Behind the Lens With Foreign Affairs Photojournalism Amanda Rivkin

FIS, TÜRKIYE. A villager makes bread in an outdoor kiln in Fis, Türkiye, on February 24, 2012. Fis is known as one of the first meeting places of arrested Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) guerrilla leader Abdullah Öcalan. Fis used to be home to 70 families, but the Turkish military destroyed much of the town repeatedly in 1993-1994 in retaliatory strikes for the villagers' show of sympathy to the PKK guerrillas to whom they provided food and shelter ("They are our sons," in the words of one villager). Only seven homes have been rebuilt in Fis after a period of forced exile from the village, and everyone is too scared to provide their name.

In an age of increasing global misinformation, media polarization and the rise of artificial intelligence, journalists are fundamental in documenting and understanding the global order.

Amanda Rivkin (SSP'11), a graduate of SFS's Master of Arts in Security Studies program (SSP), has spent more than a decade working as a press photographer, news writer, editor and researcher for Deutsche Welle, The New York Times and myriad other publications. She has published widely in the U.S. and Europe, and her photographs have been exhibited in many cities around the world, from DC and Chicago to Milan and Aleppo. She has also served as a senior expert at the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, Latvia.

Rivkin recently returned to the Hilltop to participate in the inaugural event co-hosted by SSP and the Bern Security Dialogue, a new independent geopolitical forum. As part of the new initiative, she authors the Alpine Security Monitor, a weekly newsletter that includes special reports on key issues influencing security in the broader Alpine region.

We sat down with Rivkin to reflect on what led her to SSP and connections between journalism and international relations. She also shared a compelling selection of images from her portfolio that illuminate this relationship.

Engaging with domestic and global issues

By the time she arrived at Georgetown in 2009, Rivkin had already been working as a journalist for several years. She had covered major national political stories, including Barack Obama's victory celebration in Grant Park, Chicago, and the fall of then-Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich a few months later.

At the same time, Rivkin was witnessing the peak years of the Global War on Terror-a term widely used from 2001 to 2009-but wanted a deeper perspective of these military and intelligence forces shaping events. "I was watching my country transform before my eyes, but I did not have any background in military or intelligence affairs really until that point to understand it," she says. This ultimately led her to SFS and the Security Studies program.

"In a cratering media environment badly transitioning to an unknown digital future, a degree from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service seemed like not only a window out to the rest of the world but a nice backdrop for whatever else I might wish to do later in life."

At Georgetown, she was not only studying defense and security issues-she was shoulder-to-shoulder with individuals actively engaged in them: "Suddenly, I was in class with the people who were on the frontlines and professors who were shaping the American understanding of those front lines."

Beyond a new academic focus, Georgetown also opened up professional opportunities. The summer after her first year in the program, Rivkin received a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant to travel the length of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. After graduation, she received a Fulbright Grant in photography, which she used to return to Azerbaijan.

Security meets storytelling

Reflecting on how her studies informed her reporting, Rivkin explains that she learned to think critically about global issues not just as they unfold, but in terms of their long-term ramifications. While she describes the pace of the media industry as largely reactive and deadline-driven, she says SSP allowed her to cultivate an appreciation for the long view:

"My Georgetown education very much taught me and gave me this capability to think over the horizon."

Over the course of her career, Rivkin has developed extensive experience in Central and Eastern Europe, Türkiye and the Caucasus, as well as the Midwestern United States. Her work has focused sharply on a range of political, social, humanitarian and security issues.

She has covered geopolitical developments around the world, including the Gezi Park uprising in Türkiye, new Ukrainian military recruits in Odesa in 2016 during the war in eastern Ukraine, ecological disaster in Hungary and postwar reconstruction in Bosnia.

No matter how far she travels, Rivkin always brings those lessons back home. "What I saw in the field later helped me to interpret what I saw happening in my own country in a meaningful way," Rivkin says.

At the same time, she underscores the continued need to look outward:

"It is no longer possible to look at the major events shaping our world on just a local or national level, especially given developments of the last two and a half decades."

Looking outward, together

As both a producer and a consumer of news, Rivkin sees clearly how attacks on accurate information come from many directions, often leaving audiences overwhelmed. For students preparing to navigate this fast-moving environment-defined by distortion and digital noise-her advice is straightforward: broaden your perspective by stepping beyond your own vantage point.

"The only way to push back against all these very convenient and very cynical forces is to go out into the world, whether that is one's community or a foreign country, and experience the world in a tactile and syncretic manner."

As her experience and photographs illustrate, doing so in concert with others is critical. She emphasizes that one cannot develop analytical skills or understand the world based on any one person's experience alone.

"Centuries of human experience are not on social media and the internet," Rivkin says. "They are in libraries and in engaging with people who are older and younger, who are experiencing the same world we are but through a different prism, whether that is age, class, race, nationality, profession."

BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA. Visitors are seen near the recently constructed monument to those who died trying to escape the communist regime by crossing into Austria by swimming a mere 40 meters across the Danube in Devín, Slovakia, on June 26, 2010. Located beside the Devín Castle, the once heavily fortified crossing point, among the narrowest in the former Eastern Bloc, was and remains a popular spot for local tourists and day trippers as the oldest castle ruins in Slovakia are perched on the adjacent hillside.

All photos and captions courtesy of Amanda Rivkin, used with permission.