EastWest is, in the end, such a story.
Prescribing Pluralism
Balkan Ghosts author Robert D. Kaplan has described Romania, with some 23 million inhabitants, as "the fulcrum state of Europe." Romanians practice Eastern Orthodox Christianity, derive their linguistic roots from the West and have utilized both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets in the past two centuries.
The end of the horrendous Ceaucescu dictatorship on Christmas Eve 1989 presented the outside world with painful images of sorrow and anguish: orphans with HIV tethered to their beds, decaying chemical facilities posing risks to human health and a bleak, often degraded urban landscape. The need for action by Western institutions was immediate if Romania was to successfully manage the dual transition to free markets and a pluralistic democracy. To confront the social and political challenges in the post-communist era the EastWest Institute devised the Legislative Issues Service (LIS).
The Legislative Issues Service operated out of the EWI Prague Centre, and helped to transform the performance of the Romanian parliament by developing the first professional staff. The EWI-sponsored LIS also provided significant contributions to parliaments in Bulgaria and Ukraine. EWI also worked to promote concerted associations between citizens and their elected representatives. Through public discussions on policy issues and the promotion of objective, non-partisan research and analysis, LIS aimed to legitimize democratic institutions and educate legislators on constitutional and legal concerns. In 1998, the project advised the Romanian government on its approach to pension reform adjustments, in addition to arranging public hearings in the Romanian parliament on pending legislation, a first in that country.
A foremost achievement of the Legislative Issues Service came in 1996, when LIS assisted the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhova Rada) in the adoption of Ukraine's first post-communist constitution. In professional development seminars organized by EWI in France and Spain, delegations of Ukrainian parliamentary leaders who served on the constitutional committee consulted Western legal experts on establishing proper balances of power between the various branches of government. Special efforts were made to include key legislators who were unsure of which direction to move. Within three months of these visits, the newly independent nation of Ukraine adopted its first free democratic constitution.
Women and Post-2014 Afghanistan
Women and Post-2014 Afghanistan: Report on Afghanistan Parliamentarians’ Visit to Brussels, a new report from the EastWest Institute, highlights the importance of protecting the rights of women in Afghanistan after the pullout of foreign troops.
Under the auspices of EWI’s Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention and its work on women, peace and security, the delegation, two-thirds of them women, took part in high-level meetings in Brussels’ most prominent institutions. The Afghan delegation’s goal was to promote their role in international political bodies and to engage in discussions on peace and security with regard to the future of Afghanistan.
EWI’s Vice President and Ambassador-at-Large Beate Maeder-Metcalf declared: “With the planned troop withdrawal from Afghanistan coming up soon, it is vital that any political changes do not jeopardize the rights of women that are now mandated by the constitution.”
In their meetings, the visiting parliamentarians emphasized that even if the constitution were to be revised post-2014, the rights of women must continue to be explicitly guaranteed. “Women’s rights cannot be used as a bargaining chip with the Taliban,” the report asserted.
The visit of the parliamentarians took place from October 8-12, 2012. That same week, the Taliban tried to kill 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai in the Swat Valley. Yousafzai was shot in the head simply because she was standing up for the right of all girls to get an education. The attack exemplifies the brutality girls and women face as they struggle to secure their most basic freedoms in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The release of this report coincides with the 5th Anniversary of the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention, which mobilizes members in parliaments across the globe to find pioneering ways to prevent and end conflicts. For more information on the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention, please visit: www.parliamentariansforconflictprevention.net
Other reports in this series:
> Women, Peace and Security, 2012
> Forging New Ties, 2011
> A New Voice for Afghan Women, 2011
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