Like many HDS alumni/alumnae who choose a different path than ordination, Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, MTS ’84, shares her classmates' commitment to ethics and values.
Donahoe came to the Divinity School to delve deeply into philosophical and moral questions before embarking on what’s become a 30-year career in law, international security and cooperation, human rights, and diplomacy. She says those concerns—and the years she spent at HDS reflecting on them—continue to shape her life and work.
“Those questions about how society is organized . . . about the relationship between government and citizens,” Donahoe said at HDS in 2014, “I’ve carried with me from those days on throughout my career and in everything I’ve done . . . . Even though there is an individualism at the heart of the human rights movement, in many ways, the biggest question is ‘How do governments get to treat their citizens?’ ”
As the first permanent U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council from 2010 to 2013, Donahoe worked at the intersection of morality and pragmatic diplomacy. She and her team achieved concrete results on fundamental issues, not by dictating right and wrong to other nations but by asking them to reflect on their own history and values. On the issue of freedom of assembly and association, for instance, Donahoe built support with Argentina by calling to mind the protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose children had been “disappeared” by the country’s authoritarian regime in the 1970s. For Poland, it was the Solidarity movement. For South Africa, it was antiapartheid.
“If they didn’t have the right to assemble and associate, then those societies would not have been transformed,” Donahoe said. “In each of these cases, you could see the light in the eye of our diplomatic counterparts. They would say, ‘Yes. That’s our value. We own that.’”
At the same time, she and her team struggled with fundamental differences in values between the United States and other nations. She found herself at odds, for instance, with representatives from other cultures who believed it was their moral obligation to oppose equal protection under the law for lesbian, gay, and transgender citizens.
“People would stand up in Palais des Nations room 20 where we did our work in Geneva and feel very certain that they were standing up for truth and justice by not supporting LGBT rights,” she remembers. “The clash of values was just palpable.”
After serving out her term at the United Nations, Donahoe was appointed director of global affairs at Human Rights Watch (HRW), where she represented the organization worldwide on “human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, cybersecurity, and Internet governance.” One of her top priorities has been narrowing the “digital divide” between the 65 percent of the developing world that has no access to the Internet and their online counterparts.
“While those of us who live in the digital ecosystem can’t remember what daily life is like without Internet connectivity or our digital devices,” she wrote on the Human Rights Watch site in March 2016, “the majority of people in the world have zero digital experience . . . . These digital divides have the potential to significantly exacerbate existing global inequality and lead to conditions where conflict is more likely.”
Whether at the UN or HRW, Donahoe says that her work has been animated by a personal commitment to care, service, and justice that “comes from a place that has a spiritual and religious dynamic.” She appeals to that same energy in others in her efforts to resolve conflict, build consensus, and advance human rights around the world.
“There’s such resonance in that idea of getting people to step back and claim their values,” she says. “People are animated by things other than the intellect. At the end of the day, truth can only be told on some level in ways that are different than linear analytic thinking. Whether it’s literature, spirituality, or mysticism, that’s where the truth is. That’s what really animates people around the world.”
—Paul Massari