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John Koenig at the Dukakis Center

John Koenig, former US Ambassador to Cyprus, visited ACT and the Dukakis Center last week to deliver a Dukakis Lecture, and to visit with various constituencies at the College.

The highlight of Ambassador Koenig's visit was a Dukakis Lecture entitled "The Cyprus end-game: Unification or permanent partition?" The event was co-hosted by the Navarino Network, and took place at the Daios Hotel, on the site of the old US Consulate General. 

The Dukakis Center has had a longstanding interest in the Cyprus question going back to 2002. Guest speakers have included Van Coufoudakis (twice) and Alvaro de Soto, the latter in his capacity as Special Representative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for Cyprus. The timing of Ambassador Koenig’s lecture was meant to coincide with the current phase of bi-communal talks on the island, in which he had played an active role as mediator.

Ambassador Koenig, who spent three years as Consul General of Thessaloniki in the early 2000s, is an Honorary Advisor of the Dukakis Center, and met with ACT Provost Karamouzis and Executive Director Wisner as follow up to the Advisory Board meeting of November 2016. During his visit he also met separately with ACT students for an informal discussion on multilateral diplomacy, and was the guest of honor at a reception at Nelson in Panorama. (He had previously participated in a round table discusion on the 2000 US Presidential election, and, more recently, in an event dedicated to the 2016 Democratic primaries.)

Ambassador Koenig was accompanied in his visit by his Greek-American wife, Natalie.

 

 

 

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Alexandros Mallias returns to the Dukakis Center

Former Greek Ambassador to the United States Alexandros Mallias spoke to ACT students on January 30 under the auspices of the Dukakis Center, on the siubject of his most recently published book, The Middle East and Pandora's Box.

Ambassador was in town to promote his book at various venues and graciously accepted an invitation to return to ACT, which he first visited for a Dukakis Lecture in 2011, following a long period of gestation dating back to 2004.

Ambassador Mallias enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the Greek foreign service, which included a stint as Director of the Department of Balkan Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. More recently he had been an active member of To Potami, the centrist political party created in 2014.

This is Ambassador Mallias' third book.

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Dukakis Center scholars lecture at the University of Macedonia

This past November 29, some 150 students and faculty from the Universities of Macedonia and Thessaloniki heard ACT instructors Lambrini Nassis and David Wisner speak at a public conference on the recent US elections, hosted by the Greek Association of Political and Economics Science Students at the University of Macedonia.

Wisner offered an overview of the US system of government, followed by some of the more unusual features of the 2016 elections. Dr. Nassis then spoke on the Electoral College and on voting behavior in 2016.

This is the third time the Dukakis Center has collaborated with the Association, more popularly known as GRAPESS, whose members are drawn from the two public universities in Thessaloniki. GRAPESS members had previously taken part in three Dukakis Center events dedicated to the 2016 election in May, in October, and again in November.

The University of Macedonia conference was also attended by Professor Theodosios Karvounarakis, while Evangelos Plakas, a journalist at TV100 and Makedonia newspaper, moderated the event.

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Enjoying a taste of change with the Dukakis Center

A live crowdfunding event is such an exciting happening. Especially when there is dinner and wine afterwards for participants!

Last Wednesday, the Dukakis Center and FEAST Thessaloniki joined forces to host an innovative crowd-funding event at WE Thessaloniki. “A Taste of Change” was an unforgettable fun(d)raising event focusing on new social challenges.

To kick things off Dorie Clark, best selling author and CEO of Clark Strategic Communications, gave a Dukakis Lecture entitled “Marketing for Social Change,” in which she focused on a whole range of considerations in strategic marketing.

After a stirring finale in which Dorie Clark defined public service and citizenship in a most satisfying way ("If we want to be citizens, I think it is important for all of us to be thinking about ways to be of service"), representatives of three local non-profits stepped up to pitch their socially entrepreneurial projects to the sizable audience of 70 strong.

Those presenting were the following; CEPI – Citizen Engagement Policy Innovation, Citizens & Activists, and Give. Each team was given ten minutes to present their inventive and original ideas to the audience, with a view toward winning the gate to fund their projects. The audience was then invited to vote for their preferred project.

CEPI focused on the creation of a channel in which contemporary issues and policies could be discussed, rated and shared among users. Citizens & Activists introduced a platform in an attempt to bring together a community of activists. Meanwhile Give, the winning team, introduced a platform aiming at bringing together physically challenged people in need of clinical help with activists or professionals.

FEAST Thessaloniki have considerable experience hosting this sort of event at venues like WE, and came into the collaboration with the Dukakis Center highly recommended by the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki and the Municipality of Thessaloniki.

Feast members Argyro Barata and Niki Vouimta organized the soup event portion of the evening, including lining up sponsors for dinner and for extra prizes. The Dukakis Center hosted Ms Clark and organized follow up mentoring sessions at the Bissell Library with the individual teams.
 

This was the first such event co-hosted by the Dukakis Center since its transformation in 2011 from endowed chair to academic and outreach center. The current strategic plan of the Dukakis Center calls for the Center gradually to incubate and otherwise support efforts of local non-profit start-ups.

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Remembering Obama in Greece

In remembrance of President Obama, and in honor of our many Greek friends who were invited to attend his legacy speech in Athens, we publish Dukakis Center Director David Wisner’s 1988 post-election remarks, delivered at the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki (below the break).

Students, interns, and staff at ACT and the Dukakis Center had been especially active during the 2008 US general election, both in Greece and in the US.

Senior Kristin Harms caucused for Barack Obama in Iowa in January 2008, in what was the beginning of President Obama’s successful campaign to gain the nomination of the Democratic Party. (Kristin told us that a fellow Iowan who had spent the Fall 2007 semester as a study abroad student at ACT caucused actively for Hillary Clinton.) Meanwhile, junior Nemanja Grgic, who has spent the fall 2008 semester studying in the US at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, attended a late-October Obama rally in Pittsburgh and eventually got within a few feet of the candidate. A smaller number of people in the ACT community supported the McCain campaign but a sturdy number of study abroad students wore their McCain-Palin campaign buttons with pride.

On campus, American citizens working or studying at ACT were encouraged both to register and to vote by absentee ballot; more than half of the study abroad cohort took advantage of this service, which was coordinated by the Office of International Programs with additional support from the Dukakis Center. The ACT community was furthermore able to take part in an interactive dialogue on the election with former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis via digital teleconference.

ACT figured prominently in election and post-election media hoopla. Lambrini Nassis, David Wisner, and a handful of US study abroad students were interviewed by local journalists in the days prior to the election. Dr. Wisner was a featured speaker at a post-election breakfast held at the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki. ACT professors Joseph Gratale and Peter Chressanthakis also attended the event.

Finally, Dr. Wisner and a group of ten ACT students, including several study abroad students, attended a post-election assessment at the Consulate in the days following the election. The featured speaker was veteran Democratic strategist Rick Ridder of RBI Associates, who campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and for Barack Obama on behalf of environmentalist groups in Colorado in the general election.

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Prepared Remarks

US Consulate General of Thessaloniki
2008 Post-election Breakfast

By David Wisner

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you all here in turn. I think it is appropriate for me to thank Hoyt Yee, Bob King, Ioanna Koutsounanou, Costas Vassalos, and the entire team of people who work day in and day out at the US Consulate General of Thessaloniki to put on this event. And I think it is pretty well known throughout Greece that this is the place to be the morning after the election.  You guys put on a great party, so if you don't mind giving up a round of applause to Hoyt and the team here. 

I'd like to thank also a group of people who are rarely acknowledged in this type of public event, with whom I have worked in the past, actually as a wayward colleague, and that would be the press corps of the city of Thessaloniki, and in general the media and the journalists in Greece. I think what's interesting about this election, among many, many other things, is the unprecedented level of interest outside the United States in the campaign itself, in the candidates, in the platforms of the political parties, and now of course in the outcome of the election, and I'm confident when I turn on Greek TV that I actually can get very reliable and useful information, and so you guys owe it to yourself, you're not always acknowledged, but you do a great job.

I'm here representing the American College of Thessaloniki, and one of my tasks at ACT is to direct the Michael Dukakis Chair in Public Policy and Service, which now is entering its tenth season of public affairs activities. It's a non-partisan forum for debate on public issues, and one of the things we do every two years, when there is a general election, especially in the Presidential election years every four years, is to ensure that the American students who study at ACT register to vote and cast their ballot.

This semester we have over 100 American students studying at universities throughout the United States, and thanks to the work of my colleagues in the International Studies program well over 70% of those young people registered and voted. This is a number that we're seeing throughout the United States, and I'm pretty proud of that.

One of my students actually, a resident of the state of Iowa, got involved last year, volunteered to canvas for Barack Obama just prior to the primaries, caucused for Barack Obama during the Iowa primary, and stayed active even when she came back to Greece to resume her studies with the organization known as Democrats Abroad (you know both the American political parties, Republicans and Democrats, have units that operate in countries where you have American ex-patriots).

This is great. We have young people getting involved in unprecedented numbers in this particular election, and I hope its something that rubs off on young people here in Greece, and in the other countries whose students come and spend some time here in Greece with us or, as the case might be, at the public universities, represented in the person of Theo Karvounarakis.

I called the election about ten days ago. It seemed to me that the polls were indicating a fairly clear Obama victory. But the actual impact of that fact really started to sink in last night as I was looking at the Internet one last time. And I had four thoughts which I jotted down very quickly.

  • I'm humbled that we have elected an American who is of African origin; I'm moved.
  • I am saddened that such a great public servant as John McCain was defeated. He is a great man.  If you watched his concession speech, there has rarely been a more graceful concession of defeat in American public life. 
  • I'm proud to be an Americans right now, and I don't think that is such a bad thing.  I'm proud that so many people voted, perhaps for the first time. I'm proud that a group of Americans who had been in the margins of American public life have come to the fore, as was the case in 2004, when the so-called evangelical vote emerged and helped George Bush be reelected. This is very good for American public life, that the entire population is able to express itself, in the elections, during the campaigns, and I'm very proud to be a part of that.
  • I'm hopeful, too, that the bitterness and divisiveness of any campaign, but of this campaign in particular, can become very quickly a thing of the past, if a majority of American citizens, taking the lead of Senator McCain, accept the fact that they have a President, a person who perhaps they did not vote for, but who is their leader. It's constitutional, it's legal, we understand that, and hopefully we accept it.  If you're a Republican, you'll work with your party for the next round of elections; if you're a Democrat, you'll be happy, you'll celebrate, but you won't gloat, because the reality of American life is that we win sometimes, you win sometimes. And that's something we learn to live with. That's why democracy can flourish.

Well, it's been a very long, costly, and bitter campaign; you've watched some of it here.  It's also been a campaign marked by moments of humor, and I thought that perhaps at this moment we'd break some of the seriousness. Out of the thousands of video clips that I've seen on You Tube and other places, I've picked tow that show some of the lighter moments, the lighter side of the candidates, of the people that have been working with them. There is great joy in politics, and we just take a moment to look at these and then we’ll get on with our talk.

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/mccain-qvc-open/805381/

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/10/26/wazzup-eight-years-later/

Three insights I've had over the course of the last six to eight months, and I'd say, well, they have been pretty accurate. 

I read an op-ed piece by the somewhat controversial conservative commentator of the New York Times David Brooks, commenting on the primaries, back in February, and he says, well, nobody really knows what's going on here. And I think that's one of the themes we've been seeing here, you've got all the guys on TV and writing in the papers and writing in the blogs, talking at podiums like myself, and very few people would have been able to predict a year ago, let alone perhaps a couple of months ago, that Barack Obama would be elected -- that he would be nominated. You may recall four years ago I predicted we would have a race between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guiliani; well I am a New Yorker, so that makes a little bit of sense. But this is it, this has been the election to turn punditry on its head. And I think part of the reason for that is the availability over the Internet of so much information, such that you yourself could have an expertise in American politics just by spending a few hours a day looking at sites on the Internet. 

My second thought came as I was addressing an email from one of my former American students, a young man, I think of Middle Eastern origin who studied at a very prominent American university and now has a job working at a brokerage firm -- I presume he still has his job now, I don't know! And he asked me, well, these are the things that are going on and it seems to me that this is the candidate who expresses the best solution for that particular issue, and I said, "Guys, this is about race. Are we ready to elect an individual of African descent to be President of the United States?"  And you know when a French media team goes into a truck stop in Iowa which is typically full of people, of Democrats who have voted Democrat all their life, and he asks whom are you voting for and they say we're voting for McCain; the journalist asks why, and the individual looks into the camera and says, "I don't like niggers." 

Race is a fact in American life. It's not only African-Americans, it's a fact. It's something we live with, something we try to deal with.  You've seen a lot in the news about the negative campaign tactics of the Republicans, and this maybe media bias, it may be true, the fact is there, on both sides, that people have difficulty accepting the fact that a person of color can become President of the United States. Well, I hope we've overcome that.

My third thought very briefly, when it was announced that Sarah Palin would be the Vice-Presidential pick of John McCain, I thought, that's it for the GOP. The so-called part of the Big Tent is ripping at the seams. Which direction is the Republican party going to go in. I mean, we know the Democrats have a similar problem: the Rainbow Coalition, it's sometimes called. It's a fact of American political life that the parties are decentralized; there's an enormous degree of diversity in the composition of the parties. But at this particular juncture it wasn't clear in my mind and in the mind of a lot of people watching, which direction the Republican party wanted to go in. And this has been followed up. I had this insight, what a couple of months ago, and you see now more and more moderate Republicans are questioning the wisdom of that particular move. I don't want to say whether it was good or bad, I don't want to reveal whom my choice of presidential candidate would have been, but it does appear to me that that was one of the problems that the Republicans had. Are they going to be the party of George Bush, are they going to be the party of John McCain, or are they going to try to be a little of both, because they are not the same persona. 

Now what are we going to look for in the next four years. You have a Democrat majority, or a Democratic majority – do I sound a little like George Bush there? that was a slip – in the Congress; some of the Democrats in Congress will want to go faster than Barack Obama will want to go. He does have to represent all Americans. How is he going to handle hostility in the opposition and hostility from the more radical elements of his own party. This is a big question. He himself has already hinted that he's not going to be changing a lot of things in 100 days; it may take 1000 days, it may take four years, and I think that's a responsible thing to say. He's got a lot of challenges. I would say looking at the way he managed his campaign, if there's a person in American politics who is up to that challenge it may well be Barack Obama. And I think we should all hope he is successful.

Folks, this time four years ago I was looking at the next round of elections. The political parties are doing that. They're starting with what's happening in the states – the next round of elections, the local governance, the state legislatures, the governorships.  2010 is an important year because we conduct a census. And if a particular party controls the legislature in a state that has incoming population they can change the shape of the districts such that that party stands a better chance to elect members of Congress in Washington. It's something, this is a fact of American life, it's always changing. Republicans did it very well in 2000; we'll see what happens. The indications are that while the focus in the federal government in Washington has been on a Democratic sweep – what we call a triple – it's not certain whether the Republicans will do so badly in state and local elections, and that means the next time around the Republicans could very well be competitive. Bear in mind,
this is part of the great dynamic of American politics.

Two things further that we need to watch out for, they will probably be a little less under the radar screen, particularly the first. Barack Obama is the first candidate in American history to forego public financing for his campaign. He raised an enormous amount of money, uniquely from private sources. I would think one of the first things that John McCain is going to do when he goes back to the Senate is to introduce legislation that will regulate this. He has that reputation. The one guy had a clear deficit, John McCain, because he accepted public financing, which means $84 million and that's all you get. We're expecting the total for the Presidential race alone to exceed $1 billion, for advertising, campaigning, and everything else. That's a lot of money; maybe we need to look at that.

Observers on both sides of the political spectrum of the United States are also predicting that this election will mark the death of mainstream media. You see it already, stations like MSNBC and Fox News are clearly partisan in the way they look at the election, particularly the commentary, and, you know we used to pride ourselves in the United States that journalism was done a little differently, you could have a mainstream national media that was non-partisan. And it appears now that we are looking a little bit like France, or Britain, or Greece, or European countries where the newspapers pretty much take sides. And I think this is something we need to look at. Now, there is an alternative form of journalism for which I have some hope, and that is what you see in the blogs, the web logs, in the Internet. And you often are going to see, in fact a Pew Institute study just done last week indicates, that more and more people are turning to the Internet for information about the campaigns, and I think this is a trend that will persist. But we need to worry about the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Washington Times, and some of these newspapers that seem to be taking sides a little bit more explicitly in their coverage of events. That's something which as an American I fear.

I'd like to thank you for hearing me out this afternoon... Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

 

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Election Day USA: A carnival of democracy

 

Election day is nigh upon us. For close to two years candidates and political parties have been jockeying to attract the attention of the American electorate. Who will win the race to the White House? Which parties will capture majorities in the US Senate and House of Representatives? What surprises await us in state and local elections?

Despite the extreme competitiveness, complaints about negative tactics and the preponderant role of moneyed interests, and fears of outside influence which characterize elections in America every two years, we have reason to celebrate.

More than 120,000,000 citizens are expected to vote in a little over 3100 counties across the country. Thousands of voters will submit absentee ballots from overseas. Early voting has already begun in several states.

Americans will elect 425 members of the House of Representatives and 34 Senators; 50 Governors and some 7000 of state legislators, and countless other public officials in local government, including, in Duxbury, Vermont, the dog catcher. The dog catcher!

That makes 519, 682 elective offices in the United States.

Meanwhile thousands upon thousands of election workers will endeavor to ensure that eligible voters will be able to cast a ballot that will be tallied and counted fairly – elected supervisors, paid county employees, and untold numbers of volunteers.

It’s a veritable carnival of democracy.

The Dukakis Center at ACT will welcome friends, colleagues, and fellow Americans to celebrate the occasion in a public reception at the Hyatt Regency Thessaloniki, Regency Ballroom, on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, from 8-10 PM. Joins us for drinks and snacks, live news broadcasts from American media, multimedia specials – including an in-house poll, and cameo appearances by friends of the Dukakis Center.

Address inquiries and requests for media availability to Marina Charitopoulou at 2310 398 221 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

 

 

 

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The Future of Democracy intern projects

The Dukakis Center is hosting an especially large cohort of undergraduate interns this fall, including a talented cohort of Study Abroad students from universities throughout the US. One of the projects they are working on is called "The Future of Democracy."

The Dukakis Center has been concerned with this topic ever since Michael Dukakis delivered the inaugural Dukakis Lecture in September 1999. The theme of democratic reform has been prominent, particularly in a more recent series of conferences, culminating in the April 2016 conference "Civic Engagement and the Practices of Democracy."

Now the Center has a new twist on the theme. This fall at ACT a handful of Dukakis Center interns are pursuing innovative research on democratic engagement. Two teams will work on the following project areas.

1. US general election -- anthology of "Don't vote" arguments. This project will entail two sorts of inquiry. First, interns will search for recent articles on the Internet encouraging voters not to vote if they do not like the candidates (presidential or down ballot). The interns will produce an annotated list of such articles, to be posted on Politis, the blog of the Dukakis Center. (Here is a recent example.) The group will then devise a survey of ACT and study abroad students asking them to articulate their own "don't vote" arguments. The resulte from this in-house survey will be posted on Politis also.

2. US general election -- resource on voter integrity. The purpose of this project will be to create a list of online resources dedicated to informing Americanb voters and dispelling rumors regarding voter fraud and rigged elections. For instance, the Supervisor of Elections in Seminole County, FLorida, who has spoken at a Dukakis Center event already this fall, maintains a daily exchange with voters on Facebook. Here is another useful resource.

3. Democracy in Southeast Europe. Intern Mikhail Tishin is building a web page dedicated to electoral activity in Southeast Europe in the coming months. Interns will provide three categories of information for the site: systems; parties and personalities; issues in the news (specifically, news stories in English).

The first two project teams will present their findings in erly December 2016, before the study abroad students return to the US. The third group will continue updating the dedicated web page throughout the spring 2017 term.

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Voting in America

On Wednesday October 5, the Dukakis Center for Public and Humanitarian Service hosted a round table discussion on “Voting in America” at the U.S.  Consulate General in Thessaloniki. Special guests included Michael Ertel, the Supervisor of Elections for Seminole County, Florida, Charles Stewart III, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, Rebecca Fong, U.S. Consul General of Thessaloniki, and David Wisner, Professor of International Relations at ACT and Executive Director of the Dukakis Center.
 
The event consisted of an interesting discussion by a panel of experts about how the electoral system works and what problems they  face. Topics covered included the electoral college and alternatives occasionally proposed; voter registration, voter turnout, and early voting; varieties of electoral campaigns; money in politics; negative campaigning; trends in partisanship; and undecided voters and abstention.
 
The topic of absentee voting sparked an interesting discussion, focusing on the importance of giving a voice to Americans living overseas to express their preference.  A debate whether the absentee ballot counts was born, and all speakers highlighted the efforts to make it easier for overseas voters to participate in the election process, for example, via fax machine.
 
Overall, the discussion was both informative and interesting, for the Americans and the internationals in the audience, who were reminded how much or how little their vote might matter, in a presidential election at least. The event raised important questions about how the electoral system works and what needs to be done to ensure that the voice of the people is heard.

By Katharine Welch 

NB Katharine "Katie" Welch is a freshman at Northeastern University majoring in Political Science, studying abroad at ACT. She is from San Francisco, California. A longer version of this note appeared in Politis, the blog of the Dukakis Center.

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Politics at the bistrot

Two Democratic delegates honored the Dukakis Center with their presence this past Monday evening at La Place Mignonne, a local watering hole in downtown Thessaloniki.

Former US Consuls General of Thessaloniki John Koenig and Alec Mally, both of whom have turned to party politics following their respective retirements from the US Foreign Service, participated in a debate/discussion on the 2016 Democratic primaries pitting Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders, before a lively audience of some 50 students from ACT and the Universities of Thessaloniki and Macedonia. 
 
Dubbed "Politics at the Bistrot," a deliberate allusion to the May 2014 Dukakis Center event "Politics at the Cafe," the main theme of the evening's proceedings was the degree to which the Democratic caucuses and primaries can be said to be democratic.
 
Mr Mally, representing Democrats Abroad Greece, discussed the role of DAGR in motivating US ex patriots to vote, and described the Democratic Global Primary of March 2016, in which Bernie Sanders emerged victorious over Mrs Clinton. Mr. Mally shared some of his election paraphernalia, gathered over the years, including Russian eggs of the Democrats to occupy the White House since 1960 and John F. Kennedy.
 
Meanwhile, Mr Koenig, joining the gathering via Skype from his home in Billington, Washington, where he is a Democratic delegate campaigning on behalf of Hillary Clinton, explained the nuances, complexities, and potential democratic deficiencies of the two-tiered selection process in Washington, which combines local caucuses, won earlier in the month by Mr Sanders, with a state-wide primary, which Mrs Clinton won the day following the event.
 
Not to be outdone, the audience attending the discussion, which included senior US residents Bill McGrew and Peter Baiter, took their own mock exit poll, designed by George Siakas of the University of Macedonia Research Institute and ACT alumnus Pantelis Rafail, of Deploy Digital, who provided technical support throughout the event. Not surprisingly, given global sentiment on the matter, Bernie Sanders was preferred by the majority of those taking the poll, by an almost 2:1 margin. 
 
The discussion was lively throughout, and culminated in the world premiere of two animated get-out-the-vote videos produced by Dimitris Savvaidis and his team at Thessaloniki-based AddArt. The clips were commissioned by the Dukakis Center in April 2016 for the international conference "Civic Engagement and the Practices of Democracy."
 
To promote the event, Mr Rafail and his company designed and carried out a social media campaign reaching over 35,000 Facebook users and increasing the Center's databse by more than 10%. Mr. Rafail also conducted a masterclass in digital deployment to interested students and staff from ACT and the local public universities.
 
The Dukakis Center will organize one or more public events in the fall before the general election of November 8

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Alumni corner -- Katerina Rigas

After four years of intense deliberation about the subject matter of my studies at ACT, I realized that the core of International Relations is international politics and the subject matter of international politics is the struggle for power among sovereign nations. Predicated upon immediate developments, this view became rather crystallized, as the European crisis entered a new, highly dangerous phase in 2015, one that threatens its survival and questions the Union’s purpose. However, despite the deep misgivings about the future in the twenty-first century, as it became apparent that we are not far removed from nineteenth century politics or twentieth century warfare, it is important to study the world from the point most accessible to us.

My time in the Dukakis Center helped me realize that this point is in fact ones’ self and should anyone want to understand international politics, getting actively involved in public affairs and contributing to their communities is essential. And, while the diminishing capacity of the state to reorganize internally in an ever globalizing world is still difficult to deny, Dukakis Center events on civic engagement and public service, especially when the current political system is challenged, allowed me to weigh in the single human factor that is often downplayed in many respected scientific approaches.

Thus, after being given the opportunity to participate in various events and assist on projects, I consider my experience in the Dukakis Center to have profound influence upon not only on my studies but also on my person, as it forced me to reevaluate the impact of one’s civic engagement and personal contribution in political affairs. Having worked in the private sector in Greece, both in in wholesale and retail industry, I have experienced the consequences of practicing a civic disengagement that borders apathy towards public affairs. Though it may be an inadequate paraphrase based on Plato’s Republic, nonetheless the price of indifference to public affairs is in fact to be ruled by lesser men.  I received my BA with honors in International Relations on the 4th of July, 2016, and as I prepare for graduate studies in the US in International Affairs and Security, I know that ever since my time in the Dukakis Center, the point of departure in my studies has been ourselves and the subsequent impact of our engagement – or lack thereof  -- in international politics.

 

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