46 DECEMBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Mark Wilson joined USAID’s Foreign Service as a crisis stabilization and governance officer in 2008. His career has taken him to Kenya, Afghanistan, Guinea, Uganda, Senegal, and Ethiopia, where he is currently posted. His dedication to public service was inspired early on while living in Accra, where his father was a Fulbright scholar. An internship with the U.S. Information Service in Cape Town— where he observed his first election and reported on the final amnesty hearings of that country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission—cemented his commitment to conflict prevention and good governance. Wilson told the Journal he is deeply grateful for the support of his wife and two teenage boys, acknowledging that without them, he couldn’t have pursued his passion for social justice and forging new relationships. AFSA Achievement and Contributions to the Association Award Harry Kopp AFSA’s Unofficial Historian Has Lessons for All of Us As the U.S. Foreign Service and the American Foreign Service Association mark this centennial year, understanding the past has never been more critical. Reflecting on the Foreign Service’s history, successes, and challenges offers guidance for the future, and no one has contributed more to this reflection than Harry Kopp. This year, Kopp was honored with the AFSA Achievement and Contributions to the Association Award in recognition of his unparalleled contributions to chronicling and preserving the legacy of the Foreign Service and AFSA. As far as AFSA history goes, Harry Kopp wrote the book. For real. He is the author of The Voice of the Foreign Service: A History of the American Foreign Service Association, published by AFSA’s FS Books in 2015. Kopp describes the book as an institutional biography of AFSA. For this project, Kopp spent countless hours unearthing documents and records from AFSA’s archives (before they were digitized), becoming the only person to have read every back issue of The Foreign Service Journal—from its earliest iteration as The American Consular Bulletin in 1919 to the present day. This year, in honor of the centennial for both AFSA and the Foreign Service, Kopp did a full revision and update of the text for a second edition, The Voice of the Foreign Service: A History of the American Foreign Service Association at 100, extending the history up through 2023. Kopp’s involvement with AFSA was not straightforward. After joining the Foreign Service in 1967, he was only briefly an AFSA member. “I believed that commissioned officers should not belong to a union,” he says, reflecting on his decision to let his membership lapse when AFSA became a union in 1973. After leaving the Foreign Service in 1985, however, he began to question his prior convictions. “The State Department and the Foreign Service, I realized, were different institutions with often different—and often divergent—interests. Through unionization, AFSA had come to speak for the Service,” he says. He also began writing about diplomacy. His Commercial Diplomacy and the National Interest, was published jointly by the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Business Council for International Understanding in 2004. And in collaboration with the late FSO Charles A. Gillespie, Kopp wrote Career Diplomacy, which was published by Georgetown University Press in 2008. Subsequently revised and updated by Kopp and former AFSA President John Naland, that guide to the Foreign Service is now in its fourth edition. In 2012 AFSA commissioned Kopp to write AFSA’s history. Over the following years, the FSJ turned repeatedly to Kopp for articles on various aspects of FS and AFSA history, and in the process, he became the unofficial AFSA historian. In addition to his extensive writing, Kopp was instrumental in convincing AFSA to digitize over a century’s worth of The Foreign Service Journal. “Now every article ever written for the FSJ is available to a global audience online,” he notes, reflecting on one of his proudest achievements. This digitization project has made the Journal’s content accessible to scholars, diplomats, and the public, preserving the legacy of the U.S. Foreign Service for generations to come. Harry Kopp The State Department and the Foreign Service, I realized, were different institutions with often different—and often divergent— interests. —HARRY KOPP
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