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Your search for Global Policy & Economics returned 18 results

David Andelman
Executive Editor, World Policy Journal

David A. Andelman is Executive Editor of the World Policy Journal, a non-partisan source of progressive global policy analysis and thought leadership. In his role, David leads the transformation of the World Policy Institute's flagship quarterly, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in Fall 2008. He has served as a domestic and foreign correspondent for The New York Times in various posts in New York and Washington, as Southeast Asia bureau chief, based in Bangkok, then East European bureau chief, based in Belgrade. He then moved to CBS News where he served for seven years as Paris Correspondent. He has traveled through, and reported from, more than 50 countries. There followed service as a Washington correspondent for CNBC, news editor of Bloomberg News and Business Editor of the New York Daily News before coming to Forbes. He is the author of three books: The Peacemakers, published by Harper & Row; The Fourth World War, published by William Morrow, which he co-authored with the Count de Marenches, long-time head of French intelligence; and A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today, published in October 2007 by John Wiley & Sons. Mr. Andelman has written for such publications as Harpers, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Grolier Club.

Dan Ariely
Behavioral Economist; Author of best-selling book Predictably Irrational

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and visiting Professor at the MIT Media Lab. A behavioral economist, Ariely’s research has shown that we all succumb to irrationality in situations where rational thought is expected. He is an expert on how people actually act – and why they act – in all kinds of business and economic environments, and what this means for business innovation, strategy, marketing and pricing.

Ariely is the author of the new best-selling book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, (HarperCollins), currently on the New York Times best-seller list. In this groundbreaking work, Ariely presents often humorous and peculiar research findings that provide new insights into human behavior – that will help us make better decisions as individuals, as corporations, and as a society.

Ariely received a Ph.D. in marketing from Duke University, a Ph.D. and M.A. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.A. in psychology from Tel Aviv University.

He publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in economics, psychology, and business. His work has been featured in a variety of media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science, CNN, NPR, and he was interviewed for ABC's 20/20.

As a speaker, Ariely has a natural and unique talent for turning his research into vignettes that are fun, relevant and engaging, and for delivering the results in a genuinely charming, original, and often comical way.

George Ayittey
Recognized Authority on Africa and Economic Development

George Ayittey is a Ghanaian economist and widely recognized authority on political economics development in Africa. A distinguished economist in residence at American University and president of the Free Africa Foundation, George has championed the idea that “Africa is poor because she is not free.” True freedom never came to much of Africa after independence from colonial rule, says his first book, Africa Betrayed, which won the H.L. Mencken Award for “Best Book in 1992.”

In the analysis of Africa’s woes, George believes that a much greater emphasis should be placed on internal factors—bad leadership, corruption, military vandalism, and exploitation of the African people—rather than the external factors. George stresses "internal solutions" and initiatives that must come from Africa itself. He coined the expression: “African solutions for African problems.” Crying out against the “vampire states” and dysfunctional governments that, he believes, are the bedrock of problems of many troubled Africa states, George speaks passionately about the grassroots enterprises that will enable “Africans to take back Africa – one village at a time.”

His influential book Africa Unchained boldly proposes a program of development—a way forward—for Africa, investigating how Africa can modernize, build, and improve its indigenous institutions. George argues forcefully that Africa’s salvation lies in Africa itself – not inside the corridors of the U.S. Congress or the inner sanctum of the World Bank. Africa’s salvation lies in returning to and building upon its own indigenous institutions and traditions of free village markets and free trade—rather than continuing to use alien and exploitative economic structures. The critically acclaimed book has helped unleash a new wave of activism and optimism about Africa.

His recent efforts have focused on identifying profitable enterprises for “Cheetahs” —a new breed of Africans taking their futures into their own hands instead of waiting for politicians to empower them. His speech “Cheetahs vs. Hippos for Africa's Future: made a powerful impact at the TED Global Conference 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania.

George earned a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada; an M.A. University of Western Ontario, London, Canada and a B.Sc. Univ. of Ghana, Legon, Ghana.

Yochai Benkler
Law Professor and Internet Scholar

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society. Since the 1990s he has been a major theorist of the role of commons and radically decentralized individual action and collaboration in the production of information, knowledge and culture, as well as the organization of infrastructure.

Yochai’s work traverses a wide range of disciplines and sectors. It is taught in schools of law, business, and information sciences, and in departments of communications, media studies, computer science, economics, and political science. In real world applications, his work has been widely discussed in both the business sector and civil society.

His recent book, The Wealth of Networks (2006), and his earlier work, have won him awards from civil rights and social movement organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for 2007 and Public Knowledge's IP3 Award in 2006, and was called a “reveille for netizens" by The Times of London and “Internet utopianism for grown-ups” by The American Prospect. At the same time, Wealth of Networks has been called “perhaps the best work yet about the fast moving, enthusiast-driven Internet” by the Financial Times, and was named the best business book about the future in 2006 by Strategy and Business. His work has been the subject of reports in The Economist, BusinessWeek, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as general publications like the New York Times and Time magazine, exploring the implications of the emergence of networked information economy.

Stewart Brand
Author, Futurist, Activist and Visionary

Since he emerged in the counter-culture sixties, Stewart Brand has been a force in the world for giving access to the information needed to make the planet a better place.

He is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, a scenario strategy consulting business and part of the Monitor Group, where he works with leading companies and public institutions on their futures.

Mr. Brand is the president of The Long Now Foundation. Brand is well known for founding, editing and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85), which received a National Book Award for the 1972 issue. In 1984, he founded The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 11,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre.

Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity, since 1989. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting advisor to Ecotrust, the Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forests from Alaska to San Francisco.

Recently, he has advocated nuclear power as a responsible strategy to address power demand in the face of the stark reality of global warming. His seminal essay on this topic, entitled Environmental Heresies, appeared in the MIT Technology Review in May 2005.

Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now in 1999, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built in 1994, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT in 1987, and Two Cybernetic Frontiers on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science in 1974. It had the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers.

Larry Brilliant
Pioneering Physician and Philanthropist

Dr. Larry Brilliant is executive director of Google.org. An online pioneer and veteran philanthropist, Larry oversees the philanthropic wing of the leading Internet search engine, which has committed more than $1 billion to philanthropic activities. A self-described social change "addict," Larry recently won the prestigious TEDPrize, which grants recipients $100,000 and one wish to change the world. In February 2006, Larry announced his wish: to form the International Networked System for Total Early Disease Detection (INSTEDD), an international non-governmental network that will detect early signs of emerging, global health crises, such as pandemic bird flu.

Peter Cappelli
Leading Authority on Managing Workplace Talent, Professor of Management, Wharton School

Recognized as one of the world’s most important authorities on human capital, Dr. Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. His work focuses on human resource practices, talent and performance management, and public policy related to employment. He advises to organizations on the development of managerial and executive talent by helping his clients better understand how careers and career paths have changed, how these changes require companies to think about managing talent from a more strategic perspective, and how individuals should now think about managing their own careers. Peter was named one of the 25 most influential people in the field of human capital by Vault.com and one of the top 100 people in the field of recruiting by Recruiter.com. Additionally, he was elected to the National Academy of Human Resources, and—in 2004—named editor of the Academy of Management Perspectives.

Sir Richard Dearlove
Renowned Expert on Global Intelligence and Security

Sir Richard Dearlove has established himself as a scarce but in-demand commentator on the new century’s security threats. Only since his retirement as the Chief of British Intelligence in 2004 has he been able to dispose of his hard-won knowledge and experience for the benefit of private audiences. He still keeps an inquisitive media at arms length and refuses to write about his extraordinary career.

Sir Richard joined British Intelligence as a very young front-line officer in 1966 and worked extensively in Africa, behind the Iron Curtain, and in Europe. He experienced the Cold War at first hand and established his reputation quickly as a skillful spymaster. In his recent book, George Tenet describes him as the "spies spy."

Dearlove served as the British Intelligence representative in Washington during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, moving on to fill all of the key senior management roles in MI6, before his appointment in 1999 as ‘C’ (as the Chief of MI6 is known in British Government circles). He sensed early the changing nature of Intelligence work in the post-Cold War world and was radical in his approach to its restructuring, particularly in countering the growing terrorist threat.

At the center of the infamous leaked ‘Downing Street Memo,’ Sir Richard has had an insider’s view of key events and developments – 9/11, the continuing threat from Al Qaeda, Iraq, Afghanistan, the disarmament of Libya, the Iranian nuclear program—and he was of course an interlocutor of some of the leading players. His 38 years in Intelligence, and more than a decade in a leadership role, have given him a unique perspective on this closed and misinterpreted world.

Sir Richard is currently the Master of Pembroke College Cambridge, founded in 1347, one of Cambridge University’s leading teaching and research Colleges. He advises widely on risk and national security. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of AIG, senior advisor to the Monitor Group and Chairman of Ascot Underwriting at Lloyd’s of London. He was knighted by the Queen in 2001.

Ben Heineman
Former Chief Counsel, GE, Senior Fellow, Harvard JFK School

Ben W. Heineman, Jr. was General Electric’s Senior Vice President-General Counsel from 1987 until 2003, and then Senior Vice President for Law and Public Affairs from 2004 until his retirement at the end of 2005. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Distinguished Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession and Senior Counsel to the law firm of Wilmer Hale.

A Rhodes Scholar, editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Mr. Heineman was assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and practiced constitutional law prior to his service at GE.

His new book, High Performance with High Integrity, was published in June, 2008 by the Harvard Business Press. He writes and lectures frequently on business, law and international affairs. He is also the author of books on British race relations and the American presidency. In 2007, he served on the Independent Review Panel on the World Bank Group’s Department of Institutional Integrity (the Volcker Panel).

Heineman is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Science, Technology and Law and recipient of the American Lawyer’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award of Board Member Magazine. He serves on the boards of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Transparency International-USA. He recently delivered the Oliver Smithies Lectures at Oxford University on the global anti-corruption agenda.

John Kao
Innovation Strategist and Practitioner, Transformation Catalyst

John Kao is an authority on the intersecting subjects of corporate innovation and transformation, design, and the future of business. Dubbed a “serial innovator” and “Mr. Creativity” by The Economist, he has made a career out of helping organizations go from “getting” the importance of innovation to “getting innovation done.” John has worked with a wide range of Fortune 500 companies, startups, and government agencies around practical issues of strategic innovation and organizational transformation. Other nicknames he acquired from his clients include “the Innovation Sherpa” and “the Innovation Guru.”

In addition to his other accomplishments, John is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, Tony-nominated producer, and business pioneer. For 14 years, he taught at Harvard Business School, where he developed courses, lectures, and executive seminars that addressed the topics of entrepreneurship, venture management, innovation, leadership, and organizational change. He has also been a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Innovation at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

John's new book on the global dynamics of innovation is called Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters and How We Can Get It Back. It pays particular attention to what America’s innovation posture needs to be in a world in which many countries are racing for the innovation high ground, such as Singapore, Denmark, Dubai, China, and Brazil.

Joel Kurtzman
Author, Advisor on Global Competitiveness

Joel Kurtzman is a noted author and advisor to leading organizations around the world in the areas of social capital, governance, and assessing and managing global risk. His expertise is highlighted by his long, successful career forecasting global events, from oil-price shocks to the dollar’s ups and downs. Joel’s vantage point in understanding and relating business implications comes from the fact that he has held both positions of senior strategic business leader and journalist responsible for reporting and translating business issues. Whether presenting to business leaders or government officials, Joel presents his ideas with one overarching concept in mind: provide thought leadership that creates value and sustainable growth.

Michael Porter
Seminal Authority on Competitive Strategy

Michael E. Porter is indisputably the foremost authority on modern competitive strategy.

Generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field, Professor Porter has been identified in a variety of rankings and surveys as the world’s most influential thinker on management and competitiveness. His expertise spans competitive strategy, the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions, and the application of competitive principles to social problems such as health care, the environment, and corporate responsibility.

He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School. A University professorship is the highest professional recognition that can be awarded to a Harvard faculty member. In 2001, Harvard Business School and Harvard University jointly created the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, dedicated to furthering Professor Porter’s work.

He is the author of 17 books and over 125 articles, including his seminal works: “The Competitive Advantage of Nations,” which has guided economic policy in countless nations and regions; and “Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors,” in its 63rd printing and which has been translated into 19 languages. His book "Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results" (2006; Harvard Business Press) is influencing thinking and practice not only in the United States but numerous other countries. "On Competition" (Harvard Business Press) was re-issued with new and expanded content in October 2008. Professor Porter has received six McKinsey Awards for the best Harvard Business Review article of the year, including an unprecedented four first-place awards.

Professor Porter has served as a strategy advisor to top management in numerous leading U.S. and international companies, among them Caterpillar, DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Royal Dutch Shell, Scotts Miracle-Gro, SYSCO, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. He currently serves on the board of directors of Thermo Fisher Scientific Corporation and Parametric Technology Corporation, and is senior strategy advisor to the Boston Red Sox.

He is actively involved in assisting governments and advising national leaders in the U.S. and abroad, including Armenia, Ireland, India, Kazakhstan, Libya, Nicaragua, Portugal, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.
The Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development is based on his thinking about economic development for groups of neighboring countries.

Extending his work on competitiveness to states, provinces, and other sub-national regions, Professor Porter led the Clusters of Innovation project, which developed a framework for economic policy in U.S. regions. In addition, he is dedicated to addressing the relationship between competition and important social issues such as poverty, health care delivery and the natural environment. He has devoted growing attention toward economically distressed communities and poor and developing countries.

Professor Porter founded three major non-profit organizations: The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and FSG-Social Impact Advisors. He also currently serves on the Princeton University Board of Trustees.

He received a B.S.E. with high honors in aerospace and mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He received an M.B.A. with high distinction in 1971 from the Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar, and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1973.

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Professor Porter lived and traveled throughout the world as the son of a career Army officer. At Princeton, he played intercollegiate golf and was the New England champion. He was named to the 1968 NCAA Golf All-American Team. After graduating from college, Professor Porter served through the rank of captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. He maintains a long-time interest in the esthetics and business of music and art, having worked on the problems of strategy with arts organizations and aspiring musicians. Professor Porter has two daughters and resides in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Iqbal Quadir
Entrepreneur, Founder of GrameenPhone, Philanthropist

Iqbal Z. Quadir is the founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which promotes bottom-up entrepreneurship in developing countries.

Quadir is an accomplished entrepreneur who writes about the critical roles of entrepreneurship and innovations in improving the economic and political conditions in low-income countries. Quadir is often credited as having been the earliest observer of the potential for mobile phones to transform low-income countries. His work has been recognized by leaders and organizations worldwide as a new and successful approach to sustainable poverty alleviation.

For four years, Quadir taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, focusing on the impact of technologies in the politics and economics of developing countries. In 2005, he moved to MIT. His particular research interest is in the democratizing effects of technologies in developing countries with some of his initial thoughts published in the Summer/Fall 2002 issue of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs.

In 2006, Quadir co-founded the journal Innovations, published by MIT Press, which highlights private efforts in public service. Quadir spent most of the 1990s founding and building GrameenPhone Ltd., which has now become Bangladesh’s largest telephone company, with net income of $250 million in 2006. His childhood exposure to the conditions in rural Bangladesh combined with his later venture capital experience in New York led Quadir to recognize that the ensuing digital revolution could facilitate the introduction of telephony to 100 million people living in rural Bangladesh. In 1994, he formally launched this effort by convincing angel investors to establish a New York based company, Gonofone Development Corp (meaning “phones for the masses”) to help him organize what subsequently became known as GrameenPhone.

Quadir’s vision of a large-scale, commercial project that could serve all urban areas and 68,000 villages in Bangladesh led him to organize a global consortium including Telenor AS, the primary telephone company in Norway and an affiliate of micro-credit pioneer Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. He attracted these investors by complementing his vision with a practical distribution scheme whereby small entrepreneurs, backed by loans from Grameen Bank, could retail telephone services to their surrounding communities. With the support of these investors, GrameenPhone, established in late 1996, started building a new cellular network and providing services to the public soon thereafter. To date, it has built the largest cellular network in the country with investments of nearly $2 billion and a subscriber base of nearly 20 million. Its rural program is already available in more than 60,000 villages, providing telephone access to more than 100 million people, while helping to create 250,000 micro-entrepreneurs in these villages.

Quadir appeared on CBC, CNN and PBS and was profiled in feature articles in The Economist, Boston Globe, Financial Times and The New York Times, and in several books. The World Economic Forum, based in Geneva, Switzerland, selected him as a “Global Leader for Tomorrow.” In 2006, Quadir was awarded the prestigious Science, Education and Economic Development (SEED) award in Bangladesh. In spring 2007, Wharton Alumni Magazine selected Quadir for its list of 125 Influential People and Ideas on the occasion of the 125-year celebration of the Wharton School. His work is referred to in 20 books and is prominently featured in the 2007 book, You Can Hear Me Now, by Nicholas Sullivan (Jossey-Bass).

Earlier in his career, Quadir served as a vice president of Atrium Capital Corp., an associate of Security Paciﬁc Merchant Bank, both in New York, and a consultant to the World Bank in Washington DC. He received an MBA and an MA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a BS with honors from Swarthmore College.

Peter Schwartz
World-Renowned Futurist and Strategist

Peter Schwartz is co-founder and current chairman of the Global Business Network (GBN), the world’s preeminent member organization focused on scenario thinking and planning, where he leads programs for corporations, governments, and non-profit institutions. His current research and scenario work encompasses energy resources and the environment, technology, life sciences, telecommunications, media and entertainment, aerospace, and national security. A prolific author, Peter’s most recent book, Inevitable Surprises, offers a provocative look at the complex forces at play in the world today and their implications for business and society. His first book, The Art of the Long View, is considered a seminal publication on scenario planning and has been translated into multiple languages. Peter addresses many different audiences in corporate board rooms, at conferences on issues such as global warming and human life extension, and at the World Economic Forum. He led the scenario team at Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980s, where many of the scenario tools were pioneered. He has even lent his futurist skills to Hollywood as a script consultant on such films as The Minority Report, Deep Impact, Sneakers, and War Games.

Anne-Marie Slaughter
Dean, Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Expert on International Relations and Law

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and the Bert G. Kerstetter Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Drawing from rich interdisciplinary expertise, she writes, speaks and teaches broadly on geopolitical shifts, global governance, international criminal law, and foreign policy.

Dean Slaughter came to the Wilson School in 2000 from Harvard Law School, where she was a Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law and Director of the International Legal Studies Program. She has the unique distinction of being an accomplished expert in both fields of global politics and international law. She is an astute observer of the political and economic emergence of China and India.

In addition to her research, Anne-Marie speaks regularly to businesses, governments, academic audiences, and civic groups. She is a former President of the American Society of International Law and currently serves on the boards of a number of organizations, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the New America Foundation, and the Canadian Institute for International Governance Innovation. She is also a member of the Citigroup Economic and Political Strategies Advisory Group, and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a frequent commentator on television programs including Charlie Rose, On the Record with Greta van Susteren, and CBS Evening News.

She has written for publications including The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and the International Herald Tribune. She contributes regularly to the America Abroad Blog on TPMCafe.com. Her most recent book, The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith With Our Values In A Dangerous World explores the essential principles and values that define America, and how we have lost our way with those values in the modern world. She sets forth a bold vision of an America that upholds its values abroad as well as at home. Her previous book, A New World Order, was hailed by Foreign Affairs as a "major new statement about global governance." In it, she identifies transnational networks of government officials as an increasingly important component of global governance and maps out how the power nation states can be counterbalanced with effective networked diplomacy and governance.

Anne-Marie was raised in Charlottesville, Virginia by her American father and Belgian mother. She graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1980. She received her M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees in international relations from Oxford in 1982 and 1992, respectively, and her law degree from Harvard Law School, cum laude, in 1985. She continued at Harvard after graduation as a researcher for her academic mentor, the distinguished international lawyer Abram Chayes. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she taught at the University of Chicago Law School.

Steve Weber
Political Economist and Critically Acclaimed Author

Steve Weber is professor of political science at UC Berkeley, where he directs the multi-disciplinary Institute of International Studies. His research and consulting work consistently breaks new ground in areas as diverse as health care telecommunications, U.S. foreign and intelligence policy, software markets, and the emerging geopolitical issues of the 21st century, particularly around Sino-American relations. His advisory work has benefited organizations as diverse as IBM, the CIA, The Ford Foundation, Chiron, and the Library of Congress. His most recent book, The Success of Open Source, is an internationally acclaimed study of the political economy of the open source software community (2004 Winner of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award Competition, Computer and Information Science).

Ethan Zuckerman
Fellow, The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law; Founder, Global Voices

Ethan Zuckerman is an activist, academic and engineer whose work focuses on technology in the developing world. In 2004, he co-founded Global Voices, an award-winning international citizen media network. Global Voices maintains an online newsroom, which reports from over 100 nations via weblogs and a translation network that publishes content in 12 languages. Global Voices offers trainings in citizen medium podcasting and videocasting throughout the developing world, and runs an advocacy project that supports free speech online. Ethan became a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in January, 2003. His work at Berkman focuses on the impact of technology on the developing world. His current projects include a study of global media attention, research on the use of weblogs and other social software in the developing world, and the use of web 2.0 technologies by activists.

Prior to his work at Harvard, Ethan was involved with founding several internet start-ups. He helped co-found Tripod, an early pioneer in the web community space. Ethan served as Tripod's first graphic designer and developer, and later as VP of Business Development and VP of Research and Development. After Tripod's acquisition by Lycos in 1998, Ethan served as General Manager of the Angelfire.com division and as a member of the Lycos mergers and acquisitions team. Ethan then went on to found Geekcorps, a non profit group that provided technology assitance to governments and companies in the developing world.

Ethan graduated from Williams College with a BA in Philosophy in 1993. In 1993-4, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Legon, Ghana and the National Theatre of Ghana, studying ethnomusicology and percussion.

Ethan was given the 2002 Technology in Service of Humanity Award by MIT's Technology Review Magazine and named to the TR100, TR's list of innovators under the age of 35. In 2004, Ethan was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.

He lives the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts with his wife Rachel. He serves on the boards of regional and international organizations that focus on technology and education, including on the sub-boards of the Open Society Institute's Information Program and US Program.

Paul van Zyl
Global Leader and Advisor on Transitional Justice & Human Rights

Paul van Zyl is a co-founder and the Executive Vice-President of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), an organization which assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. The ICTJ was founded in 2001 in response to a growing recognition that facing legacies of past abuse and injustice is crucial to promoting human rights around the world. By helping to address past crimes, transitional justice can help to break vicious cycles of violence and reduce the likelihood of future conflict.

Mr. van Zyl has acted as an adviser and consultant to human rights organizations, governments, international organizations, and foundations on transitional justice issues in numerous countries. From 1995 to 1998, he served as Executive Secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, helping to establish the Commission, develop its structure and modus operandi and manage its operations. He has also worked as a researcher for the Goldstone Commission, as a department head at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, and as an associate at Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York.

Throughout his career, Mr. van Zyl has received a number of academic and professional honors. He has been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, joining a group of extraordinary leaders under 40 who dedicate their time and energy to working towards a better global future. He was also selected as a TED Fellow, and was named as one of New York’s “Top 15 Lawyers Under 40” by New York Lawyer Magazine.

Mr. van Zyl also currently serves as director of New York University School of Law’s Transitional Justice Program, and teaches law both in New York and Singapore. He obtained a BA and an LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and an LLM in International Law from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Following these studies, he was accepted into the prestigious Hauser Global Scholars Program at New York University School of Law, where he completed a LLM in Corporate Law.

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