While Bombs Dropped in Yemen, I worked from Home

About the author: Elena Crespo '21 was a summer intern for the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), an NGO focused on helping and supporting civilian victims in conflict. She is a current second-year student in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy (MIP) program.

As the world grounded to a halt for COVID-19, conflict around the world heated up. More U.S.-made bombs were dropped in Yemen, arms flooded into Libya, and a military coup unfolded in Mali. I'm all too aware of this because I spent my summer working with the U.S. program at Center for Civilian in Conflict (CIVIC), an NGO committed to reducing harm to civilian populations caught in the middle of armed conflict around the world. CIVIC is a unique organization, because rather than being categorically anti-war, it seeks to reduce harm by engaging with militaries on policies and practices that can prevent harm and make amends for harm caused. My team, the U.S. program, specifically focuses on engaging with U.S. government actors (the DoD, Congress, the State Department, USAID, the White House etc.) on reducing civilian harm in ongoing U.S. operations in the Middle East and in the Sahel. Additionally, we have an eye to the future, and are proactively working to address potential harm that could arise as new weapons technologies and new conflicts with U.S. rivals emerge. 

For the last four years, I've struggled to navigate the intersection between human rights and security studies. I feel as though I found my home at CIVIC, where I completed technical research on defense policy issues through a human rights framework. Throughout the summer, I partnered with another summer fellow to create a comprehensive research brief on arms sales reform. Drawing from a series of reports produced by arms sales experts and previous legislative initiatives on the Hill, we created a product that will hopefully drive the arms sales reform debate for years to come. Through this research, I gained an invaluable understanding of the U.S. arms sales regime, one of many U.S. foreign policies that is devoid of the human rights concerns that we claim to espouse. For over a decade, U.S. weapons have flowed to governments committing war crimes, have been illegally transferred to U.S. enemies like the Islamic State, and have been used by "allies" to suppress democratic protests. It is this understanding of how broken U.S. arms sales are that galvanizes me to continue working in this space.  

Similarly, I had the opportunity to support groundbreaking research on the importance of consulting civil society in countries where the United States is assisting a foreign military in any capacity. With the potential to shift the U.S. government's approach to security sector assistance, a multi-billion-dollar endeavor, this research completed by the director of the U.S. program, Dan Mahanty, could have an outsize impact by ensuring greater transparency and accountability in the way the U.S. conducts security sector assistance.  

As an organization that often works in coalition, CIVIC taught me much about the NGO world dominating the progressive foreign policy world in Washington D.C. I had the opportunity to listen in on strategy calls on war powers reform and working group meetings on improving the U.S. drones program. I've witnessed first-hand the power of uniting the legislative powers of a member of congress with the brilliant and tireless advocacy of the NGO community, when over 90 NGOs signed on to a letter to end the transfer of surplus military gear from the DoD to U.S. police departments.

Though it may have felt like the world held its breath his summer, my summer as CIVIC was a flurry of frantic, but iron-willed activity. I was endlessly heartened and inspired to observe so many passionate advocates for human rights in U.S. foreign policy. My time at CIVIC has made me reconsider a career path that strictly took me into government in favor of perhaps working within the NGO world. I'm grateful to CIVIC for entrusting me with hand-on policy research and for challenging my preconceived notions of my future.