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July 21, 2005

Balancing Creativity and Instinct With Theory and Evidence: Susanna Pfohl Campbell, Fletcher PhD Candidate

Susanna Campbell is tall and striking. So striking in fact, that while she was in Kenya working for the International Crisis Group in 2002, a casting director for the film Tomb Raider II spotted her in a Nairobi café and asked her to be a stand-in for Angelina Jolie. Unlike the fictional fight against evil in the movie however, Campbell’s quest for international peace and security is very real, and much more nuanced.

A “triple jumbo,” Campbell pursued her Bachelor’s degree at Tufts University, as well as her Master’s and now her Ph.D. at Tufts’ Fletcher School. Campbell’s research on ethnic conflict extends to her undergraduate days at Tufts. “Having grown up in the South,” she said, “I wanted to look at how race relations and international conflict intersect and ultimately how identities are formed and changed by conflict.” These issues have continued to fascinate her throughout her career and academic work.

After college, Campbell settled into a job as a Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York City. During her three years at CFR, she continued her study of ethnic conflict, exploring how the international community could effectively intervene to prevent escalation of such conflict. “This was in 1996, soon after the genocide in Rwanda,” she noted. As a result, her research on ethnic conflict and the responsibilities of international organizations was coincidentally very timely. And though she had not yet traveled there, she said she had always been “drawn to” Africa.

With an eventual move to Africa in mind, in 1999, Campbell moved to London to work as the Communications Coordinator for the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response. Six months later she left for Nairobi, Kenya to coordinate the organization’s Central African Network. The move, she remembers, was “exciting but also kind of terrifying.” She was on her own. “I worked with a Kenyan NGO but had very little support. It was yet another enormous lesson in humility.” The real challenge however, was not fulfilling the duties assigned her, but the politics and conflicting interests between headquarters and partners in the field. “The only thing I could do,” Campbell said, “was talk to people and try to bring them together. My role became purely facilitative. And in fact, I was most effective when I was the least visible. As a young, white woman, I had to gain credibility every step of the way.”

After six months in Nairobi, she was recruited by the Deputy Regional Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). At first, she worked for UNICEF’s emergency response unit consolidating interagency and donor appeals and coordinating training workshops. In 2001 however, Campbell moved again, this time within Africa—to Burundi, where she became UNICEF’s Head of Communications for the country. “Now, in 2005, there is a UN mission there,” Campbell notes, “and there is a real transition out of the ten-year war taking place.” But three years ago—before the first peacekeeping mission had arrived—Campbell recalls falling asleep at night to gunfire and mortar shell attacks.

Two years later, Campbell returned to Nairobi and took a consultancy position with the International Crisis Group where she wrote a report entitled “A Framework for Responsible Aid to Burundi.” Her report laid out an outline of what a transitional period out of ethnic conflict would look like, calling on both the Burundian transitional government and the international donor community to step up to the plate, pointing out that there is a shared responsibility in the search for peace and stability. At the time, the only other piece of work she had seen that espoused similar views was Fletcher Professor of International Humanitarian Studies Peter Uvin’s book, Aiding Violence. “His book and his ideas really gave me support to do what I was trying to do.” The next year, Peter Uvin would become one of Campbell’s mentors at The Fletcher School.

After three years in Africa, Campbell decided to pursue an advanced academic degree. “I realized that only having a BA was going to inhibit me in my career advancement. Also, because the work I was doing was analytical work, I knew that in order to really do the work well and make recommendations to policymakers, I needed to go back to the literature and understand the theories and tools of intervention. I needed objective distance from the approaches I saw implemented on the ground.”

During her two years as a MALD student at Fletcher, she joked, she learned how to overextend herself even more. She dove into her MALD classes, dissecting ethical dilemmas and asking difficult questions about power—who has it and who doesn’t. “That’s what international relations, especially when dealing with conflict, is about.”

Focusing on International Conflict Resolution and Negotiation, Human Security, and International Security Studies, outside of class Campbell co-directed Fletcher’s negotiation and conflict resolution student group and was one of the founders of the Fletcher Conference on Innovative Approaches. Campbell also worked as a teaching assistant for visiting professor Antonia Handler Chayes and as a research assistant for Associate Professor Louis Aucoin.

Now as a Ph.D. candidate with Peter Uvin as her advisor, Campbell’s research will build on her MALD thesis “Transitions and Trade-Offs: The Art of Programming Between War and Peace.” The next step in her work is to focus more specifically on the role of international organizations in the peacemaking and peacebuilding process. Campbell’s hypothesis is that “transitions between war and peace require a specific type of programming that most international organizations are not institutionally structured to carry out; they are either enormous bureaucracies or small organizations with minimal impact – neither of which may be able to effectively engage with a conflict environment or promote institutional change.”

“The challenge now,” she says, “is balancing creativity, instinct, and understanding with evidence to back up my argument.”

Article by Claire Topal, MALD '05

Posted by jessica at July 21, 2005 12:41 PM