Reimagining U.S. Foreign Assistance: Strategy, Security, and Global Impact ft. Dr. Dafna H. Rand

Join us for a lunchtime conversation with Dr. Dafna H. Rand, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and the Wilhelm Fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies, on the future of U.S. foreign assistance and its role in American foreign policy. 

Drawing on nearly two decades of experience across the executive and legislative branches—including serving as the Director of Foreign Assistance and an Assistant Secretary at the State Department—Dr. Rand will explore how assistance can advance U.S. security, economic, humanitarian, and strategic priorities. 

The discussion will examine how U.S. foreign assistance could be restructured to meet the challenges of global authoritarianism, great-power competition, and global crises, and what these shifts might mean for U.S. leadership on the world stage.

Please register with a valid Harvard email address to attend in-person.

About Dr. Dafna H. Rand

Dafna H. Rand serves as a senior fellow at Brookings and a Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies. Her research examines a range of international security and governance questions—focusing on the Middle East, the threat of rising authoritarianism, the future of U.S. foreign aid, and the future configuration of multilateral organizations, including regional organizations and their capacity to prevent conflict. After serving in foreign policy roles across the executive and legislative branches of government for nearly two decades, Rand is conducting research on change management and strategic learning and evaluation within the U.S. foreign policy and national security apparatus.

Before joining Brookings, Rand served as the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor at the State Department. In that capacity she advised the president and secretary of state on new threats emanating from global autocratic regimes and how to protect civilians caught in global conflicts. Rand led efforts to consider the human rights implications of new technologies within the context of great power competition. She also represented the president as a commissioner on the U.S. Helsinki Commission and as a commissioner on the Congressional Executive Commission on China.

Previously, she served as the director of foreign assistance at the State Department, where she managed historic foreign assistance accounts of $70 billion annually. Working with Congress, the White House, and USAID, she helped to conceive, allocate, and implement three historic Ukraine supplemental appropriations, consisting of security, economic development and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine and its neighbors after Russia’s 2022 invasion. She piloted new programmatic approaches to climate assistance and to programs countering the negative ramifications of China’s investments in the developing world. For her work as the director of foreign assistance, Rand won the State Department’s Superior Honor Award.

Earlier in her career, Rand worked for President Obama’s National Security Council and for the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, focusing on U.S. foreign policy formulation for the changing Middle East and North Africa. She has served two tours in the U.S. Senate, first as foreign policy and defense legislative assistant to Senator Frank Lautenberg and then as a professional staff member for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Outside of government, Rand served as the vice president for policy and research at Mercy Corps, building teams to evaluate the efficacy of development assistance programs and to push for systemic changes to the international aid infrastructure. She is the former deputy director of studies at the Center for New American Security and a former distinguished resident fellow in strategic affairs at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.

As a scholar, Rand has published two books and a dozen journal articles on the Middle East and North Africa and testified multiple times in front of Congress on this subject. She was appointed by congressional leadership to serve on the Syria Study Group in 2019. From 2020-21, she served on the congressionally-mandated Afghan Study Group run by the U.S. Institute of Peace. From 2018-21, the secretary of defense appointed Rand to serve as the vice chair and then acting chair of the board of visitors, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, U.S. Army, Ft. Benning.