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.

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.

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