The MacMillan Center has enjoyed an action-packed spring semester. Numerous scholars and luminaries came to campus to speak. Mo Ibrahim, founder of CelTel International, one of Africa’s leading mobile telephone companies, gave the Coca-Coca World Fund at Yale Lecture on governance in Africa. It’s a topic he knows well. Ibrahim founded the Mo Ibrahim Foundation in 2006, which was launched to encourage good governance and leadership in Africa.
Kofi Annan and Henry Kissinger both spoke at the invitation of the Jackson Institute. Annan spoke at a Town Hall Meeting in February on a number of issues ranging from Security Council reform to the civil war in Syria and the development of Africa. In April, Kissinger spoke on American diplomacy at the opening for the second annual conference hosted by the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy. The Johnson Center is a program of the Jackson Institute, in collaboration with International Security Studies and the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.
Earlier this month, I joined a panel on the “Governance Best Practices” plenary session at the 23rd World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town. The theme was “Delivering on Africa’s Promise.” The WEF provided a platform for more than 1,000 regional and global leaders from business, government, and civil society to deepen the continent’s integration agenda and renew commitment to a sustainable path of growth and development. Topics included accelerating economic diversification, boosting strategic infrastructure, and unlocking Africa’s talent. To view the plenary session, please click the link to the left.
I am pleased to announce that Yale has received a grant of $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support the InterAsia Initiative here at the MacMillan Center. It will help build a intransregional scholars’ network that will rethink the traditional approaches to understanding Asian topics.
We’ve just completed the fifth season of The MacMillan Report, an online show that features the international research that Yale faculty are doing. Well over a hundred faculty have been interviewed. You can watch all of the shows at www.yale.edu/macmillanreport.
Please take a moment to read about some of our many events highlighted in this newsletter. You can also watch videos of several of the speakers through the links on the left.
My best wishes to you for an enjoyable summer.
— Ian Shapiro, Henry R. Luce Director