Jared Cohen, US Department of State

March 26, 2010 · Posted in 2010 Speaker Bios

Jared Cohen
Secretary of State Policy and Planning Staff
US Department of State

Jared Cohen is a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, where he has served since September 2006. Initially brought in by Condoleezza Rice as the youngest member in history, he was kept on to serve on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff. In this capacity, he focuses on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, Middle East, technology and innovation, public diplomacy and strategic communications, and youth issues. In this capacity, he also chairs the Policy Planning Staff’s working group focused on 21st century statecraft. Prior to his work at the State Department, Cohen received his BA from Stanford University and his M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Cohen has become a specialist in the use of technology to advance American interests throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. In December 2008, Cohen assembled the first ever Alliance of Youth Movements, which was a summit of 21st century movements that relied almost entirely on technology to affect change. In April 2009, he took senior executives from Silicon Valley to Iraq on the first ever US government technology delegation. Eight months later, Cohen brought Google CEO Eric Schmidt to Iraq in what was the first trip to Iraq by an American CEO from a leading technology company. During June 2009 he intervened to keep the Twitter network online, delaying scheduled engineering work, so that supporters of the Iranian opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, favored by the U.S., could continue using the network to plan anti-government activities. In December 2009, CNN released its top ten Internet moments of the decade, of which Cohen’s call to Twitter was among a list that included the launch of Facebook, the introduction of the iPhone, the 2008 presidential campaign, and the Google IPO. In a Huffington Post article posted on October 20, 2009, Cohen coined the phrase “Connection Technologies” now popularly adopted by senior policymakers and widely used in the technology industry. In February 2010, Cohen co-led the U.S.-Russia Innovation Dialogue in Moscow and Novosibirsk. The Innovation Dialogue served as an important illustration of President Obama’s “reset” policy toward Russia and was the first ever bilateral dialogue on innovation that involved governments and society.

Cohen is author of several books. His first, One Hundred Days of Silence: American and the Rwanda Genocide,”was published in 2006 by Rowman & Littlefield and chronicles U.S. policy toward Rwanda during the 1994 Genocide. His second book,”Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East,”was published by Penguin Books (Gotham) in October 2007 and has also been published as an audio book and translated into Dutch and Italian. Cohen’s work on Children of Jihad has received the endorsements of names like Tom Brokaw, Frank Carlucci, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Lugar, and Chris Matthews. Children of Jihad was starred by Kirkus Review and selected as one of the “Best Books of 2007.” Additional publications include The Passive Revolution: Is Political Resistance Dead or Alive in Iran (Hoover Digest, 2005), Iran’s Young Opposition (SAIS Review, 2006), and “Diverting the Radicalization Track” (Policy Review, Spring 2009).

Jared frequently appears in the media: he has been featured in The New Yorker”, “Business Week”, “Wired Magazine”, and appeared on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, CNN, CBS, ABC, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, Discovery Channel, Headline News, CSPAN2-Book TV, Current TV, and a variety of other TV and radio programs both domestic and international. He is frequently asked to speak at domestic and international conferences hosted by think tanks, the public sector, the military, the private sector, and foundations.

Cohen is actively involved in the Tribeca Film Festival where he serves as an annual judge. He has also been involved in the Tribeca Film Festival’s internationalization by traveling with the Tribeca co-founders to Qatar in October 2009 as part of the inaugural Doha Tribeca Film Festival.

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