The Howard S. Brembeck Fellowship was launched in January 2023 by the Fourth Freedom Forum Board of Directors and is named to honor the memory of the Fourth Freedom Forum founder, Howard S. Brembeck.
The Fourth Freedom Forum has awarded the inaugural Howard S. Brembeck Fellowship to Anna Romandash from Ukraine, who is a member of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs’ Master of Global Affairs (MGA) program’s Class of 2022. The newly-established Brembeck Fellowship is an academic fellowship focused on promoting fair opportunities for aspiring students to develop practical skills in the field of international peace and security.
Anna Romandash is a multi-award-winning journalist and researcher from Ukraine. She has extensive experience working across Eastern Europe and Central Asia where she researched democratization processes, freedom movements, and human rights violations. Romandash has written substantially on Belarus and Russia’s dictatorships and on Ukraine’s relations with the EU and the US. Her areas of interest include international security, sanctions, and transitional justice. Romandash is a professional advisor at United Europe where she writes on Europe’s defense and response to human rights violations and crises.
Romandash likes the emphasis of the Brembeck Fellowship because “it combines a foreign policy focus with a peace and justice angle.” she said. “I also value that it is attentive to underrepresented audiences and aims to include the excluded groups as crucial elements of research. I hope that via this fellowship, I would be able to expand my knowledge, as well as to make a meaningful contribution to the Brembeck project and an overall revision of foreign policy toward a more peace-oriented world.”
As the Brembeck Fellow, Romandash will work directly with Professor David Cortright at the University of Notre Dame to promote the work of the New Paradigm Project, which is taking the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War to consider more humane and effective approaches to security and development, and to advance a new paradigm for a more peaceful and inclusive U.S. foreign policy. To this end, Romandash will provide research support for the writing and dissemination of publications, as well as program support to organize public events on issues related to the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War and the potential for a redesigned approach to U.S. foreign policy.
The Howard S. Brembeck Fellowship was launched in January 2023 by the Fourth Freedom Forum Board of Directors and is named to honor the memory of the Fourth Freedom Forum founder, Howard S. Brembeck. He had a vision of multigenerational engagement on these issues and this fellowship will continue his legacy of promoting and supporting young scholars and future leaders whose work will also help to advance the Fourth Freedom Forum’s mission.
The scope of work for this fellowship is not limited to traditional views of state-centric international security, rather we encourage applicants to embrace the concept of Integrated Cooperative Security. That is: the collective promotion and attainment of sustainable peace, dignity, and well-being for all of humanity including active measures to safeguard the health of the environment. It involves a holistic, inclusive, and multi-stakeholder approach to preventing and addressing threats from intimidation and violence in all forms and from humiliation and human rights violations. It requires providing civilian-led protection from economic, food, health, ecological, personal, community, digital, and political inequities and insecurities, through the use of good governance initiatives, diplomacy, peacebuilding, harm reduction, development, advocacy, technology, and other peaceful means of governmental and non-governmental action without overreliance on the use of military force.