Mohammed M. Obaid Shwani ’24 has been a world traveler and an award winner since he was a teenager. In 2016, he first came to the United States after being named an Iraqi Young Leader through a State Department program, then traveled to Bosnia to attend United World College on a scholarship before landing in Maine for college.
As a first-year student at Bates, he won the Dana Award, the highest honor bestowed on a student in their first year. He majored in politics, minored in philosophy, and graduated summa cum laude and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After time in England and a return to Iraq, he’ll soon embark on another journey with a fresh accolade, heading to Beijing as a Schwarzman Scholar.
This month Shwani was named one of 150 Schwarzman Scholars, representing 40 countries and 83 universities from around the world, who will attend a one-year, fully-funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. Selected from a pool of over 5,800 candidates worldwide, Shwani is a part of the most competitive cohort to date.
When the State Department selected him as a Young Iraqi Leader, they saw a determined student from Kirkuk who grew up amid terrorism and instability, and who, at just 16, founded Iraq’s first National Model United Nations association. At Bates, Shwani was curious about global systems and approached this work from an interdisciplinary perspective. His work at Bates was followed with a year in England studying law at the University of Oxford. These experiences, he says, helped him learn to critically analyze power, history, and governance. “Bates didn’t give me a single narrative,” he notes. “It gave me the tools to deconstruct them and form my own conclusions.”
Shwani returned to Iraqi Kurdistan after Bates and has been leading global partnerships at the Kurdistan Foundation, tasked with attracting investment, collaboration, and strategic alliances to the region.
“For years, my country and I have oriented ourselves around ‘what will the U.S. do, and how does its system work?’” he says. “But my country is now actively engaging with another great power whose system we do not understand. We have strong economic ties with China, but almost no insight into its strategic culture, its governance model, or its long-term vision. Kurdistan and Iraq’s future leaders must understand and have connections with all sides to be able to navigate the country’s relationships in this new multipolar world.”
This need for understanding led him to the Schwarzman Scholars program, a scholarship created to respond to the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century and designed to prepare the next generation of global leaders.
“Our eleventh cohort is a truly impressive group that fills me with optimism,” says Stephen A. Schwarzman, founding trustee of Schwarzman Scholars, “I am hopeful that their interest in China and global affairs, coupled with their leadership potential, will create opportunities for collaboration and dialogue at Schwarzman College and beyond.”
As Shwani prepares for Beijing, he looks forward to reuniting with Scarlett Wang ’23, who now lives in Beijing. “It’s been years since we were on campus together,” he says. “The idea that a Bates friend will be part of my first community in China makes this huge transition feel more like a homecoming. It reminds me that no matter where I go, the network and relationships from Bates are a permanent foundation.”
