Archive - December 26, 2012

By Robert Nolan (Zimbabwe ) How the Peace Corps Benefits Diplomatic Security Robert Nolan is an editor at the Foreign Policy Association and producer of the Great Decisions in Foreign Policy television series on PBS. You can follow him on Twitter @robert_nolan. As a young Peace Corps volunteer in Zimbabwe during the late 1990s, my colleagues and I used to joke that we had a much deeper understanding of politics in the southern African country than the American ambassador posted in Harare. Living in rural communities among average Zimbabweans, we were often privy to late night political discussions around a shared “scud” of Chibuku, (a local beer named after the missiles used in the 1991 Gulf War), during lunch breaks at the secondary schools where many of us taught or while traveling between the countryside and the capital on unreliable buses. Trusting Zimbabweans might chat with us about an uptick . . .