Your Excellency Prime Minister Edi Rama, honored members of the Albanian delegation, distinguished guests, esteemed faculty, students, friends, and colleagues. Good morning and welcome to Georgetown University in Qatar. This is a special moment for me because two parts of my life that usually live far apart are suddenly colliding in one room. I am the first and still the only Albanian student to have studied at Georgetown University in Qatar. And now I'm also a staff member. Studying here in Doha, a global hub of diplomacy, mediation, and geopolitical negotiation has shaped the way I understand politics. It has taught me how small states navigate big conversations, how identity becomes a form of soft power, and how narrative can matter just as much as strategy.
Albania, on the other hand, has shaped that learning quite as much. The way my country has reinvented itself, argued with itself, survived itself and rebuilt itself has shaped the way I perceive diplomacy. As nothing is linear, nothing is guaranteed and sometimes the most unexpected actors can change the story. Over the past few years, GU has taken me from Doha to Washington DC, Nepal, Kenya, and into friendships with students from over 70 countries. In each of those places, I was asked to explain Albania, its history, its energy, its resilience. And the reaction was more or less always the same: 'Yeah, this sounds complicated.' And my response would be, 'Yeah, that's why we keep on electing leaders that have a very high tolerance for complexity, otherwise no one would survive trying to govern us.' I am honored to introduce a leader who has not only survived that complexity but thrived in it: His Excellency Prime Minister Edi Rama.
He was born in Tirana in a family where art, debate, and public responsibility were woven into daily life. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and became a professor of painting, played basketball at a national level, and spent formative years living and working in Paris, a period that deepened his relationship with color, form, and experimentation. Even now, as prime minister, his artistic practice continues. During long meetings and phone calls, he draws as a way of balancing what he has described as the inner gaze and the outer gaze. Those drawings, layered on top of state schedules and documents, have become a hallmark of his work. His public life began in the democratic movement that brought down Albania's communist regime. In 1998, he became minister of culture, youth, and sports. In 2000, he became mayor of Tirana and led an urban transformation that people across the region still reference. Reclaiming public spaces, removing illegal structures, expanding green areas, and repainting the facades of a city that had long forgotten its colors. That work earned him international recognition, but most importantly, it shifted how Albanian people saw their own capital. Since 2005, he has led the Socialist Party of Albania. And since 2013, he has served as prime minister through major judicial reforms, digital transformation, and Albania's evolving world, including opening all remaining EU negotiation chapters and chairing the United Nations Security Council. His leadership has oftentimes sparked debate, but its trajectory is undeniably unconventional, which feels fitting for a country that has never followed the straightforward path.
That brings us to the themes at the center of today's event: the influence of creativity on leadership, the demands of institutional modernization, and how a small state positions itself in a rapidly changing global environment. This morning, His Excellency will be in conversation with Dr. Ogaia Busharaf, professor of anthropology here at Georgetown. Her areas of expertise include human rights, gender, migration, diasporic studies, political anthropology with a geographic focus on Sudan, the Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. She's the author of several books and the founding editor of Monsoon, Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim. Dean Masri would like to extend his regards. Unfortunately, he had a prior commitment today, but he will be glad to welcome His Excellency at his list right after the event. Before I welcome His Excellency Prime Minister and Professor Busharaf to the stage, I would like to say, Mr. Minister, it's an honor to have you here at Georgetown. Encounters like this open doors and I hope this will not be the last time we walk through one together. Please join me in welcoming Professor Busharaf and His Excellency. Thank you.
Good morning everybody. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, Your Excellency Edi Rama. What a terrific honor to be here, to have a conversation with you. But before we start our conversation, thanks are due to our brilliant Yeta. Thank you so much for all your help with contextualizing Albania. Thank you so much to Dean Masri for giving me such a rare opportunity, the first in my life to be in conversation with a prime minister. So thank you, Dean Masri, so very much. Thanks to brilliant Trudy, Jack, Khaled, and our communication team. So thank you so much, Your Excellency. Sometimes when you are given questions beforehand to ask, you miss some things, right? So for example, I didn't imagine that before the invitation that you and I have a lot of commonalities. One commonality is that I come from a city in Sudan where the Nile, the White and Blue Nile meets under the Blue Nile bridge. You come from an area where the Adriatic Sea and the Mediterranean meet. That is incredible and I think while it inspired you on your art, it didn't ignite the same kind of talent in me to be an artist or a painter. Can you please just start with your story as an artist and how that shaped your thinking, your subject position as a human in this world and as a prime minister of a country of thousands of years since antiquity, rich with archaeology, culture.
Amazing. So, when you started talking about commonalities, I don't know why I thought that you would mention we are both dressed fully in black, not too. And I told the host while entering here, I saw my picture with a red tie. And I told him, I hope nobody's disappointed that I am dressed differently than I look in the picture. This is incredible, by the way. But this is one of the reasons I feel so good when I come in this part of the world because I have not to explain why I don't have a tie, like it is the case sometimes when I go like that to meet my Western friends. So thank you for having me here and let me tell you that I'm very proud of having been introduced by a shining Albanian student of yours. I heard that she is the only Albanian student you have here and I hope that she is enough bright and grades to inspire you to bring more Albanian students here.
Now going back to me and to my story. Well, I think you don't have enough time to hear my story because it's quite long and complex, but I should tell you that yes, I started my life since I was a very young kid, three years old, painting and I never stopped painting. So I wanted always to be an artist. I never imagined that one day I would be something else. And by the way, when I entered the office of the minister of culture, it was the first office I entered in my life. I never saw an office before except the office of the dean of the art faculty. So how it happened, I'm telling you, it happened without even myself being aware that it was happening. And it happened because art brought me to question the limits of freedom. And the limits of freedom brought me to engage, to push for more space in a time and in a country where there was no freedom and where art was supposed to be, as they said, a weapon in the hands of the ruling party, and where artists were supposed to be, as they used to say, soldiers of the people. Meaning the art had to be serving the ideology and had to be limited to dogmas and to shapes and forms that were very, very strict.
In the meantime, you have to just try and understand that Albania is in the middle of Europe, is really in the very middle of Europe, like the umbilicus of the continent physically. But Albania had a totally different story and history from both sides, the West and the East that were already divided by an iron curtain because Albania was isolated from both, pretending to be the only communist, really truly communist country. And practically it was like North Korea of Europe where art and culture of the 20th century outside of our borders was totally forbidden and where you could go to jail for books of Pablo Picasso or you could go to jail for having in your house music of the Beatles. And on the other hand, Albania was the only country in my knowledge, even outside Europe but for sure in the whole Europe, that enshrined in its constitution atheism. So it was the atheist Republic of Albania, which meant that every shape or form of representation of religion was illegal and the Bible or a Quran was like a weapon without permission and you would go straight to jail. There were thousands of churches and mosques blown up with dynamite. There were hundreds of thousands of religious artworks and books burned in the streets of the country by celebrating with songs and all clergy was put to jail. So this was the context and when all the former communist East collapsed, Albania was still not really very touched by it because we were not with them. And so the collapse of our regime happened a year later. And where it all started was the Academy of Arts and from where it all started were the forbidden books. Opening the forbidden books became a statement of wanting change. So this was how art brought me to question the limits of freedom and how the limits of freedom brought me to fight for my own freedom and then life happened while I was planning other things and I entered politics and politics is a kind of dance where it's sometimes easy to enter but it looks like impossible to get out. So here I am in a totally different look. When I got my freedom, I had all my hairs black. And I'm not going to describe many other things in my body that were different. Today it's very different. And Albania is a different country as my fellow student of yours said, it's a totally different country. We are in our quest to enter the European Union and our GDP since I took office has tripled, closely tripled. We are now from a country where we had average 2,500 to 3,000 tourists per year to a country that we are close to 12 million tourists. It's a long way and it's a big change.
Yes. Thank you. And by the way, we have something. I don't know if it's a commonality, but on our side of the world, we talk too much.
That is exactly why I was invited by the Masri.
That is exactly our answers are typically very long. Masri, this is really wonderful. Just to stay on the subject of art a little bit, you talked about the challenges and the constraints because the suppression of art is also suppression of freedom of expression. Were there, as I expect you would say yes, challenges in your own encounters, in your own product by way of censorship or suppression? What was it like for you to break through?
Listen, you have to understand it was a totally different place than let's say Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia or in the other communist countries there was dictatorship. Yes, there was dictatorship. There was no freedom of elections, freedom to choose. There was no pluralistic scene and all this. But there was a very big difference when it came to art, when it came to culture. Václav Havel was in jail but in jail he could write theater plays that were somehow expression of his dissent. Albania, if you would go to jail, you would work down in the hell of mines. You'd never ever had the chance to write and read. And if you do, it would be absolutely very, very dangerous. And if you'd go to jail for political reasons, your family and not just your close family, but also your brothers and your sisters and your nephews and your uncle and your aunts will go to concentration camps. It was quite a different place. So there was not really, it was, and the moment that they banned the art and culture of the 20th century, there were artists that were jailed. And as I said, you know, the proofs of their guilt were books in the house or were paintings and were theater plays that if you would look today into them, you'd say what is here that is not communist? What is here that is not realist? But they were very ruthless and so working through art and trying to dissent through art became impossible. So it started to move a bit, as I said, in that period when things were going bad and we saw the chance to open a bit more the space but it was not, the struggle with the censorship was at the level that the censorship got inside the mind and the soul of people. So it was much more a self-censorship imposed by the very clear understanding combined with a fear that if you try you'd go to jail and not only you'd go to jail but their family would suffer big time. So it was different.
We can definitely relate. It was a total nightmare. Yeah. Do you still paint every day? What is your favorite? I know it is unfair.
I painted in my office during my meetings about tax, about security, about all the things. Yeah, it looks like I'm joking or it looks like crazy or it looks like not serious, whatever you want. But it's what I do. In my table in the prime minister's office is full of different type of instruments to paint, you know, from pastels to the markers and to acrylics and I just, you know, I listen to what my ministers have to say or others have to say and I just do it all the time. In the beginning it was very, very bad because people thought I was just not caring but then they came to realize that if I do that I'm much more attentive to what they are talking about. And a few years ago I saw a beautiful study of the psychology department of a big American university, MIT if I'm not wrong, that analyzed the psychological behavior of people that doodle during meetings. There are a lot of people that doodle during meetings, not painters, but there are people that do all the time. And there were many interesting things, but there were two findings that were very interesting. One, that people that doodle during meetings have on average 50% more concentration in the topic. And number two, people that doodle during meetings have on average 30% less stress from the topic because you know when you have a stress from a topic and someone that you don't really like is talking to you and you look at him, you start to be overstressed, right? Otherwise when your eyes are following the hand and the hand is painting, your ear is totally focused on what you are getting from whomever is talking and your mind is free to elaborate the topic. So you can understand that what I paint is abstract.
This is absolutely fantastic and art is therapeutic.
And I was not supposed to do that. I just did that because when I became Minister of Culture and as I told you, it was my first time entering an office and I had to go in government meetings and it was like going in weekly torture, being there for hours and listening and it was like an harassment of the soul. And I was all the time drawing with my pen on the pile of legislation or decrees of government all the time. And after every meeting, my colleague on my right side, the minister of education, was saying to me, 'Can I take it? Take it. Hey, take it. Take it.' And one day after some time I go to his office for something and at the end of the conversation he says to me, 'Do you want to see my art collection?' I said, 'You have an art collection?' He said, 'Yeah, I have an art collection.' And at that time he was under attack for some corruption and he brings the big portfolio with my drawings and I was going through and when I saw all of them together I said, 'Oh my god, there is something interesting. So he's a thief. I have the proof.' And I was very angry. I felt ripped off by a colleague.
Exactly. So the attacks on him proved to be completely unfounded. But to me, he stole my art. And I went back to my office and I said to my assistant, 'You know, the guy is a thief.' She said, 'Why?' I said, 'He stole my art.' She said, 'What art?' I said, 'My drawing.' She said, 'But do you know how many I have?' I said, 'You have?' She said, 'Yeah.' And she opened it, it was full of my drawings. I was doing the same in office and she was collecting. I said, 'Don't dare to make a portfolio. Keep them and start to.' And then a friend of mine who now is one of the most important contemporary artists, Anri Sala, who was my student, he came and I said to him, 'Look at it.' He said, 'Wow, this is great, it's better than what you did when you were a free artist.' And he said, 'Why don't you do an exhibition?' So from that we made an exhibition, from the exhibition was made a book and from the book a gallery in Berlin got interested and now my paintings are exposed in galleries and so I had some great feedback from them in the Frieze of London and so on. So you are talking to a serious artist. Don't look at me like a failed artist that is doing politics. It's a bit different.
Would you be mad at me if I said good for the person who stole your art?
No, I would not be mad at you because I made peace with this. But as the value of the drawings is growing in the art market every year, every time I see the price going up in the market, I make the calculation of how much money he is already adding to the value of his collection. And I can tell you he will be a rich person. Very rich. If he'll sell the collection.
Okay. You should be. Yeah.
