The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 17 Site of the Month Diverse Diplomacy Leaders Speaker Series diversediplomacy.com G eorgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy is hosting an online speaker series fea- turing diverse diplomacy leaders who share insights about their careers and about diversity and inclusion at the State Department. These senior diplomats also answer questions from students considering careers in foreign policy. The series was launched in December 2018 by Rusk Fellow Caroline Savage. It’s part of ISD’s mandate to connect students with foreign policy professionals to better understand the opportunities and challenges of a foreign policy career. The series aims to include a diverse representation of foreign policy profes- sionals from different generational, gender, religious and ethnic lines, in order to encourage young people from diverse communities to pursue careers in foreign policy. Speakers have included Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie Chung, Ambassador (ret.) James Irwin Gadsden, Ambassador (ret.) Lino Gutierrez, Ambassador (ret.) Linda Thomas-Greenfield and, most recently, Ambassador Dereck Hogan. War, is the oldest dissent reporting mechanism in the U.S. government, the report notes. “Using the dissent channel can carry a degree of stigma,” POGO reports, stat- ing that it’s only used five to 10 times a year. “To some, it signifies a failure to effectively advocate a position through normal channels.” POGO urges the executive branch and Congress to improve dissent channels where they exist, and to create new ones at agencies that don’t have them. All agencies with dissent channels should offer an independent office that receives and assesses the policy dis- sent; include a formal method to appeal management’s response; and track and provide the public, at least annually, a publicly releasable summary of the dis- sent and its resolution, POGO continues. The project also recommends that agencies offer awards to employees for constructive dissent, noting AFSA’s annual dissent awards. The Project on Government Oversight is a nonpartisan independent watch- dog that exposes waste, corruption and abuse of power. It champions reforms to promote a more ethical and accountable federal government. USAID Fights Future Pandemics T he U.S. Agency for Interna- tional Development on Sept. 30 announced the launch of a five-year, $100 million project to prevent future pandemics. Strategies to Prevent Spillover (STOP Spillover) will attempt to anticipate and address threats posed by emerging viral zoonotic diseases that might jump from animals to humans. It will play a large part in the implementation of the U.S. government’s Global Health Security Strategy, issued by the White House in 2019. Experts from Tufts University and 12 partner institutions will work to strengthen the capacity of high-risk countries “to gain and use essential knowledge about how viruses emerge; collaborate with them to identify human behaviors that lead to outbreaks; and help them prepare their public health systems to contain spread during a pan- demic,” according to an Oct. 7 report in Tufts Now. “Over the last five years alone, more pandemics have emerged than in the previous 15 years,” said Saul Tzipori, a professor of microbiology and infectious diseases at Tuft’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. Tzipori, who will be a lead researcher on the project, told Tufts Now that rural areas where people “live near wildlife are more likely to see diseases transfer through infected food and shared drinking and bathing water.” Program director Deborah Kochevar, a senior fellow at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, told Tufts Now that the project will “focus on what people can do differently in their daily routines to stop infectious diseases.” “Considering more than 70 percent of emerging infectious diseases originate from animals, STOP Spillover is a critical next step in the evolution of USAID’s work to understand and address the risks posed by zoonotic diseases that can ‘spillover’—or be transmitted—from animals to humans,” according to a Sept. 30 USAID press release announcing the project.