LATIN AMERICA
September 3, 2009
Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center Announces 2009 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership
Press Release
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University announced today that the 2009 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership will be given to the Mexico City Metrobus, a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system that reduces air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, while improving the quality of life and transportation options in one of the largest cities in the world.
AP Photo
April 27, 2009
"SARS Corporate Playbook"
Op-Ed, On Leadership at washingtonpost.com
By Ben Heineman, Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
"Multinational corporations have seen this movie before. It was a horror flick called "SARS" (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome)."
AP Photo
April 2009
"Nasty, Brutish and Long"
Magazine or Newspaper Article, Prospect, issue 157
By Monica Duffy Toft, Associate Professor of Public Policy
It’s a busy time for civil wars. The Sri Lankan army has pushed far into Tamil territory, seeking a decisive victory. The killings in Northern Ireland show how spoilers try to gain advantage over rivals in any political process. Then there is the threat that recently pacified civil wars, such as those in Iraq and Sudan, will come back, while the global recession may push new ones forward.
AP Photo
January 2009
"Re-Plan Colombia"
Policy Memo
By Sarah Zukerman Daly, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Intrastate Conflict Program
"The financial crisis will require a reevaluation of U.S. aid. Critics of Plan Colombia argue that, in Colombia, union leaders remain at risk, human rights abusers are not brought to justice, the military commits "false positives," and drug eradication has failed. Based on this record, they conclude that the U.S. should reduce or withhold aid from Colombia. This is unsound advice. Colombia has made great advances against the guerrillas and paramilitaries because of U.S. aid. Some 340 politicians who conspired with paramilitaries, 3,000 paramilitaries who committed crimes against humanity, and 14 perpetrators of abuses against union leaders face prosecution because of U.S. aid. These advances in security, justice and democracy would not have occurred without U.S. assistance. However, the critics are not wrong; there is much work left to be done."
AP Photo
December 8, 2008
"A New Cold War? Western Hemispheric Manuevers"
Op-Ed, National Review Online
By Thomas M. Nichols, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom
"Visiting the Panama Canal and sending bombers and ships to Venezuela might seem like a flexing of Russian muscle in America's backyard. But these acts are nothing more than mere stunts, expressions of a wounded Russian national ego....The new administration should ignore Russia's juvenile, attention-seeking behavior and return to a discussion of matters that are far more important to both of us, including terrorism, nuclear security, and better cooperation in the midst of a global economic crisis."
Belfer Center
Winter 2008-09
"Report Urges Governments to Explore Benefits, Risks of Biolfuels"
Newsletter Article, Belfer Center Newsletter
Governments should initiate an orderly, innovation-enhancing transition toward incentives that target multi-dimensional goals for biofuels development, according to the report "Biofuels and Sustainable Development," released by the Sustainability Science Program of Harvard Kennedy School in ollaboration with Italy’s Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea, and Venice International University. Henry Lee, director of the Belfer Center's Environment and Natural Resources Program and co-author of the report with William Clark and Charan Devereaux, writes that if the potential of biofuels is to be realized, "governments must be clear about goals and constraints and the specific interventions to address each of them.”
July 29, 2008
New Report from Harvard Kennedy School Researchers Calls for Changes to Biofuels Incentives
News
By Henry Lee, Director, Environment and Natural Resources Program, William Clark, Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science, Public Policy, and Human Development; Co-director, Sustainability Science Program; Faculty Chair, ENRP; and Charan Devereaux
Despite pressure from biofuel critics, governments should avoid simplistic and precipitous changes in course such as rollback or moratoria on existing biofuels mandates or incentives, according to a new report from three Harvard Kennedy School researchers. Instead, the researchers urge governments to initiate an orderly, innovation-enhancing transition towards incentives targeted on multi-dimensional goals for biofuels development.
AP Photo
Summer 2008
"Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict"
Journal Article, International Security, issue 1, volume 33
By Maria Stephan, Former Research Fellow, Intrastate Conflict Program/International Security Program, 2003-2005 and Erica Chenoweth, Associate, International Security Program
The historical record indicates that nonviolent campaigns have been more successful than armed campaigns in achieving ultimate goals in political struggles, even when used against similar opponents and in the face of repression. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to win legitimacy, attract widespread domestic and international support, neutralize the opponent's security forces, and compel loyalty shifts among erstwhile opponent supporters than are armed campaigns, which enjoin the active support of a relatively small number of people, offer the opponent a justification for violent counterattacks, and are less likely to prompt loyalty shifts and defections. An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims. These dynamics are further explored in case studies of resistance campaigns in Southeast Asia that have featured periods of both violent and nonviolent resistance.
Summer 2008
"Divining Nuclear Intentions: A Review Essay"
Journal Article, International Security, issue 1, volume 33
By William C. Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova
Although projections of nuclear proliferation abound, they rarely are founded on empirical research or guided by theory. Even fewer studies are informed by a comparative perspective. The two books under review—The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy, by Jacques Hymans, and Nuclear Logics: Alternative Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, by Etel Solingen, are welcome exceptions to this general state of affairs, and represent the cutting edge of nonproliferation research. Both works challenge conventional conceptions of the sources of nuclear weapons decisions and offer new insights into why past predictions of rapid proliferation failed to materialize and why current prognoses about rampant proliferation are similarly flawed. While sharing a number of common features, including a focus on subsystemic determinants of national behavior, the books differ in their methodology, level of analysis, receptivity to multicausal explanations, and assumptions about decisionmaker rationality and the revolutionary nature of the decision. Where one author emphasizes the importance of the individual leader’s national identity conception in determining a state’s nuclear path, the other explains nuclear decisions primarily with regard to the political-economic orientation of the ruling coalition. Notwithstanding a tendency to overinterpret evidence, the books represent the best of contemporary social science research and provide compelling interpretations of nuclear proliferation dynamics of great relevance to scholars and policymakers alike.
July/August 2008
"Separatism's Final Country"
Journal Article, Foreign Affairs, issue 4, volume 87
By Richard N. Rosecrance, Adjunct Professor; Senior Fellow, International Security Program; Director, Project on U.S.-China Relations and Arthur A. Stein
"Muller argues that ethnonationalism is the wave of the future and will result in more and more independent states, but this is not likely. One of the most destabilizing ideas throughout human history has been that every separately defined cultural unit should have its own state. Endless disruption and political introversion would follow an attempt to realize such a goal. Woodrow Wilson gave an impetus to further state creation when he argued for "national self-determination" as a means of preventing more nationalist conflict, which he believed was a cause of World War I...."
