The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security has announced a new oral history initiative, the Hillary Rodham Clinton Oral History Project. The multi-year project seeks to establish an authoritative record of the international context, decision-making processes, and policy innovations of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.
The project will provide an important resource for students, researchers, journalists, policymakers and historians to understand a pivotal period in American foreign policy history. Drawing on public records, memoirs, press, speeches, and extensive oral histories, it will chronicle Secretary Clinton’s management and vision, including her “Smart Power” doctrine, the institutionalization of Women, Peace & Security policy and global challenges the State Department navigated under her leadership.
“Never has the work been more vital or more necessary,” observed Dr. Allida Black, Director of the Hillary Rodham Clinton Oral History Project. “The project demonstrates how policy can—and sometimes cannot—address crises and promote a more stable world. It also demonstrates the immense impact women continue to have on war and peace, diplomacy and statecraft around the globe.”
Each interview rests on rigorous research of domestic and global records conducted by the project team, which includes postdoctoral fellow Dr. Rebecca Turkington and undergraduate and graduate Georgetown students from across the School of Foreign Service. This extensive background work informs deep discussions about the details of the policy process. The project’s conversations will create a roadmap for how government works by showing how policies were made and operationalized, how officials learned from mistakes, and how policy makers argued, negotiated, and built coalitions. Rather than interpretation or analysis, the project provides an unbiased look at the legacy of one of the most consequential foreign policy figures of the 21st century, as well as a record of the evolution of American policy on key global issues such as human rights and international humanitarian law; counterinsurgency and drone warfare; economic statecraft and great power competition, climate change and crisis management, and public diplomacy and countering illiberal democracies.
Housed at Georgetown, the oral history project builds on nearly forty interviews conducted at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs starting in 2020. Looking beyond the senior diplomatic leadership of the State Department’s “Mahogany Row,” it will expand to more than a hundred interviews and include the perspectives of a wide range of actors—from Secretary Clinton to implementing staff to Clinton’s foreign counterparts to local activists around the world. By talking to the people who created American policy and those who were affected by it, both critics and supporters, the project will offer a new kind of diplomatic history and potentially a blueprint for effective governance.
Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security seeks to promote a more stable, peaceful, and just world by focusing on the important role women play in preventing conflict and building peace, growing economies, and addressing global threats like climate change and violent extremism. We engage in rigorous research, host global convenings, advance strategic partnerships, and nurture the next generation of leaders. Housed within the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, the Institute is headed by the former U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer. For more information, sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Twitter and Facebook @giwps and Instagram @georgetown_wps.
Media Contact:
Alexandra Gopin
ag2276@georgetown.edu