SIPANewS - School of International and Public Affairs - Columbia ...

SIPANEWS
VOLUME XXV No. 1 January 2012
Published semiannually by Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs
From the Dean
The quickening pace of globalization over the past two decades has undermined traditional national
identities and helped to promote ethnic, social, cultural, and even transnational solidarities that compete
for primacy. More than 200 million people worldwide now reside outside their country of birth.
Most of the rest of the world’s population now live in cities that are becoming more and more diverse.
As the essays in this issue of SIPA News demonstrate vividly, individual identities and attachments are
changing on a vast scale. In some places, of course, economic crises and political tensions have fueled a
revival of nationalist sentiment against outsiders, but in most of the world, urbanization, education, and
rising consumption are making people more cosmopolitan.
In many places, identity formation has become an object of policymaking for national as well as local
governments and of lobbying (or marketing) by social entrepreneurs of all kinds. Governments seek to
reshape the attitudes of potential foreign investors and end up creating or perpetuating national or local
mythologies, while cultural symbols and achievements, from ancient ruins and transnational religiosity
to pop music and football (soccer), are being deployed by governments and non-state actors alike to
create a sense of community (or of tension and confrontation) where it did not exist before. These are
powerful trends, pushed along by the rapid proliferation of new means of social communication.
SIPA, for example, is working hard to enhance and expand its own community of more than 18,000
alumni in 153 countries. A record number of SIPA alumni volunteered to serve on an enlarged Alumni
Council that now includes active alumni representatives from around the world. You can find SIPA via
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, in addition to the Morningside Post (the student run blog
space) and the SIPA web page, with its videos of timely lectures and conferences on the great public
policy challenges of our times.
SIPA graduates are also playing key roles in reaching out to all Columbia alumni. Karen Poniachik
(MIA ’90), for example, now heads the new Columbia Global Center in Santiago, Chile. Karen is
Chile’s former minister of energy and minister of mining. Ipek Cem-Taha (MIA ’93, BUS ’93), a wellknown
media personality in Turkey, directs the new Global Center in Istanbul. SIPA graduates also
play leading roles in Columbia University Clubs from Beijing to Bogotá. Whether you are a SIPA grad
or not, don’t hesitate to get connected.
John H. Coatsworth
Dean, School of International and Public Affairs
Interim Provost, Columbia University