Emma Sky

Emma Sky
Emma Sky
Born	1968 (age 55–56) England
Occupation(s)	Director of Yale World Fellows Jackson Institute for Global Affairs Senior Fellow
Notable work	The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (2015)

Emma Sky, OBE is a British commentator on conflict, reconciliation and stability, who has worked mainly in the Middle East. She served in Iraq as the political advisor to US General Ray Odierno and General David Petraeus during the surge. She is director of the International Leadership Center at Yale University, overseeing the Yale World Fellows Program and other initiatives. She is a Senior Fellow at Yale's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where she lectures on Middle East politics and global affairs.

She is the author of The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (2015) and In a Time of Monsters: Travelling in a Middle East in Revolt (2019).

Early life and education

Sky was born and grew up in England. She attended the Ashfold School and Dean Close School and earned her undergraduate degree in Oriental studies at Somerville College, Oxford University. She also studied at Alexandria University in Egypt, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, and the University of Liverpool.

Career

Following Oxford, Sky spent about ten years working for non-governmental organisations in attempts at ‘development and conflict resolution’.

Emma Sky (second from left) accompanying Gen. Ray Odierno (centre) on a visit to a local market in Khalis, Iraq, January 2009.

During this period, Sky primarily lived in Israel, working in the East Jerusalem office of the British Council managing projects in the West Bank and Gaza which aimed to help build up the capacity of Palestinian institutions, and to promote co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians. In 2001, Sky returned to the UK and continued working for the British Council in Manchester, where she remained until the launch of the 2003 Iraq War.

Although (ostensibly) “opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq”, Sky volunteered to join the Coalition Provisional Authority and served as the Governorate Coordinator of Kirkuk from 2003 to 2004.

Sky served in 2005 in Jerusalem as the Political Advisor to General Kip Ward, the US Security Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. In 2006, she was based in Kabul, Afghanistan as the Development Advisor to the Italian and British Commanding Generals of NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

From 2007 to 2010, Sky served as the Political Advisor to US General Raymond T. Odierno when he was the Commanding General of Multi-National Corps – Iraq and Commanding General of US Forces Iraq. She also advised General David Petraeus on reconciliation.

In her Iraq War memoir ‘The Unravelling’(2015), Sky describes (pages 312-313) her dispute with The Obama Administration’s incoming US Ambassador to Iraq Chris Hill - one of whose first acts was to kick her out of The Chancery of the US Embassy which this ‘unaffiliated Brit’ had infiltrated as US Army General Odierno’s political advisor, or “Polad”. For Ambassador Hill’s perspective on Sky see pages 351-353 of Hill’s own (more diplomatic) memoir ‘Outpost: A Diplomat At Work: A Memoir by Christopher A. Hill’(2014).

Sky was called to account in Britain for her conduct in Iraq - testifying before the Iraq Inquiry (which reported in July 2016) in January 2011.

Sky was a Spring 2011 Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. From 2011–2012, she was a visiting professor at King's College London and a Fellow at Oxford's Changing Character of War Programme.

Since August 2012, Sky has been a Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, where she lectures on Iraq and Middle East politics. Since 2015, Sky has been Director of the Yale World Fellows international leadership development program. Sky oversaw the transition of the program to the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and in 2016 secured a $16 million contribution from the Starr Foundation and Maurice R. Greenberg. She also serves as the Director of Yale's Leadership Forum for Senior African Women.

Sky is no longer a member of the Wilton Park Advisory Council. She remains a trustee of the HALO Trust.

In 2019 Sky’s “Middle East Politics” class at Yale was the first subject of a string of campus protests called “Do You Trust Your Educator?” by Zulfiqar Mannan and 4 other Yale students as part of “Paradise Sought” a larger capstone project inspired by ‘gaga-feminism’ and David Scott Kastan’s 2005 edition of John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’ was of course set in Gaza. ‘

Books

Sky is the author The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (2015), which was one of the New York Times 100 notable books of 2015, and shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, the 2016 Orwell Prize, and the 2016 Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. She also wrote In a Time of Monsters: Travelling in a Middle East in Revolt (2019). Sky’s title ‘In a Time of Monsters’ reflects a common mistranslation of a phrase from Antonio Gramsci’s ‘State and Civil Society’(1930) which she misquotes on page vii as: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’(sic). But what Gramsci actually wrote was: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms (‘fenomeni morbosi’) appear.’ (‘Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci’ edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 1971 Lawrence & Wishart Ltd). Her book - a collection of personalised travel writing in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kurdistan, The Silk Road, Jordan, The Balkans and Britain over the period 2011-2016 - makes no further reference to Gramsci’s works (even though in ‘State and Civil Society’ he goes on to mention ‘the so-called “problem of the younger generation” - a problem caused by the “crisis of authority” of the old generation in power, and by the mechanical impediment that has been imposed on those who could exercise hegemony, which prevents them from carrying out their mission.’ (op cit).)

Awards

Sky was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2003 and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2008 in recognition of her service in Iraq.