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Home  /  Articles  /  Tom Fletcher: Diplomacy in the digital age
May 27, 2016
Alan Philps, The World Today
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Tom Fletcher: Diplomacy in the digital age

The techno-optimist and leader of a review into the future of the Foreign Office
shares his views on diplomacy in the digital age with Alan Philps.

You left the diplomatic service last year after serving as ambassador to
Lebanon. What keeps you in the region? 

I teach at the NYU Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi but at the moment I have been
focusing on getting Syrian children back to school in September. We’re making
much more progress than even I’d hoped at the beginning of the year. A lot of
people are coming together to recognize that this is a first order challenge.
There are one million Syrians out of school at the moment. I think we’re going
to get almost every Syrian in Jordan into class next year. We’ll probably reach
two-thirds of those in Lebanon and probably half to two-thirds of those in
Turkey. Frustratingly, it’s very hard to get education to the displaced
communities inside the country. 

Doesn’t the United Nations system provide schools?

In the big camps they take the lead. But actually most of the Syrian kids in
Jordan are in mainstream Jordanian schools, as they are in mainstream schools in
Lebanon. So a big part of the challenge is rehabilitating those schools and
running a double-shift system. You can imagine the strain that puts on teachers,
buildings and communities. These host communities have shown extraordinary
compassion. It’s striking when you look at the refugee debate closer to home,
and then you look at the staggering numbers in Lebanon where there are more
refugees in the state school system than there are Lebanese. Can you imagine
what that would do in Britain?

Donald Trump has called for a big wall to keep migrants out of the US. Isn’t the
idea of coexistence dying? 

History tends to suggest that big walls don’t last for very long and they’re not
very successful as a way of dealing with the world. I think taking on those
arguments is important – you can do a lot to promote coexistence in the
curriculum. So part of the education effort is to teach new models of
coexistence in these schools. As a techno-optimist I believe that the internet
will break down a lot of these barriers. The millennial kids from across the
region that I teach see over walls in a way that previous generations weren’t
able to. They can see that the differences aren’t as great as they’ve always
been told. 

Click here to read the interview in full. 

Photo credit: Francesco Guidici


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