History of our Strategic Partnership with IGL

The relationship between the Project on Justice in Times of Transition and the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University began in 1991, when Tim Phillips, Project co-founder, attended the seventh EPIIC international symposium entitled “Confronting Political and Social Evil.”  That year’s discussions were significantly influenced by the end of the Cold War and the rapidly changing global context and speakers included leading human rights activists, Eastern European dissidents and foreign policy specialists. Discussions at this meeting had a strong impact on Mr. Phillips, who had witnessed similar thorny challenges in Central and South America in the late 1980’s, where he had organized a series of high-level fact finding trips with influential US opinion leaders to the region.

Since the early 1990s, the Project and the IGL have remained in regular contact and many Tufts students have worked with the Project, conducting research and assisting with the development of a range of its initiatives in the Balkans, Central America, Colombia, Sri Lanka and the Basque Region of Spain. Mr. Phillips has also been a member of the External Advisory Board of IGL for more than a decade and served as an IGL INSPIRE Fellow (Institute Scholar, Practitioner in Residence) in 2002-2003, helping to foster among other things the Sovereignty Exchange and the Central American Youth Leadership Initiative as student driven programs at the IGL.  In 2007, the Project and the IGL formalized their already solid relationship into a strategic partnership which is designed to complement and reinforce the work of both institutions.  To further enable this cross fertilization the Project has moved its offices to the IGL building and Wendy Luers, Project Co-Chair also joined the IGL External Advisory Board.