Speaker: Michael Weintraub, Associate Professor, Universidad de los Andes 

Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations (UN) has increased its involvement in countries emerging from conflict. Most work on UN peacekeeping focuses on how it decreases the odds of conflict relapse by reassuring elite and mid-level commanders. Yet understanding the attitudes of former rank-and-file fighters—low-ranking recruits who primarily do the soldiering—is a pressing task. The speaker and his co-authors conducted an original phone-based survey of 4,435 former combatants of the FARC-EP, Colombia’s largest rebel group, which demobilized following a 2016 peace agreement.

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Speaker: Eleanor Freund, Research Fellow, International Security Program

What factors explain variation in China's security cooperation with other states? Why has China formed alliances or deployed troops to fight alongside partners in some cases, while in others it has limited itself to the transfer of weapons or the signature of neutrality agreements? More generally, how can scholars measure and explain the range of security cooperation behaviors that states exhibit in both peacetime and war?

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Speaker: Antonia Juelich, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

What happens when civilians in conflict zones from Somalia to Syria find themselves in rebel strongholds? It is often assumed that they either cooperate or resist insurgents in such contexts. The messy reality, however, is that people rarely fall in just one category. . Narratives from former Boko Haram associates, collected during extensive fieldwork in Nigeria, reveal that they executed and refused orders, provided labor from domestic chores to high-risk military support, were enslaved and empowered in the group's forest camps. This seminar describes a broad spectrum of civilian engagement, from collusion to compliance to resistance, and explains what gives rise to such unexpected turbulence in highly controlled settings. The offered framework introduces the concept of militarized rebel governance and demonstrates how noncombatants adapt by engaging in power struggles to survive or even thrive in the system.

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This seminar is cancelled.

Speaker: Peter Biar Ajak, Fellow, Middle East Initiative

On July 9, 2011, a momentous occasion unfolded as hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese converged at the Dr. John Garang Mausoleum to witness the birth of their newfound nation. However, just two years later, this optimism was eclipsed by a power struggle between the president and vice president, sparking a devastating civil war. Tragically, this conflict swiftly assumed ethnic dimensions, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, the displacement of millions, and the severe deterioration of the economy. The initial euphoria of independence was soon replaced by profound disillusionment. Today, South Sudan finds itself languishing at the lowest rungs of international indicators. The question that begs an answer is: What precipitated this unfortunate turn of events, and is there still hope for South Sudanese to rekindle the unity and sense of purpose that characterized their proclamation of independence?

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Speaker: Colleen Larkin, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

President Jimmy Carter entered office committed to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. foreign policy. He espoused the logic of mutually assured destruction and hoped for major arms control progress. Yet by the end of his presidency, he had embraced a competitive nuclear posture and accelerated the arms race. What explains this shift in Carter’s strategy? 

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Speaker: Mariana Budjeryn, Senior Research Associate, Project on Managing the Atom

What is it like living in a country at war? How does the war imprint itself on everyday life, on holidays and celebrations, on work and art, even far away from the active front line, in the deep rear? Mariana Budjeryn traveled to visit her family in Lviv, western Ukraine, over the holiday break. She shares her impressions and reflections on life amid Christmas carols and air raid sirens and on how ordinary people contribute to the war effort and cope with the losses and grief it inflicts, amid uncertain prospects for its conclusion.

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Speaker: Anatoly Levshin, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

Why do states conclude treaties restricting the use of military power in particular geographical domains or against particular states? Across the past two centuries, states have concluded over seventy such pacification agreements. Examples include the neutralization of Belgium (1839–1919), demilitarization of the Rhineland (1919–1936), and renunciation of the right of war under the League of Nations (1920–1946) and United Nations (1945–). In this seminar, Anatoly Levshin will argue that pacification agreements should be understood as strategic solutions to the risk of inefficient escalation of interstate wars and that variation in their institutional design should be understood as deliberate adaptation to shifts in the perceived distribution of that risk. This argument will be validated using case studies composed with original archival research.

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Speaker: Zachary Burdette, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Growing tensions with China have raised concerns about how the United States should manage the security implications of the U.S.-China trade relationship. The Trump administration repeatedly floated the idea of "decoupling" the two economies, and the Biden administration has instead called for "de-risking" the relationship. But what exactly decoupling and de-risking mean — and what constitutes the broader range of strategic options available — remains unclear.

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Speaker:  Leyla Tiglay, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

Rumors of an impending atomic experiment in Africa circulated in newspapers as early as 1956, four years before France conducted its first atomic test at the Reggane Testing Center in the Sahara in 1960. The late 1950s saw France's technological preparations, strained transatlantic relations due to complex nuclear alignments in Europe, and an unprecedented wave of anti-nuclear mobilization in decolonizing Africa. Using the French tests as a case study, this research aims to refine scholars and policymakers' understanding of how decolonization intrinsically influenced the formation of the current global nuclear landscape during this pivotal era in nuclear politics. 

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Speaker:  Sudarshana Chanda, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This seminar explores how, in post-WWII British Malaya, banishment became conflated with another category of movement, repatriation. It further examines the new ways postwar "repatriation" schemes inflected categorizations of belonging for people with plural ethnic identities. In the aftermath of WWII, hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, surrendered personnel, and "foreign" civilian occupants were voluntarily repatriated from Malaya to their home countries. At the same time, the forced movement of many people — which derived from multidecadal colonial banishment policies — was also rebranded as "repatriation." Both types of movement out of Malaya involved encounters with the colonial state and an implicit redefinition of citizenship or belonging based on ethnic categories.

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.