How I Got My Career in Foreign Policy: Inu Manak

Inu Manak originally wanted to be an actor when she was young, but she soon pivoted to studying the dramatic intricacies of global trade relations instead. Her research focuses on U.S. trade policy and the World Trade Organization (WTO), work that has taken her from Geneva, Switzerland, to Washington, DC, where she’s now a senior fellow for international trade at CFR. Read more about the benefits of working in environments with distinct ideological perspectives and why she loves talking to “trade nerds” at the WTO Public Forum every year.

Here’s how Inu Manak got her career in foreign policy.

What did you want to be when you were little?

I actually wanted to be an actor. I was doing lots of musical theater and drama classes, and I just loved being on the stage—preparing, remembering lines, dressing up, and singing songs with my friends. So that’s what I always envisioned I would do. And then my parents said, “Well, you probably won’t make a living doing this, so maybe you should think about something else.” Which is why I studied hard and tried to find other things that I was interested in.

So when did you become interested in foreign policy, and I guess, trade and economics? 

It started in twelfth grade, when I was taking an international history class. It was an AP elective where we were digging into Canadian and global history from the First World War to the present time. We were having discussions about some of the big questions, like: Why do we have the international system we have today? What were the factors that shaped it? What are the causes of conflict? And this really sparked a big interest in me to learn more about foreign policy.

Our teacher actually assigned Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy—it’s like the size of a telephone book. He encouraged us to read a chapter every week. That book really impressed me in terms of understanding the role of individuals in shaping foreign affairs—how certain characters in foreign policy can play a really outsized role in developing the ideas that shape how people think about things. So looking even within the United States—Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points, Teddy Roosevelt, looking at [Richard] Nixon and how he handled multiple crises, it was really fascinating to see how he described the role of people, and in particular, leaders in foreign policy.

So that made me really interested to learn more, which is why when I went to university the next year, I took my first class in political science and I never turned back.

Speaking of—you got a bachelor’s in political science, and then you got a master’s in international affairs. But then you got a PhD in government. Maybe it’s more common than I realize, but that surprised me. What intrigued you about a doctorate in government?

Once I started my master’s, I really enjoyed the research. And I always knew I wanted to go back to school at some point. But having paid for a master’s degree, I needed to work and pay off my loans first. So I worked for a bit and then started looking at PhD programs—what fit my interests, what could grow my expertise.

Traditional political science was actually considered the study of government. A lot of older programs are called “Department of Government,” and more recent ones are departments of political science. I think there’s a natural evolution of calling it political science because we’ve become more scientific—more statistical analysis, more quantitative work. But the traditional study of government is not only understanding the mechanics of what makes government work, but also the philosophy that underpins it, the intellectual basis for forming a government, the big-picture questions about the ideas that shape it.

Georgetown was top of my list because they had professors whose work I had read for years. They had a program perfect for what I wanted to do—specialists in international political economy, which is what I ended up specializing in. Since Georgetown is in Washington, DC with lots of interdisciplinary people, it provided the perfect way for me to create the program I wanted. I was focusing on the politics of international economics and international development, and understanding why we create the institutions that we do. They had all the people there that I wanted to work with.

What did you do between your master’s and your PhD?

I was a research associate at the Cato Institute, which is a think tank here in DC, and I was working in their trade policy division. So I was already exploring trade quite in detail at that point and was looking at various questions on international trade. I was working with lawyers, economists, and also people who were doing political science. It was really interesting because I got to learn different aspects of trade that I never otherwise would have had exposure to.

That’s what started my interest in international economic law. I worked with someone who was in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Appellate Body Secretariat—the staff that helps with all the decisions that the WTO makes on certain disputes. So I learned a lot about WTO law just over many, many lunches with him, talking about the questions that would interest me. It really sparked a deep interest in that institution. Once I understood the legal rules that bound the members, it helped me ask a lot of questions about why members participate there in the first place. So it really prompted this desire to learn more about its functioning and then to test some assumptions about why it functions the way it does.

You also ended up going back to Cato after your PhD, right?

Yeah, in fact, the story of how I went back—it was 2016, and I had just finished a summer in Geneva doing initial fieldwork for my dissertation, interviewing officials at the WTO. I came back thinking, “I’m missing working at a think tank.” At the time, we were heading into what seemed like it would be a really decisive election, which it was.

In late August, I called up my former boss and said, “Hey, I know that maybe there’s no positions open right now, but could you keep me in mind in case something comes up? I’d love to be back in the policy space a little bit. I’m spending a lot of time in the library doing fieldwork, but I kind of want to talk to people about the policies.”

The following year, he said, “Actually, we do need someone.” [President Donald] Trump had just come into office, and I was like, “Yeah, let me do this.” I felt like there was a need at that moment to explain what trade is, why it matters, and what people should be thinking about it. I thought that was an opportunity for me to take all the stuff I’d learned and put it into practice.

You mentioned Geneva, and I actually wanted to ask you about that, because when you were doing your doctorate, you were a junior visiting fellow at the Center for Trade and Economic Integration and a fellow at Trade Lab, both in Geneva. How did working abroad shape your understanding of trade policy that maybe you wouldn’t have had if you just stayed stateside?

It really did shape my perspective. When I was developing my dissertation, after defending my prospectus, my committee said, “Great, off you go. Go do your research.” And I thought, “I have the summer. I could spend it in the library collecting data, or I could go out into the field and do what we call ‘soak and poke.’” We immerse ourselves in the environment we’re studying and ask questions to get a sense of the landscape.

So I called up one of my committee members at the graduate institute and said, “Do you have projects I could support this summer?” And he said, “Actually, we do have an opening.” He had a project called Trade Lab, which was basically a legal clinic—a set of clinics across different law schools where clients would send in questions about trade barriers. We’d get students to help these countries, mostly developing countries, asking for assistance to navigate trade law. It was pro bono and really interesting cases. It was fascinating to learn about how a country getting its feet on the ground in terms of WTO involvement was navigating that legal landscape.

Also, just being in Geneva, I learned so much talking to delegates at the WTO. There’s an atrium in the center of the WTO building with a cafe and a tree in the middle, and you can just sit there having coffee and stop people and have meetings with them. So I would kind of sleuth a bit like a journalist and follow people around—”Could you talk to me for five or ten minutes? I’m doing research on this issue.” I spent the whole summer just talking to people, and from there, all those original discussions turned into some of the big questions that drove the eventual research that I did.

Speaking of think tanks—CFR is nonpartisan, Cato is libertarian. Do you think there are drawbacks or benefits to working at think tanks that have an ideological orientation?

I really enjoyed my time at Cato. I felt like it was great to be among a group of people that was very committed to a certain set of ideas and beliefs. In many ways, you get to work and you know what your mission is. You know what you’re going there to do. So it always gave you a bit of a guiding perspective of what to focus on. But it also served as a bit of a check—you knew what you didn’t have to work on as well. So it helped focus a lot of your research agenda in a big way.

Also, you got to meet a lot of people that maybe you wouldn’t ever have met. For me, I was always a political independent, and I decided to work at Cato because they had a policy opening in trade. I was like, “I really want to work in trade.” And the people there were some of the top folks who were studying international economic law and trade. So I thought, “Okay, that’s a great opportunity to learn.”

I think one of the interesting things about working at a place that is very mission-driven and has an ideological focus is that it helps you really challenge your own assumptions too. Daily, I would have conversations, just casual conversations, about things that maybe I didn’t agree with. So you learn to debate, and you learn you can have a civil discourse and have a fun discussion about a lot of things. I grew up in Canada—I guess there are libertarians there, but they’re kind of different than what you have in the United States. So it was a huge education for me about what American libertarianism was. And I found that really fascinating.

What drew you to CFR?

I’d known about CFR from when I was in college. I used to read Foreign Affairs in the library, and I thought it was a great institution. At the time that I applied for CFR, there was an opening in trade. I’d spent about seven cumulative years at Cato, I’d really explored a lot of work there, and I was thinking it was time to explore other things, to challenge myself a little bit further. Sometimes you get comfortable in certain jobs, and I enjoyed it very much, but at the same time I thought, “Okay, maybe there’s another challenge for me here.”

I also wanted to write a book. So I thought, “CFR is a great place to do a lot of deep research. Maybe this is a place where I could start working on my book as well.” So it really was just perfect timing. We had a transition with the Biden administration coming into office, and I really wanted to spend more time talking to folks that I never had the opportunity to talk to. Considering where I was at Cato, I spent a lot of time talking to libertarians, to Republicans. I thought, “Maybe I can talk to Democrats, too, and reach a broader audience,” because CFR is nonpartisan. I would actually get to engage with a wider diversity of members and people within the policy space. So that’s what kind of drove me here.

There’s another thing that I thought was interesting on your resume—you’re a book review editor at the World Trade Review. How did that come about, and what is exciting about doing that?

This is actually a fun side gig. In the realm of all the things you do as an academic, or former academic, you have professional service commitments—like peer review or being on the editorial staff of an academic journal.

One of my colleagues at a university in Switzerland, who’s part of the World Trade Review editorial board, reached out and said, “We really need a political scientist on our editorial board to help with book reviews, because we have all these lawyerly reviews and we need to mix it up a bit. Would you take a look at what we’ve been doing and offer some advice?” And I agreed.

So we had a couple meetings, and I thought, “This is kind of fun. Maybe we can build this out.” I had a colleague who was a trade lawyer, and I was covering politics and economics books. We’d essentially reach out to publishers and say, “What books are coming out this year?” Then we’d take a look at the books, see if they fit our interdisciplinary mission, reach out to the authors, and find people to review them.

It’s really cool, because you get to learn a lot about the books out there. You select the books, solicit a review, and then read and edit those reviews and give feedback. Through that process, I feel like I’ve read so many books, even though I haven’t read all of them. So it’s a really fun way to just stay on top of the literature.

You mentioned you hoped to write a book at CFR. Is this the book you’re currently writing, about U.S. trade policy's bipartisan shift towards protectionism?

Yes, this is the book. Certainly, things have slowed down this year on the book because there’s been a lot going on in trade. But this is the book I’m working on. The idea that I had when I started working on this was to really talk about this odd observation that I had from the transition from the first Trump term to the Biden administration, where there was some continuity in trade policy. It was kind of puzzling—like, “Why is that happening?” This is kind of a weird consensus that seems to be emerging. We even saw, looking at the views of members of Congress, that there seemed to be a lot more continuity in their views as well, and they had a lot more in common than one might actually think.

So I thought, “This is kind of worth investigating to figure out: How did we get to the point where, in many ways, some of the beliefs on trade among both Democrats and Republicans seem quite similar today?” We used to have a pretty big gap, and now things are changing. Now, that all could change in the next couple of years, obviously, but I thought it would be worth it to interrogate what got us to that point. If we could understand that, perhaps we could understand what it is that’s changing in American domestic polity, to understand these shifts and to predict maybe what could come next.

Interesting. I’m curious—your career has been sort of on the policy analysis research side. Was there a conscious effort to avoid government work? 

I’m a dual citizen. I think it was 2013 when I became American, so originally, I didn’t work in government when I got out of my master’s because I did not yet have U.S. citizenship. Then when I got into my PhD program, I was just very focused on doing that and nothing else, because it’s kind of all-consuming. I happened to get a job back at Cato before I actually had finished my PhD, and so it sort of just naturally progressed in that way.

Now, there was a point in time in which I was considering perhaps going into government, particularly when I was thinking, “Okay, what’s the next challenge?” At the same time I had applied to CFR, I was thinking of maybe working in government when the Biden administration had just come in. But that’s obviously a very competitive process—hard to get in. And when you’re not party-affiliated, it’s hard to get a job sometimes in the government. Me being an independent meant, I think, that it’s a little challenging to get a job in a Democratic administration. 

For young people who are starting out today who want to work on trade and foreign policy, do you have any particular advice for them, or skills that they should pick up or issues they should focus on?

I always say follow your interest, because if you follow what you most care about, you will build up knowledge and expertise in that thing. And the deeper the knowledge you build, the more people want to talk to you about it. Opportunities come once you build up your base of expertise. So always focus on a few things, not many things. 

For most of my career, I’ve focused just on trade institutions—whether it be trade agreements or a big institution like the WTO. This is where I’ve dedicated my focus, which is why people ask me questions about those types of things. So that’s number one—follow things that are interesting to you alone. Don’t care about what other people find interesting, because that’s not going to be the thing that wakes you up every morning.

In terms of skills, writing is really important. You have to be able to communicate really complex ideas in a lot of different formats, and sometimes in really short formats. So learning how to write short-form is critical. Data work is so important. A lot of the work we do at think tanks is data-driven, and we have a high premium on being accurate and having evidence-based ideas. So I think it’s important to do statistics courses, courses on quantitative modeling and qualitative data, and understanding how to do surveys and interviews. Those are the two really big skills you have to invest in to do a job in policy.

How do you think artificial intelligence is going to change the calculus of how students build that knowledge?

It is interesting. I’ve been trying to think about this a little bit more. 

I always say AI is a tool we can use. It doesn’t necessarily replace the work that we’re doing.  I think you can use it to do simple things, like, “I forgot that code I need to put into Stata—how do I write that command?” So it helps make your work more efficient that way, but you always have to cross-check it. You can’t just take what it spits out as given. I think in that sense, it’s learning how to use it as an effective tool to support your work, but not replace that work, because the critical thinking that we have as humans—it’s really difficult for AI to replace that. 

We always end on the same fun note. I assume over the years you’ve had plenty of interesting work trips and dinners. Is there a most memorable one you could share with us?

That is a tough question. I’d say my favorite trip to do every year is going to Geneva for the WTO Public Forum. It’s their annual meeting, and they open the doors of the institute to everyone. You have stakeholders from all over the world, delegates from various countries, researchers presenting their research on different trade topics, and a lot of private sector folks as well. I love this conference. You have three thousand people there. It’s enormous.

It’s great because not only do you get to present your recent research, but you get to hear what everyone else has been working on. The most fun part is the conversations you have in between—going to different meetings and presentations, the random lunches, the coffees. For me, it’s those impromptu conversations where somebody sparks an idea during a presentation and you’re like, “Hey, can we follow up on that?”

I think that’s really what I look most forward to each year—this weeklong trip where I’m basically hanging out with a bunch of trade nerds talking about the nerdy things we work on, and trying to see where my research can actually evolve or get deeper from all these things that I’ve taken in during this week. And you make a lot of friends too, because it’s just a great place to meet people.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It represents the views and opinions solely of the interviewee. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.