On 21 March 2017, CEIA and Conciliation Resources held a stimulating expert workshop in London, involving 21 experts and practitioners, on the role of empathy in engaging non-state armed groups.
Matt Waldman
Our director, Matt Waldman, explains why empathy matters in international affairs, and the rationale for establishing ceia. Why Empathy? Lack of empathy is an important factor behind large-scale violence and major foreign policy errors. Mistakes made by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, were underpinned by misjudgements about others…. Read more »
Conventional approaches to international challenges are not succeeding. Read our briefing paper, The Software of Geopolitics, to gain insights from 20 leading experts on the critical but long neglected issue of empathy in international affairs. Serious efforts to understand what’s happening inside the minds of others could help reduce violent conflict and get foreign policy-making back on track.
Check out our October-November 2016 publications by CEIA experts that address a range of critical contemporary issues.
On 20th October 2016, CEIA Director Matt Waldman gave a key note address at the Center for the Study of Crises and International Conflicts (CECRI) at the University of Louvain-le-Neuve.
Ellie Geranmayeh is an Iran expert and Policy Fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. In this Insight Ms Geranmayeh discusses the vital of role of empathy and leadership in helping to secure the Iran nuclear deal in April 2015.
This Insight, by Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, explores failures of empathy by Putin and the West in relation to the Ukraine crisis. He argues that while empathy cannot be the sole basis for foreign policy-making, it has real utility for decision-makers, especially in understanding ground-level political movements.
Danielle Goldstone is Senior Advisor to Ashoka, a non-governmental organization that identifies and invests in leading social entrepreneurs. In this Insight she argues that empathy is a powerful tool for identifying effective, collaborative and sustainable solutions to social problems.
Jonathan Steele is a former Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Guardian and the author of several books on international relations, including ‘Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq’. In this podcast, which is also the basis for a CEIA Insight, he argues that lack of empathy in the 2003 intervention in Iraq had disastrous consequences for… Read more »
Gabrielle Rifkind is Director of the Middle East programme at Oxford Research Group, and a practising psychotherapist and group analyst. In this podcast she discusses the critical role of empathy in peacemaking. Her remarks were made at a CEIA expert consultation on empathy in foreign affairs hosted by Chatham House on 29 June 2016.