“Creative foreign policy speech” as a course assignment

This guest post comes from Dr. Olga Burlyuk, University of Amsterdam.

Once upon a time, I took over the “Foreign Policy Analysis” course – and syllabus – from the unmatched Prof. Maria Mälksoo at what was then the University of Kent at Brussels (scandalously closed in 2023). Besides the usual final course paper, the syllabus stipulated “foreign policy speech” as one of the assignments. Mildly intimidating at first, this assignment has since become one of my favourite – and my students’, too. So much so that some openly stated they signed up for the course precisely because of the foreign policy speech assignment.

Besides the FPA course at the University of Kent at Brussels, I have since used it in two editions of the MA elective “The EU and post-soviet space” I teach at the University of Amsterdam, my current employer. And with the support of the ATHENA Jean Monnet Chair “Europe as a Global Actor”, held by my colleague Dr. Dimitris Bouris, 27 of the best speeches have been published on ATHENA’s website so far.

So what’s it all about? In what follows, I discuss the details of the assignment, delivery, training and assessment, supported with examples from past students’ speeches and including links to these as relevant (when published).

ASSIGNMENT

The basic idea is quite simple: students write, submit and deliver in class a speech on a foreign policy issue thematically and geographically within the scope of the course. The creative spin is what makes it interesting, though: students are allowed to impersonate any real or fictional character in the past, present or future, as long as the issue is real and contemporary and, in case of time travels to the past or future, they can motivate & situate their vision within the real-life context and ‘empirics’ (and so all speeches open with a brief statement of context). Regardless of the character, students must specify the occasion on which the speech is being delivered and who the audience is (that is, who we all in the classroom supposedly are).

Admittedly overwhelmed with the idea at first, students quickly develop an appetite: “A speech? What do you mean “creative”? Wait, did you say we could be anyone?! In that case, may we come in costume, make up and all? Are accents allowed? Wait, are we allowed to rearrange the classroom, too?” And on from there.

CHARACTER

In terms of choosing the character, there is a lot of variation – and although students may approach me for advice, very few do. They need not run their choice by me and so, in absolute majority of cases, the identity of the speaker is a surprise to everyone in the room.

Some students opt for real-life political figures in the present – and so, for example, we have hosted Josep Borrell (here), Vladimir Putin (here), Nikol Pashinyan (here and here), several Viktor Orbans  (complete with an add-on belly) and multiple Volodymyr Zelenskys (all dressed in khaki colours). The upside – as well as the downside – of picking a real-life politician is that there is an existing opus of actual speeches which we are all familiar with and which the student thus has to draw on in drafting their own speech. Some students study extensively public communications of their chosen character and use “trademark” phrases or famous quotes in their speeches; others pick up on gestures or manner of clothing. 

Some students go for real-life political figures but then place them in the past or future. Four memorable examples are: Angela Merkel in year 2004 choosing to embrace Ukraine’s European future following the Orange Revolution and thereby changing the course of history quite a bit (here); Karim Khan, Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court speaking during Putin’s trial (here); and Emmanuel Macron apologizing for France’s colonisation of Algeria on a future anniversary of Algeria’s independence (a highly improbable yet highly enjoyable scenario).

Some students revive characters long (or supposedly) dead. Consequently, Catherine “the Great” II of Russia (here), Vladimir Lenin (here) and Yevgeniy Prigozhin (here) have all come back to life to scold Vladimir Putin for doing a lousy job in Ukraine and elsewhere. In turn, Frida Kahlo revived only to laugh at Mexico’s having adopted a “feminist foreign policy” in 2020.

Some students go for imaginary characters in the distant future. A student once impersonated the Prime Minister of Maldives at COP56: the Maldives had been flooded in the meantime, so the Prime Minister was in fact speaking from exile and on behalf of other small-island states on the verge of disappearance (and the speech was delivered in the week of COP26!). Another student impersonated a newly-elected President of Mexico in the year 2100, announcing in his inaugural speech no less than the construction of a wall (sic!) to protect Mexico from American refugees – since much of the coastal USA has been flooded due to climate change, while the rest turned into unliveable desert.

Some students think further out of the box and choose not political leaders but public figures who would not immediately spring to mind when thinking in terms of a foreign policy speech. Francis Fukuyama once came to apologise for his mistaken thesis on “the end of history” (here). Milan Kundera lived just long enough to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023 and used his acceptance speech to call attention to how Ukraine was being abandoned by the West, drawing parallels to his 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (here). An actual Nobel Laureate, Svetlana Alexievich delivered a Europe Day speech in Kyiv in 2025, following Ukraine’s defeat of Russia (here). Finally, one student took the notion of “everyday geopolitics” all the way – and impersonated her own father if he were an elderly Russian man with Soviet nostalgia commenting on Russia’s war against Ukraine (here).        

Curiously but not surprisingly, students shared that they particularly enjoyed the opportunity to impersonate an “evil character” and step into their mindset and logic (or manipulative discourse).

A food-for-thought observation, which I will not unpack here but wish to voice nonetheless: While female students routinely picked male characters, only once did a male student pick a female character (as a minister of culture to speak on football; see here).

TOPIC

The instruction is “to pick an issue within the thematic & geographic scope of the course”, which leaves much room for manoeuvre. Naturally, this assignment creates space for students to bring in – and up – topics that might otherwise not be addressed during the course as much, in this way, or at all. Something that is not necessarily part of the assignment or my “master plan”, but that I observe happening time and again over the years, is that students treat this assignment as an opportunity to address issues of personal political concern to them. In fact, many would state that much in their opening remarks.

A few examples spring to mind. A student from Romania once impersonated Moldova’s Prime Minister addressing the European Union during a future Eastern Partnership summit and urging the EU to support Moldova during the looming Russian takeover (see here). She wore an embroidered shirt (with the pattern typically found in Romania and Moldova) and spoke with conviction. The student shared on her social media later that this was the single most difficult and most meaningful study assignment for her – because it came so close to what mattered to her personally.

A student from the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States told the class she had written a whole different speech first, but then realized “yesterday” that this was her chance to speak to “a group of future policy-makers and diplomats of the world” as a Ukrainian, on the Ukrainian cause, and so she wrote overnight a speech she would be delivering (see here).

Similarly, a day after the results of the Dutch 2023 elections, a Dutch student told the class she had a different speech ready but the election results shook her to the core and so she too wrote another speech overnight, responding to the political momentum more directly (see here).

Finally, perhaps most confronting and moving for the group was a speech by a Palestinian student who impersonated Refaat Al Areer, a Palestinian scholar, writer and poet murdered in a target Israeli attack just days before, calling out Europe’s hypocrisy in responding to wars.

The extremely international composition of the classroom in the study programs in which I have taught seems to play a role too: students organically (i.e. simply by way of interacting with each other) develop an awareness of the diverging IR sensitivities and sensibilities and, some confessed, this compels them to seize the opportunity to voice theirs.

DELIVERY

The assignment stipulates that students need to deliver “a speech of min 3, max 4 minutes”, which translates into approximately so many words on paper. There is no required word limit or range, as people (and their chosen characters) have different speech paces, and some students are particularly skilled at using silences to carry their message (and yes, these silences count towards the 4 minutes). I time students when they deliver their speech and indicate with a hand gesture when their time is up. I warn them in advance that I will do so and explain that staying within the time limit is part of the assignment – and so the assessment – and that is it in their best interest to time themselves in rehearsal and adjust the text as necessary.

The speeches are delivered in class. In practice, since the course consists of weekly 3-hour seminars, I usually split students (a group of 25) over 3-4 seminars towards the end of the course (i.e. the final 3-4 classes) and we dedicate the last hour to hear the 6-7 students presenting that day.

Even though students are free to choose informal characters and settings for their speeches, the delivery of a speech is a formal presentation, solo, in front of one’s lecturer and peers. As a teacher yourself, you will know that students have different levels of anxiety and various public speaking frights. I occasionally get emails requesting to be scheduled in the first or last class of the course, or the first or last slot of the day. Mindful of this, I specifically advise students to be honest to themselves about their strengths (and weaknesses) as a public speaker and pick the character accordingly. They have the freedom of choice, and it is perfectly legitimate to exercise it to one’s advantage! I also encourage them to use the physical space in the classroom and “make it their own”. They can move the furniture a little, use the beamer for background projections, brighten or dim the lights, etc. They can choose to stand or sit during their speech, they can place themselves into a TV frame of sorts – or, as one student did once, even step out of the frame altogether and act as a voice-over to a video that was shown to us on the screen (truly, there is no end to students’ creativity when it’s unleashed!). The important part is that the mode of delivery fits with the chosen character and occasion on which the speech is supposedly delivered.

The students deliver their speeches as a minimum in character, preferably in costume (of course, I emphasize that there is no expectation for them to buy anything, for example, formal clothes should they choose to be a prime minister), occasionally with an accent. Some students, however, take impersonation to a whole new level and provide a truly immersive experience for the audience.

One student impersonated Andrzej Duda, the President of Poland, while fellow students were told they were members of the government seated at a closed dinner. About 15 seconds into his speech, which started in a most traditional way, the student dramatically threw his paper notes into the air and acted out the rest of the speech, approaching students-members-of-government one by one and giving them what-I-really-think treatment, in the style of Frank Underwood character from “The House of Cards” TV series. Another student impersonated Alexei Navalny giving a livestream address from prison (this was before Navalny’s passing; see here). Delivering her speech by heart into a mobile phone placed in the corner of a desk, dressed in overalls and handcuffs, and looking over her shoulder in “the guards are coming” way every 10 seconds, she gave many of us in the room a shiver.

Yet another student impersonated Yevgeniy Prigozhin risen-from-the-dead (or never dead in the first place, since no one has seen the body) to scold Putin and Shoigu for doing a lousy job in Ukraine and gloat at them ending up on trial in the International Criminal Court (see here). With a head piece on to give her an entirely bold head to the likeness of Prigozhin, the student delivered her speech entirely by heart and acted it out fully, to the standing ovation of fellow students. Finally, Geert Wilders paid us a visit with a livestream address in year 2044 as Russia was bombing the Netherlands (see here) – and this was the first time a student made use of sound and light effects in their speech (stomping feet on the ground, sounds of explosions activated on the laptop, flickering lights activated by a fellow student recruited for the purpose…).

What is fascinating about this assignment to me and the students is that the fact that students appear in character seems to provide the necessary distance between “the real you” and “the character you”, which in turn seems to have a liberating effect. As a result, students often confide in me that they believe they ended up doing a better job than they would have in a traditional presentation assignment. For the same reason, it is not the case that the most talkative students in class deliver the best or the most creative speeches: we had been surprised on multiple occasions, and sometimes students would ask each other in the feedback round, “Who are you?! Have we even met?!” I would argue that such an opportunity for students to get to know each other from their creative side is particularly welcome in the post-COVID times, in the digital era and in an elective course which brings together students from different study tracks.

TRAINING

This assignment allows students to enhance important professional skills such as speech-writing (categorically different from the usual academic papers or policy reports they normally get to write throughout their studies) and public speaking (also categorically different from speaking up in class or even presenting one’s research to peers). It also pushes them (way out) of their comfort zone towards working directly with their creativity, abstract and associative thinking, thus going beyond critical thinking that is usually listed among the ‘learning objectives’ of a political science course. Many students confided that this was the only openly & actively creative assignment in their entire studies (there is some variation depending on what they had studied in their undergraduate).

Besides the instruction and explanation of the assignment in class, I provide students with a curated selection of links to books, articles and online videos & tutorials on speechwriting and giving speeches. I also encourage them to watch and/or read actual foreign policy speeches that have made a splash in various times (and offer some links for this, too). Ideally, I would invite a real-life speechwriter to give a guest talk and/or a workshop to students, but I have not been able to organise this so far due to time and budget constraints. Some students, however, take the initiative upon themselves and sign up for formal training courses; for example, inspired by free online materials of the Harvard University I had shared with students, one student completed Harvard’s certificate training program on speechwriting.  

ASSESSMENT

This assignment counts for 20% of the final grade. The students need to 1) deliver their speech during one of the classes and 2) submit the speech in writing via the online educational portal (usually right before or right after). Doing just one of the two is insufficient; one does not compensate for the other.

Considering that this is a creative assignment with lots of built-in room for interpretation by students and thus lots of variation across speeches in terms of their strengths, one might argue “how do you even grade a creative assignment like this?!” However, not once has my grade for a speech been challenged by a student. I believe a two things are instrumental in that.

First, I work with a system of assessment criteria which is rather broad and “inclusive” and which is not a secret for students as we explicitly discuss these when discussing instructions for the assignment. The criteria would include: originality, creativity and depth of the idea (i.e. the foreign policy issue picked, the character and the setting chosen to raise it); the fit between the different elements; the context note to motivate these choices; the extent and depth of research into the subject (which, believe me, is instantly clear from one’s speech); the content of the speech (incl. build-up and closure, logical reasoning, clarity and strength of the message, language, use of punchlines and metaphors, etc.); the use of rhetorical tools and presentation skills (incl. composure, pace, tone, body-language, etc.); staying within the allocated time.

The overall impression a speech makes on the class is also important. Occasionally, students appear more impressed by a speech than I am, and I take note of that. Thinking outside the box, linking events into chains or to individuals or nodes in time, originality, immersion, powerful language is what makes a difference between a very good speech and an outstanding one.

Second, students receive plenty of feedback from me and from their peers. Moreover, unlike with any other assignment, with this one they all get to see and appreciate each other’s work! It is thus much more transparent. When students deliver their speeches in class, I take handwritten notes in my “speech assessment form” – which I have a stack of and which they see me do, because I am seated right there with them.

After a speech is completed, everyone in the class is welcome to share their feedback on any aspect of the speech or ask follow-up questions, and I provide extensive feedback, too (per my assessment form and in front of the class). I carefully read the written drafts later, this time focusing more on the substantive, speech-writing side of things, and leave extensive comments in the online grading portal.

To be honest, I do not find grading this assignment any different or any more difficult than the ‘usual’ ones. Although, since this is a creative assignment and since it constitutes “only” 20% of the final grade, I tend to grade this assignment more generously than, say, I grade the final course papers and I do place a premium on creativity and originality (of course, just creativity or originality is not enough).

While I have only ever used this assignment with Master students, I believe it would be just as suitable for use with 2nd-3rd year Bachelor students. 

PUBLICATION

The best speeches get offered an opportunity to be published on the website of the ATHENA Jean Monnet Chair, in which I am a senior researcher. In practice, I contact the selected students with a request to ‘clean up’ their file, make sure their ‘context note’ is understandable to people outside our course and confirm in writing that they approve of the publication of their speech on the website (in that many words and simply via email – but this is an important step).

Occasionally, students would ask for my permission to self-censor their speeches prior to publication for fear of repercussions back in their authoritarian countries (as did a student from Turkey) or decline the invitation altogether reasoning that “the idea or the humour may not carry beyond the classroom and be misread” (as did students from Hungary and China). Of course, I have full understanding for these concerns and accommodate their requests. Truth is: these instances are in themselves an important teaching moment for their fellow students from (more) democratic regimes, to whom knowledge of such real-life constraints on their peers often is more meaningful and eye-opening than any Freedom House Score or Bertelsmann Transformation Index.

My students absolutely love this assignment, and the feedback I receive is overwhelmingly positive. I’d be curious to hear if you try this or something similar with your students!