The World Needs New Perspectives – Quarterly

Dear Readers,

Over the past five years, the Robert Bosch Academy has created a vibrant community of international fellows: former ministers from Canada, Ghana, Greece, and Turkey; advisors to French and U.S. presidents; health experts from Italy and environmental experts from India and the United States; journalists from Poland, Russia, and the UK; Australian and South African theater directors – to name a few.

The Academy offers decision-makers, opinion leaders, and experts the intellectual and physical space for research, outreach activities, confidential exchange, and solution-oriented cooperation on global affairs. The Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship provides the fellows with the opportunity to live and work in Berlin. “What I observe about my country’s challenges through a Berlin lens, where I am learning so much about state and nation building, reconciliation, and healing, is very different from what I observe and experience whilst in South Africa,” Brian Currin, one of our current fellows in Berlin, argues in an interview. Why there is no “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to dealing with countries on the African continent is discussed by Hanna Tetteh, the Republic of Ghana’s former Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister of Trade and Industry, and James Shikwati, expert in development economics in Africa and founder and director of the Inter Region Economic Network (IREN) in Kenya. The leading U.S. expert on artificial intelligence, Kate Crawford, who spent several months at the Robert Bosch Academy this year, explains why discrimination through artificial intelligence affects societies worldwide and why we need to consider how we want our technical systems to support our coexistence.

When we established the Academy as a new institution of the Robert Bosch Stiftung at our Berlin Representative Office, the global order was becoming more complex, but the West was still confident about the cohesion provided by its common values and interests. As the Robert Bosch Academy approaches its fifth anniversary, the global order is in flux, the questions increasingly more complex, values ever more challenged from outside and from within societies. History teaches us that successful solutions on all levels depend on courageous individuals, new ideas, and perspectives.

With its fellows, the Robert Bosch Academy has contributed more than 60 interdisciplinary perspectives from 32 countries and six continents to expert conversations as well as debates on political, social, and economic issues. Once a year, this close-knit community convenes at the Richard von Weizsäcker Forum. At this year’s forum in October in Berlin, Stuttgart, and Karlsruhe, fellows discussed the implications of technological change on societies and how Germany is preparing for the future.

We feel it is time to share our fellows’ valuable contributions with a wider audience. In addition to a brief overview of the fellows and their projects, this first edition of our Quarterly Perspectives offers a selection of inspiring features from the Academy community.

We hope you will enjoy the read and we invite you to engage in the debates with the Robert Bosch Academy fellows.

Sandra Breka
Member of the Board of Management
Robert Bosch Stiftung