In this podcast, APUS Doctoral Program Professor, Dr. Elise Carlson-Rainer, speaks to Aaron Spencer – a senior official with the United Nations Development Program in Kabul. Aaron offers his expertise on the security and rebuilding challenges he faces in Afghanistan and other post-conflict areas around the world.
In this exclusive podcast, you’ll learn:
- Some key points related to a career in international affairs and international security
- How diplomats and officials overseas strategically focus their work
- How international security affects our own homeland security
- The difficulties of combining security and development
- Guidance for doctoral students and how they can utilize their education for a future career in international relations
Below is a transcript of the discussion between Dr. Elise Carlson-Rainer and Aaron Spencer.
Elise: Hello everyone and welcome. I am delighted to have Aaron Spencer with us today. Quickly, my name is Elise Carlson-Rainier and I am doctoral faculty with the university and specifically working with doctoral studies in strategic intelligence and security and global studies. As this is an applied program working with working professionals in international affairs, I thought it would be a wonderful experience and wonderful lessons for us to talk with Aaron Spencer today.
Get started on your Global Security Doctoral Degree at American Military University. |
He has had a comprehensive career in diplomacy and international affairs working with the United Nations Development Program most recently in Kabul Afghanistan. He’s worked across Latin America and countries such as Colombia Brazil and all of Central America with the Rockefeller Foundation. Aaron has worked with the 100 Resilient Cities program mostly in Central and South America. He and I worked together we were diplomats and the Department of State and he was working in oceans and environment and science in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs in program design administration. So, it’s just a thrill to have Aaron here today to really talk about what a career in very diverse sectors of international affairs looks like. So
Aaron, welcome to you. And I thought we could just start by talking about your most current work and what it looks like in Afghanistan with the U.N. right now.
Aaron: Great thanks for having me Elise. Yeah it’s interesting to hear my some of my resume there, but it’s been a pretty diverse experience that I’ve had and the diversity continues with the experience that I’m beginning to have in Afghanistan. I’m working as a an international consultant, program design consultant in Afghanistan, and what that means is I’m working specifically at this point on a program on the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan and that’s basically an international trust fund that has been set up that is administered by U.N. D.P. To provide support to the police force in Afghanistan.
So, working together with the United States government and a number of other partner governments like Japan and Germany and Korea as well as the EU you U.N.D.P. administers this large trust fund that basically controls the payroll functions for the 150,000 police officers that make up the national police force in Afghanistan. The program also has a police capacity building component of the program where I’m specifically focused. Working with police to strengthen their policing skills working on everything from working within the Ministry of the interior on institutional strengthening so helping to strengthen the ministry and everything from its monitored for evaluation to its audit capacities to its budgeting and its strategic planning. So it’s really soup to nuts, helping the ministry and then helping to strengthen the 150,000 police that are engaged on the ground within the country of Afghanistan.
Elise: That’s great. That’s such comprehensive diverse, big picture work. My question you generally is whether you’re in Panama, Ukraine, Afghanistan and you’re there for a relatively short amount of time, how do you strategically focus your work?
Aaron: You know that’s really interesting, Elise. Whether it’s Afghanistan or a prior role for example, I was with the High Commissioner for Refugees UNHCR in Panama as an example. Each of these locations you go into it imagine being an emergency room doctor right. Where you’re having to come into a situation where somebody has a particular issue and you’re having to assess what the problem is. What the problem could be. And where is the opportunity to ameliorate the problem or situation. So as an international consultant particularly working in the areas that I focus, my three primary areas which I’m hired for within the U.N. include strategic planning, a monitoring evaluation of the assessment role, and then outreach communications documents. So really helping different organizations tell their stories to their stakeholders and their countries in a compelling way.
So as you go into these situations, I’m also dealing with different subject matters and my particular background as a subject matter expert is in development with a focus on natural resource management. The funny thing is I have not really worked in this space in the last two years since leaving the Department of State and then the Rockefeller Foundation where I was focused on urban resilience. I then branched out on my own as an international consultant. And it’s been very, very interesting and also very challenging but to your question specifically as you get on the ground you have to look into your toolkit and say OK what can I do to help fix this situation. There are many times where I would be hired in my terms of reference for a particular situation. For example in eastern Ukraine in the post reconstruction effort that’s going on there a post conflict area, I was hired to do a program document for you U.N.D.P. And that’s basically to create basically a hundred page document that articulates the activities and the program results to date.
I found when I got there that that’s not exactly what they needed. As we started to go into the design of the document, we recognize there were still a lot of articulation around the activities, the monitoring the terms of evaluation frameworks that would normally identify the wins that would later be turned into a communications exercise for example, just weren’t there. So there was work that I had to do really around strategy and strategic design and strategic planning. In order to go into situations like this, you have to not only have an understanding of program and program design you have to be willing to ask tough questions. Go in with humility and recognize that you’re new to a situation and new to a particular environment, and invite people to help you solve a problem and solve the challenges. I think that’s been the most fascinating part of this role as I work around the world.
Elise: I thought we could talk about the nexus between international development and security. So we’re working with doctoral students in global security studies and really learning how to articulate and understand, we’re getting a lot of theoretical knowledge in the classroom, but how do you see in a pragmatic day to day real world what’s kind of at stake. What does security in Afghanistan how does that impact regional and global security.
Aaron: Well you know it’s interesting, I think as we look at an active conflict like Afghanistan and we look at eastern Ukraine as sort of a post conflict, although there is technically a conflict. It’s not as active in the sense that we have a line and people aren’t generally crossing that line. There’s still development that’s been going on. I would say that the inherent challenge of development during a conflict or a post conflict is you have a number of different external variables that inherently make the development activity more difficult to achieve. And this activity could be everything from infrastructure, it could be health, it could be working with the police force as I spoke about with in Afghanistan. The idea is working in that program environment. You have a group of people that either is in conflict or just coming out of conflict and dealing with everything from reconciliation that goes along with that, to trying to get their systems back up and running, to power shifts internally that have taken place between the existing local power and national powers that are there.
And so you have to take all of these variables that are sometimes changing by the week or even by the day as you’re starting to plan for interventions. And it’s really tough. I think the challenge in the security space and particularly Afghanistan a country that’s been basically within some kind of civil war for the last 40 years, is it’s extremely difficult to realize not only short term gains but longer term gains as well. That’s to say like, I’ve been actually fascinated with the amount of work that I’ve seen that have been done at the strategic level to rebuild the Ministry for example, to work on a gender integration National Plan for example, working at that level all the way down to just simply providing cops with uniforms and food that isn’t moldy, right. So helping frontline service delivery all the way back to the strategic planning that happens, and both of those things both bottom level and top level are difficult to do when the security situation is what it is.
I would say another thing that I noticed as a development professional you know security and development are two different things. Just in, if we could talk about police for example, a number of the police forces are being trained and worked directly with the military. Recognizing that those are two different jobs community policing partnerships. Day to day working with people as a police officer is very different than someone coming from a military background with a military a role for a particular strategic objective that needs to get done. And so, even the stakeholders that are engaged in not only identifying the challenge by identifying the solution because it’s an active conflict zone, you have professionals that are coming in with very different skill sets and frankly mandates. And so, when we combine security and then also development, it can get a little difficult because like I said people come in with different objectives and different backgrounds.
Elise: It’s a really complicated space and so on the note of working with police and working with security officials, give us a sense of what that’s like in Colombia or Afghanistan to work towards a peace process with the security sector officials or police who have potentially themselves been involved in the conflict.
Aaron: You know it’s really challenging to imagine again being a consultant coming into a space where I don’t have a particular expertise in Afghanistan or even in Colombia, a place where I’ve spent a lot amount of time like I don’t have good situational awareness of what’s happening in Medellin in Colombia over the last 30 years since the days of Pablo Escobar all the way to now. Recognizing that in Medellin for example one out of four people in this city has been displaced due to violence. So recognize that you don’t fully have an understanding and you never really will and you’re around people who do have a much better understanding of the local environment. Again, I go back to the idea of your tools in your tool kit.
Taking a step back and asking yourself OK what are some questions, some probing questions, I can ask here to identify the roots of challenges and to identify where the real opportunity exists. And when I say opportunity, I’m specifically leading around political will. So one of the questions that I ask when I go into any program design situation is what’s the political will of the local government or the national government. And I get very specific. We go and we look at each of the set of benchmarks. So, political will for me for example is identified as the government putting its money where its mouth is, or providing technical support or staffing or even office space.
So, I go into programs around the world that’s one of the first things that I look at is really trying to identify. There’s one thing to be at a ribbon cutting ceremony and to smile and to take pictures. Something I like to tell people. It’s like a party. Everyone likes to get invited to a party but nobody wants to stay to do the dishes. OK staying to do the dishes after the lights are down. And where is the local government or national government or any partner really putting in their cost share to help make something happen. And if it’s there. I see that as a demonstration of political will. If it’s not there, there isn’t political will there. We have to ask ourselves why are we actually doing this or is someone else doing this. And that leads to a whole, it’s like peeling an onion in any situation. So that’s been what’s been a really interesting learning on my part around the world and it’s been whether it’s Afghanistan or Ukraine or Colombia. That’s usually where I start. Before we even go to look at the design of a program whether something is or isn’t working. It’s one of the first questions that I ask and I usually lead a team through to identify sort of where things are going.
Elise: When we used to work in diplomacy years ago, it was very common for any given program to have a very long term goal and strategy that that would not necessarily have short term impact or let alone be measurable. And so I’m wondering you know when you go into these very complicated geopolitical situations, when you leave, how do you define programmatic success but then also how do you define programmatic success but then also how do you define personal what you hope to achieve when you go into these kind of short term programs and projects?
Aaron: Well you know whether it’s an assessment as I did in Turkey for example, I looked at the effects of the recent migrant and refugee crisis from Syria and Afghanistan as they took one of the routes up through Serbia and Macedonia eventually to Germany. Looking at small communities or working with UNHCR for example in Panama, I helped to design a comprehensive refugee response framework. Really identifying some activities that can be done in the short term and getting governments to commit to those activities on time bound basis. The idea for me is if I’m able to connect he made a good point here around very difficult a lot of political commitments at a higher level.
Well how does that translate on the ground? Success for me and usually the kind that I’m working for, is to be able to connect the dots from those lofty goals down to tangible activities that are going to take place on the ground in a time bound way that can be measured and are strategic. So this goes back to I mean maybe some of the students have had this now in other courses where you’re looking at tools of the trade to work in this space whether it’s performance monitoring frameworks, log frames, stakeholder mapping all of these different planning exercise are really useful. And that’s because when you get into these situations it’s like jumping into a really complex situation with people who’ve been working for a long time and sometimes they need to step back and just be able to clearly connect the dots as to what they’re doing and how it relates back to their overall goals and missions, and you’ll be surprised like just these simple exercises that clearly articulate what they’re trying to do in the short medium term and how it connects back to there.
Oftentimes it’s a theory of change. It’s really not a paper exercise. And I’ve found myself very surprised that it’s been very fulfilling to work with colleagues around the world to take that step back to make that articulation, because what happens is you find the canary in the coal mine that I’ve found is really around outreach materials. So one thing I’d recommend to students is to go online and go to websites, look at program descriptions, look at activities and achievements to date, see if you can connect the dots between what the strategic mission level that 10,000 foot level goal is to the activities or happen. The projects that are clearly able to articulate that and point to their successes generally have really defined programs and activities, and M&E monitoring evaluation systems in place that help them to articulate that. If you go to a project web site or you go to a government website and they’re really unable to articulate or they make that jump from we want global security and peace in a place like Ukraine or Afghanistan, then they immediately jump to pictures that show a training and 50 people train. There’s a lot in between that space and if it’s not really being articulated that well then that’s usually the canary in the coal mine. And I find that fascinating and very interesting to work with governments and work with international organizations to help solve some of these problems.
Elise: Thank you. That’s really interesting to hear your take on how to attack those challenges from kind of a pragmatic what can I do as an individual practitioner and the long term goals. As you know, I teach in the doctoral program about human rights and security in the general international relations sphere and that’s my own expertise in human rights and diplomacy. And so can you talk about this relationship? Can you talk about the relationship between human rights violations and security in any of the various contexts and countries you’ve been on? And so why, why does the U.N. focus on women in regards to peace and security for example? Or ethnic minorities and religious minorities? Why is it critical to bring them into peace negotiations or to various programs of international development?
Aaron: No, I mean as we look at as we look at human rights and we look at human rights abuses, nepotism, corruption, allegations of corruption within systems, there are two things to consider here as we look at programs design and look at development in a conflict situation. Just looking at the police situation in Afghanistan right. The national police really have been acting as a counterinsurgency force. And so transitioning a counterinsurgency force into one that is focused on the rule of law and dealing with day to day crimes is quite difficult. I along with all of the work that goes along with enforcing the rule of law and police programs for example. Just as an example, we’re looking at the literacy rate among police officers in Afghanistan and that’s about 20 percent of new recruits are literate, and the women actually in the police force in Afghanistan make up less than 2 percent of officers, and they’re usually restricted to much lower level roles.
So the challenge that we have is dealing with human rights violations in an active conflict as well as trying to build the foundation for Ministry of the interior and a national police force that are able to fully transition over to the day to day policing and enforcing the rule of law which then allows citizens to actually have a trust in their government which is huge. A lot of these governments order them to be legitimate, they have to protect their people and they have to be able to provide these types of services. And so some of the real challenges in the development landscape is trying to build up these capacities while at the same time recognizing that there is an active conflict going on, and that the people that were working to build capacity have to have dual roles. They’re having to work as counter insurgents and also day to day policing.
Elise: All right Aaron… Well the last question I want to touch on are kind of topic matter which is really the fun part and it’s the careers in the U.N. and international development security. This is the big question for people entering doctoral programs. What am I going to do with this degree? What am I going to do after my studies? So I think you are just a wonderful embodiment of what a career looks like in diplomacy and development with philanthropy with the Rockefeller Foundation and you worked all over the world. And so first could you just kind of take a step back and talk about how you got into diplomacy and working with the U.N.
Aaron: My career path has been a bit windy. I actually finished my graduate studies at Brandeis University at the Heller School where I studied international development with a focus on natural resource management. I then entered a feeder program in the United States called the Presidential Management fellowship which you and I were both in at least that’s how we know each other. I really had some great opportunities to work in international affairs starting with the Department of Interior which then later led me to the State Department where we worked in ocean environment science and then in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere affairs. So we’re working at the diplomatic and the policy level. I’ll call it that 10,000 foot level which was really fascinating to work in a capital to see how policy and our particular administrations perspective then gets programmed into activities that happen down at the mission and local level. That was really interesting and I then decided that I really wanted to have more field experience, which I thought would make me more effective at the policy level.
So I left the State Department and then eventually went to the Rockefeller’s 100 Resilient Cities program. It’s basically a 180 million dollar project incubating the Rockefeller Foundation focused on urban resilience and the concept of urban resilience around the world. I worked in relationship management roles so rather than working with national governments like I had at the State Department, I was working with city level governments on urban resilience. That’s the ability to deal with natural disasters, social disasters, issues dealing with various types of conflict, and working with cities on various planning processes.
From that experience, I then decided that I wanted to branch out on my own. So some of the doctoral students may want to get into large government organizations that continue at a policy level and some may want to go back out into the field and provide their services back in the field. It’s been a very interesting ride. I found that each place I go I recognize how much I’d love to go back to school and look at the theory frankly and connect what’s going on the ground to sort of what is a theoretical exercise or behind it. I’ve found that it’s extremely important as I said earlier in the discussion to put as many tools in your tool kit as possible. That means being a very articulate focused writer. That means having some experience in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. If you have that kind of experience, very useful that can apply to anywhere from Panama and Afghanistan. Working in any sort of strategic design. Again as I said earlier being able to articulate a particular policy objective and then identifying what can be done on the ground to provide that short term gain that we need to show for our stakeholders back home. As well as to advance the particular agenda or area, say wastewater for example I’ve had a lot of experiences where I worked with politicians who have come in and who wanted to solve the wastewater issues in Rio de Janeiro for example right before the Olympics. Let’s solve wastewater in Rio, but wastewater has been an issue in Rio de Janeiro for 400 years and it will likely be for another 400 years.
So how do we go in and make those changes. And it’s been having those tools in the tool kit. As someone who has taken the various activities that I’ve done throughout my career and then applying them. I mean to give you some context; I was even an elementary school teacher. I did teach for America and I found myself literally in this development space in the diplomatic space that you find adult pretty much like 8 year olds on a playground at the end of the day. And so coming in with that authenticity and candor to everything you deal with, recognizing that you never totally understand the situation you’re in, and that only through getting various perspectives can you have a better understanding which eventually gets you the objective that you want to achieve. Yeah I would say like, that’s basically a lot of the advice I would give is to be open and to step outside of your comfort zone. You may have technical expertise or situational expertise in one area and it might not totally fit something that has piqued your interest or somebody wants you to work on. I found that these crosscutting skills that you gain through diplomatic and international development career are really transferable across various cultures and sectors. And yeah that’s been basically my learning over the last couple of years and why I continue to keep doing this work. Every day is a new challenge and a new interest and I’m finding it fascinating. It can be pretty lucrative too. So that’s nice.
Elise: That was really helpful to hear from you. Specific issues that students can really hone in on. It’s really useful to hear from a practitioner’s side that students and their doctoral program should really focus on their writing and communication part. That the qualitative and quantitative methods can have direct applicability for their careers later. And so to kind of further that and to go deeper there, how do you recommend doctoral students best articulate their skill set that they’re learning from academia and learning and in their studies later to foreign affairs organizations?
Aaron: That’s a really good question. And as I work with different organizations and some of my roles have been helping to identify staffing for particular activities something that is always looked for as you mentioned around the methods both scientific qualitative and quantitative being able to articulate. I think there’s a lot of in development in diplomacy world, I’d say there’s a lot of let me use another one of my analogies. It’s like being invited to a party and in Latin America for example a party happens in the living room and dining room, and that’s usually a really ornate place so go with me here as I give this analogy, but a living and dining room is very ornate and it’s set up for a party, and everybody knows that the real action is happening back in the kitchen at any party right? So you go into a kitchen in Latin America, say Mexico for example, and you’ve got a bunch of dishes and you’ve got a bucket of lard and an old lady and a cat, and it’s all happening at the back, but in a front everything is articulate and put together and nice. But the action, the real policy changes that need to happen and how they’re going to happen is back in that kitchen.
What’s really interesting for people with applied doctorates who have the experience of focusing in on particular challenges and problems and going through the process of trying to come up with conjectures for how to solve things, is that it is desperately needed I believe in this place. People have had experience applying actual research to solve problems. Those types of results driven, data driven experience is enormously useful. I find a lot of people in this profession who are able to parlay with the best of them in this dining room are talking about throwing the party but they’re not able to roll up their sleeves in the kitchen and do some dishes, because that’s where everything’s happening. And in order to actually make verifiable changes and make the world a better place, you have to be able to have those experiences and people with applied doctorates have them. And I think that are really useful and looked for in a lot of the organizations with whom I work.
Elise: There’s a lot of dirty dishes in the field is what I’m hearing. Oh this is wonderful. And to end this, I think it’s just very helpful to here again your own background. How you now 20/20 vision of looking back on your own graduate studies and your own kind of trajectory in your own career. That as for master’s students or doctoral students what would you have done differently or are more of during your graduate studies to prepare for your career?
Aaron: You know that’s a good question. In the M&E side of things, I would love to have been in enumerator. I think as working under professor on a particular issue in the field, gathering evidence, gathering data, coming up with the conjecture… As a practitioner right now with the toolkit as I talk about, I would like to have had more of those experiences dealing with both quantitative and qualitative data sets. And yeah I actually don’t have as much experience in that space. And so I’ve had to piece it together. I would love to have worked under some professors in that sense.
Elise: OK. Well thank you so much again Aaron Spencer for joining us today. This has been wonderful to hear your insights and learn more about your expertise and just to give students a more kind of practitioner insider vision of what a career in international development and security could look like. So thank you again for joining us today.
Aaron: Thanks a lot, Elise. It’s been great. And yeah I wish everyone the best experience in their in their studies.
Elise: Thank you.
Comments are closed.