When Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president 30 years ago, Abdulahi Osman was 13 years old and growing up in communist Somalia.
“When someone was stingy and dressed badly, we called him a Brezhnev,” Osman, assistant professor of international affairs, recalled. “If someone wasn’t stingy and dressed well, we called him a Carter.”
Osman is one of several UGA professors who will present research during the conference’s Jan. 19 concurrent panels. His work focuses on Carter’s foreign policy in Africa, and his balance between idealism and realism.
“He was the first person to inject human rights and humanitarianism into foreign policy, and he was the first person to talk about how immoral South Africa’s apartheid regime was at the time,” Osman said.
“I think people would say that he’s one of the most ethical people who ever was the president, with his heart in the right place, which is hard to find in high-end politics in general,” said panelist Jaroslav Tir, associate professor of international affairs. “He was a true public servant.”
Tir, who was born in Croatia, learned more about Carter as a high school exchange student in Topeka, Kansas, where the large Mennonite community revered the former president for his sense of justice and pacifism, he said. Tir’s paper will concentrate on international conflict and territorial conflict management—something the Carter administration demonstrated when the president negotiated the Camp David Accords, in which Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in a territorial change for peace. In a recently published opinion piece in the Chicago Sun-Times, Tir wrote that if a similar intervention had been performed shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq, a peaceful partition may have pre-empted the current conflict.
“Jimmy Carter was probably one of the very few presidents who has given serious thought to energy policy,” said panelist Yilin Hou, assistant professor of public administration, who will address financial administration issues of the Carter presidency. However, his administration met its share of criticism, particularly with the country’s dismal economy at the time.
Not all of that fault should lie with Carter, said Hou.
The national economy and its environment had changed. “A new (economic) theory was in the formation but not yet fully understood or accepted by policymakers,” said Hou. “Economic forecasts were often off the target, so politicians were in the dark about it. So how could Carter know?”
Maurits van der Veen, assistant professor of international affairs, will present a paper about the impact of Carter’s emphasis on human rights.
By recalling Carter’s administration and the ideals it espoused, the conference can “show that this country can be run in a more ethical, considerate way,” said Tir.
Carter conference academic panelists (scroll to bottom of page) |
