INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
April 12, 2013
Iran's Economy Under Sanctions
News
An audio recording of Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani's March 25th talk at MEI on sanctions and Iran's economy.
Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
April 11, 2013
"End war, but don’t abandon Afghanistan"
Op-Ed, Boston Globe
By Nicholas Burns, Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Politics, Harvard Kennedy School
Professor Burns shares his key takeaways from the "Future of Afghanistan" conference he co-hosted on April 4-5 at Harvard. Like most wars, this will not be won on the battlefield; rather, it will be brought to an end in a negotiated solution between the Afghan government and the Taliban. He reminds us that the U.S. government has a basic responsibility, moral as well as political, to stay involved as the majority of Afghans wish, but that we should seek greater political and financial support from Afghanistan’s powerful neighbors — Russia, China, India, and Iran.
April 10, 2013
"Rebooting African Economies: Science and Engineering for Rapid Economic Transformation"
Announcement
By Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development; Director, Science, Technology, and Globalization Project; Principal Investigator, Agricultural Innovation in Africa
A lecture by Calestous Juma from 3:00–5:30 PM, April 18, 2013, at the Golf Course Hotel in Kampala, Uganda. Organized by the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA). Africa's identity has historically been associated with its vast natural resources which have shaped not only its political culture but also defined its place in the global family of nations. In recent years, however, a new picture of Africa has started to emerge. African economies are increasingly being view as rapid adopters of emerging technologies. The aim of this lecture is to identify approaches for leveraging the world's fund of scientific, technological, and engineering knowledge for rapid economic transformation.
June 2012
Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
Book
By David E. Sanger, Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
President Obama's administration came to office with the world on fire. Confront and Conceal is the story of how, in his first term, Obama secretly used the most innovative weapons and tools of American power, including our most sophisticated—and still unacknowledged—arsenal of cyberweapons, aimed at Iran's nuclear program.
Confront and Conceal—with an updated epilogue for this paperback edition—provides an unflinching account of these complex years of presidential struggle, in which America's ability to exert control grows ever more elusive.
April 8, 2013
"Incompatibility Hinders BRICS Bloc"
Op-Ed, Taipei Times
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"...[W]hile the BRICS may be helpful in coordinating certain diplomatic tactics, the term lumps together highly disparate countries. Not only is South Africa miniscule compared with the others, but China's economy is larger than those of all of the other members combined. Likewise, India, Brazil and South Africa are democracies, and occasionally meet in an alternative forum that they call IBSA (the India, Brazil, South Africa Dialogue Forum)."
May 2013
"Understanding Revolution in the Middle East: The Central Role of the Middle Class"
Journal Article, Middle East Development Journal, volume 5
By Ishac Diwan, Lecturer in Public Policy, Middle East Initiative
This paper presents the outlines of a coherent, structural, long term account of the socioeconomic and political evolution of the Arab republics that can explain both the persistence of autocracy until 2011, and the its eventual collapse, in a way that is empirically verifable. The changing interests of the middle class would have to be a central aspect of a coherent story, on accounts of both distributional and modernization considerations, and that the ongoing transformation can be best understood in terms of their defection from the autocratic order to a new democratic order, which is still in formation.
April 3, 2013
Australia's Kevin Rudd on China's Leadership and Reform
News
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke at a Belfer Center Director's Lunch on "China's New Leadership and the Prospects for Economic and Political Reform."
Graham Allison, director of Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, introduced Rudd at the event. A video podcast of Rudd's opening presentation is available below.
Spring 2013
"Correspondence: Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect"
Journal Article, International Security, issue 4, volume 37
By Gareth Evans, Ramesh Thakur and Robert Pape, Editorial Board Member, Quarterly Journal: International Security
Gareth Evans and Ramesh Thakur respond to Robert A. Pape's summer 2012 International Security article, "When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention."
AP Photo/Maurizio Gambarini
Spring 2013
"Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization"
Journal Article, International Security, issue 4, volume 37
By Jonathan Monten, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 2006–2007 and Alexander B. Downes, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 2007–2008
Is military intervention effective in spreading democracy? Existing studies disagree. Optimists point to successful cases, such as the transformation of West Germany and Japan into consolidated democracies after World War II. Pessimists view these successes as outliers from a broader pattern of failure typified by cases such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
Spring 2013
"How New and Assertive Is China's New Assertiveness?"
Journal Article, International Security, issue 4, volume 37
There has been a rapidly spreading meme in U.S. pundit and academic circles since 2010 that describes China's recent diplomacy as “newly assertive." This meme underestimates the complexity of key episodes in Chinese diplomacy in 2010 and overestimates the amount of change. The speed and extent with which it has spread point to an understudied issue in international relations—namely, the role that online media and the blogosphere play in the creation of conventional wisdoms that might, in turn, constrain policy debates.
