The Democracy Pipeline
By Jamil Siddiqui
On SIPA’s job search platform right now, you can find the Central Intelligence Agency listed as one of many organizations that hire our graduates. Despite the role the CIA has played in destabilizing the Global South, it sits between Catholic Relief Services and Chemonics International—ordered alphabetically, just like any other list of companies at a career fair. Meanwhile, our shiny flagship Institute of Global Politics (IGP) is chaired by none other than Hillary Clinton, who championed the NATO intervention that turned Libya from by far Africa’s most developed state into a gushing wound. In justifying this decision, Secretary Clinton employs the same kind of justification as the CIA and its sister institutions, arguing the intervention was necessary to prevent Libya from becoming another Syria. In doing so, her actions led to something far worse. Yet, during a CBS interview, Clinton responded with glee to news of the death of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi: “We came. We saw. He died.”
Secretary Clinton’s unwillingness to reckon with the consequences of her actions directly relates to how SIPA fails to interrogate the “other side of the coin” of the ideas, institutions, and people it promotes. Libya is one instance: Almost no one in IAB reconciles our own figurehead’s role in the country’s collapse with the honesty, integrity, or rigor it deserves. It’s exactly this Clinton-esque willful blindness around interventionism that breeds the next generation of regime change perpetrators.
SIPA cultivates in budding practitioners a worldview in which working for instruments of American power projection is synonymous with public service. Classroom debates often ask whether foreign intervention was timely and effective—not whether the United States had the justification to remake another country’s government in the first place. Some courses might include a couple anti-imperialists tucked away at the end of the reading list, but those works live at the margins of a curriculum that overwhelmingly runs in the opposite direction.
This kind of siloed thinking requires deliberate amnesia. Many scholars, like Dr. Lindsey O’Rourke at Boston College, critically evaluate failed U.S. interventions. In 2018, O’Rourke published her book in which she researched every U.S.-backed regime change operation during the Cold War. She found 64 covert and six overt attempts—70 operations over four decades. Over 60 percent failed, often making targeted countries more authoritarian and unstable in their aftermath. During my time at SIPA, I have never been assigned to read research like O’Rourke’s. The silencing of this kind of commentary feels deliberate, but not to protect any individuals. Rather, it threatens the sentiment the International Security Policy concentration is infused with: U.S. intervention is inherently good, and the suffering it brings to the Global South is a fair price to pay.
SIPA’s course curriculum, administration, and instructor-practitioners refuse to critically examine occupation and resistance. When people in the Global South resist foreign intervention, classrooms in IAB reflexively frame this as extremism. People like former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who represent anti-colonial self-determination outside of Washington’s script, rarely make appearances. The range of opinions for IGP panel participants or adjunct practitioners consistently fall within the acceptable boundaries of liberal interventionism and neoconservatism.
It is deeply ironic that this disconnect occurs at the same institution that propelled Edward Said’s discourse on post-colonial studies. A Columbia professor of 40 years, Said wrote the pivotal 1978 book Orientalism on this campus. In his groundbreaking critique, Said argues that the West constructed the East as inferior to justify its own imperial projects. Yet curiously, his work shows up in a handful of syllabi today. Truly engaging with Said’s work would force our community to reckon with how the institutions our program feeds into operate within the system of Western domination that Said spent his life critiquing.
Many SIPA graduates will leave IAB believing the wars the U.S. waged were in good faith. My peers will believe that Iraq, with the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves, was no more nefarious than a strategic miscalculation. They will believe that Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya were simply humanitarian missteps. They will believe this because the SIPA curriculum was designed to reward one kind of curiosity and quietly smother the rest.
Edward Said spent his career at Columbia arguing that empire does not announce itself. It shows up wearing the robes of knowledge and expertise, soft-spoken about inclusivity while reaching for the Global South’s resources. SIPA proves Said’s point every semester—and most of us will graduate without ever being asked to notice.