Save the date! The Columbia Journalism Review presents "We Want To Negotiate" with Joel Simon

Tuesday, February 5, 2019
6:00pm — 7:00pm
Graduate School of Journalism
Columbia University
The World Room
2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
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“A wise and thorough investigation of the painful conundrum posed by terrorist kidnappings. Simon makes a cogent argument about how to change our current, failed approach to negotiation.” — Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower and The Terror Years

Starting in late 2012, Westerners working in Syria — journalists and aid workers — began disappearing without a trace. A year later the world learned they had been taken hostage by the Islamic State. Throughout 2014, all the Europeans came home, first the Spanish, then the French, then an Italian, a German, and a Dane. In August 2014, the Islamic State began executing the Americans — including journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, followed by the British hostages.

Click here to read Joel Simon's oped in the Washington Post on "What Makes Jamal Khashoggi's Alleged Murder So Depraved."

Kyle Pope is the Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review. A seasoned newspaper editor and reporter who worked for a decade at The Wall Street Journal, was editor-in-chief of The New York Observer, deputy editor of Portfolio magazine, and editor-in-chief of a chain of hyperlocal weeklies in Manhattan. Follow him on Twitter at@kylepope.

Janine di Giovanni is an author, foreign correspondent, and current Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a regular contributor to The Times, Vanity Fair, Granta, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Di Giovanni has written a number of books and made two long format documentaries for the BBC. She is herself a subject in the documentary films No Man's Land (1993), Bearing Witness (2005) and 7 Days in Syria (2015). In 2013, di Giovanni was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world of armed violence by the organization Action on Armed Violence (AOAV). Follow her on Twitter at@janinedigi.