Jared Cohen

Change agent, Idea generator, Policy maker, World traveler, Writer/Editor

Jared Cohen is a non-fiction author and member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, where he has served since September 2006. Initially brought in by Condoleezza Rice as the youngest member in history, he is politically transcendent and has continued to play an important role under Hillary Clinton In this capacity, he focuses on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, Middle East/South Asia, Youth, and Technology. Prior to his work at the State Department, Cohen received his BA from Stanford University and his M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Cohen has become a specialist in the use of technology to advance American interests throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. In December 2008, Cohen assembled the first ever Alliance of Youth Movements, which was a summit of 21st century movements that relied almost entirely on technology to affect change. In April 2009, he took senior executives from Silicon Valley to Iraq on the first ever US government technology delegation. Eight months later, Cohen brought Google CEO Eric Schmidt to Iraq in what was the first trip to Iraq by an American CEO from a leading technology company. During June 2009 he intervened to keep the Twitter network online, delaying scheduled engineering work, so that supporters of the Iranian opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, favoured by the U.S., could continue using the network to plan anti-government activities. In a Huffington Post article posted on October 20, 2009, Cohen coined the phrase "Connection Technologies" now popularly adopted by senior policymakers and widely used in the technology industry. In the midst of the June 2009 post-election protests in Iran, Cohen reached out to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and urged the company to reschedule its planned maintenance of the website so that Iranians could keep tweeting. Given that all other forms of communication had been blocked or shut down, Twitter was one of the only ways for people inside of Iran to get information to the outside world. It also became an important way for people around the world to join the protests by disseminating proxy and circumvention tools. When the New York Times broke the story, it came at a time when the Obama administration declared that there would be no meddling in Iran. Cohen´s involvement drew international curiosity not just because at the time it was the most robust action taken by the U.S. government in response to the protests, but also because Cohen had spent time in Iran and written about the possibility of technology being used for social upheaval in his book Children of Jihad. In December 2009, CNN released its top ten Internet moments of the decade, of which Cohen´s call to Twitter was among a list that included the launch of Facebook, the introduction of the iPhone, the 2008 presidential campaign, and the Google IPO. Cohen is author of several books. His first, One Hundred Days of Silence: American and the Rwanda Genocide,"was published in 2006 by Rowman & Littlefield and chronicles U.S. policy toward Rwanda during the 1994 Genocide. His second book,"Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East,"was published by Penguin Books (Gotham) in October 2007 and has also been published as an audio book and translated into Dutch and Italian. Cohen's work on Children of Jihad has received the endorsements of names like Tom Brokaw, Frank Carlucci, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Lugar, and Chris Matthews. Children of Jihad was starred by Kirkus Review and selected as one of the "Best Books of 2007." Additional publications include The Passive Revolution: Is Political Resistance Dead or Alive in Iran (Hoover Digest, 2005), Iran's Young Opposition (SAIS Review, 2006), and "Diverting the Radicalization Track" (Policy Review, Spring 2009). Jared frequently appears in the media: he has been featured in The New Yorker", "Business Week", "Wired Magazine", and appeared on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, CNN, CBS, ABC, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, Discovery Channel, Headline News, CSPAN2-Book TV, Current TV, and a variety of other TV and radio programs both domestic and international. He is frequently asked to speak at domestic and international conferences hosted by think tanks, the public sector, the military, the private sector, and foundations. Cohen is actively involved in the Tribeca Film Festival. In April/May 2008, he was a judge at the Tribeca Film Festival along with Whoopi Goldberg and Padma Lakshmi and traveled with the Tribeca co-founders to Qatar in October 2009 to help launch the Doha Tribeca Film Festival.

Foreign Policy, technology as a tool for social change, national security

Technology is breaking down socioeconomic, gender, age or circumstantial barriers that have prevented non-traditional and unlikely leaders from emerging and having a voice. Technology has become an important equalizer that is leveling the playing field and opening the floodgates to a civil society that is more inclusive and expansive than ever before. The digital space is not a separate world from the traditional one we know; rather, it is an extension of the civil society we have long known. The advent of 21st century tools and the emergence of new platforms means that traditional NGOs and civil society organizations are being joined by 21st century movements that have a URL, website, or facebook page instead of an office; they have followers and members instead of paid staff, and they use open source platforms instead of having robust budgets. To those who fear this is dangerous, I say: The 21st century is a bad time to be a control freak.

Africa, Foreign Policy, Middle East, National Security, terrorism

Painting and adventure traveling