By Rayhan Asat

In the Fall of 2022, Yale’s Jackson Institute became the Jackson School of Global Affairs. The change will make Jackson an even greater forum for today’s leading foreign policy thinkers to train the next generation. This is a great responsibility. To rise to it, Jackson’s faculty and community need to be intentional about the core values they ascribe to U.S. foreign policy. A Jackson education should reorient human rights as a primary concern and teaching priority. 

I joined Jackson as a World Fellow in the Fall of 2021. It was an invaluable opportunity to learn from and connect with others dedicated to making the world a better place. For six years, I have been advocating for the release of my brother, Ekpar Asat, who was forcibly disappeared in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China in 2016, which set me on the path to become a human rights lawyer.

Many renowned professors at Yale have supported my advocacy. For instance, Professor Beverly Gage provided me with the opportunity to teach a lesson to the popular “Grand Strategy” course about human-rights-centered foreign policy. I am particularly grateful to the Orville Schell Center at Yale Law School, where I worked with human rights lawyers and bright students. With the generous support of Yale Law School Professors Jim Silk and Hope Metcalf, I led a student team to submit a comment to the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection on implementing the Uyghur Force Labor Prevention Act. I am immensely grateful for the resources provided by the Law School. 

At Jackson, I expected to find even greater allyship and friendship on the shared values of designing foreign policy based on human rights, especially given that my presence at Yale would offer profound insights into the egregious rights abuses facing my community in China. In a school where policy professionals learn about wars, peace, security, international relations, and laws, I expected that calling out these crimes against humanity would be easy. But I was overly optimistic as human rights were still a marginalized subject at Jackson.

Human rights used to be a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced a new era where his presidency aimed to “infuse a new morality in American diplomacy, one grounded in the pursuit of human rights.”[1] Since then, albeit imperfectly, the United States prioritized complying with and promoting universal values of human rights. However, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the United States shifted away from a human-rights-centered foreign policy and allowed egregious rights violations within America and the rest of the world. The enactment of the Patriot Act paved the way for rights abuses at home. In the Middle East, as recently as in 2021 in Afghanistan, the catastrophic and ill-planned U.S. withdrawal have created many tragedies, undermining America’s leadership for humanity. 

While the United States doubled down on its “war on terror,” the increasingly authoritarian Chinese government instigated the fear of terrorism and Islamophobia by othering its diverse Uyghur population as Muslims and dismissing the plurality of religions. Such framing allowed the Chinese government to systematically target ethnic populations with oppression and draconian measures.[2] China has established a perfect surveillance state and subdued millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, forced labor factories, and prisons, terrorizing an entire population. This repression also did not end at its borders, as China is carrying out the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression.[3]

One of the greatest failures of U.S. foreign policy is what Jackson’s very own Timothy Snyder referred to as blind faith in “the politics of inevitability.”[4] China is a prime example of this myth that blinded the West. The West believed economic interdependence would bring about democracy in China, but such finite thinking deprived the West of exercising the intellectual muscle to identify the warning signs that led to where we are today. Today, global supply chains are tainted with Uyghur modern slavery. Economic interdependence with China, rather than liberating people there, has instead made American companies and consumers complicit. The Biden administration rightfully signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law to tackle this, but the United States fell short of putting an end to slavery in Xinjiang. 

We are at a crossroads of democracy restoration and autocracy glorification. In many regions of the world, authoritarianism is on the rise. As the balance of power shifts, America must reexamine its foreign policy, fortify its credibility abroad, and exert the leadership necessary to confront the human rights abuses committed by autocratic regimes. Promoting democracy and human rights abroad must be accompanied by defending them at home, and the best place for doing so is in international policy schools like Jackson. President Biden reiterated that “America is an idea.”[5] America must project that idea out into the world and serve as a beacon of hope for those suffering under authoritarian rule. Many, like my brother, are counting on it. 

As a proud World Fellow, I wish that Jackson would become a world-class global affairs school to train next-generation policymakers. Cultivating leaders who value fundamental human rights and dignity should be the teaching and practicing model at the Jackson School of Global Affairs and beyond. 

About the Author

Rayhan Asat is an international human rights lawyer of Uyghur origin, a Yale Law School Tom and Andi Bernstein Human Rights fellow, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project. She frequently comments and publishes on international law, corruption, business and human rights, and atrocity prevention.

Endnotes

1.  “Carter and Human Rights, 1977-1981,” Office of the Historian, accessed November 22, 2022, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/human-rights.

2. Phelim Kine, “How China hijacked the war on terror,” Politico, September 9, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/09/china-hijacked-war-on-terror-511032.

3.  “China: Transnational Repression Origin Country Case Study,” Freedom House, 2021, https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/china.

4. Ezra Klein and Timothy Snyder, “Timothy Snyder on the Myths That Blinded the West to Putin’s Plans,” The New York Times, March 15, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-timothy-snyder.html.

5. Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation,” The White House, September 1, 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/09/01/remarks-by-president-bidenon-the-continued-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-nation/.