Worthy remembrance
The American Academy in Berlin is to remember Richard Holbrooke with a special format.
Forum of exchange. He was a gifted mediator: Richard C. Holbrooke was appointed US Ambassador to Germany in 1993; in 1994 he initiated the founding of the American Academy in Berlin, which has since been outstanding in its championing of transatlantic exchange. The Academy is now to honour its “founding father” with an extraordinary dialogue format firmly in the spirit of the diplomat, who died in 2010. The “Richard C. Holbrooke Forum for the Study of Diplomacy and Governance” is aiming to “stimulate the intellectual courage needed to deal with seemingly insoluble conflicts”. The Forum was launched on 4 December, 2013 with a gala dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York which was also attended by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a long-time friend of Holbrooke. In 2014 two working groups will dominate the new Forum’s agenda: Michael Ignatieff of the Harvard Kennedy School will head the “Globalization and Responsible Sovereignty” group, and Harold Hongju Koh of Yale University Law School will lead the “Legal Advisers’ Project”.
