South America

We asked two Belfer Center experts on Saudi Arabia to tell us what should be done to improve the strained relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Nawaf Obaid, a visiting fellow at the Center, served until recently as special counselor to Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf and previously was special advisor for strategic communications to Prince Turki Al Faisal. Karen Elliott House, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center, is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and editor and former publisher at The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future, published in September 2012.

In the months and weeks before the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., Belfer experts promoted a series of ideas to strengthen measures to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons or the essential ingre­dients to make them.

Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) doctoral student Daniel Velez Lopez is researching air pollution in Mexico and whether the country is willing to pay the costs to reduce it. HKS student Jennifer Kao is interviewing academics, investors, and government officials working to generate and commercialize clean energy innovations in the United Kingdom.

Just last year, the work environment of one of the Belfer Center's newest fellows was a far cry from Cambridge's quiet campus full of fall foliage and quaint coffee shops.

Gaëlle Rivard Piché, now a Fulbright research fellow in the International Security Program, was working in El Salvador and Haiti studying public order and violence in communities often dominated by gangs.  

The Summer 2013 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This edition highlights the Belfer Center’s expanding work on complex cybersecurity issues and Middle East challenges, offers reflections on the role of the U.S. in Iraq, and spotlights work being done by the Center and its affiliates on environment and energy issues.

"When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, then-Belfer Center Senior Fellow Doug Ahlers, a former resident of New Orleans, immediately realized that he and the Kennedy School could help. The result was the Belfer Center’s Broadmoor Project, a collaboration with the Broadmoor neighborhood....Broadmoor is now a model of recovery, almost 90 percent rebuilt, with a new charter school, library, and community center....With Ahlers vision and leadership, the Broadmoor Project has also helped other disaster-struck communities. Below, Ahlers describes how the Broadmoor model is currently assisting in the recovery of three Chilean communities nearly destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami of 2010."

Dara Kay Cohen is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a core faculty member of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center. Her current research examines variations in the use of sexual violence during recent conflicts and draws from fieldwork in Sierra Leone, East Timor, and El Salvador, where she interviewed more than 200 ex-combatants and noncombatants. Here, she answers questions related to her research on the causes of wartime rape. She recently co-authored a policy report for the United States Institute of Peace titled "Wartime Sexual Violence: Misconceptions, Implications, and Ways Forward."

In the modern global economy, nations do not compete; it is specialized regions that compete, according to Calestous Juma, faculty chair of the Innovation for Economic Development executive program. To help countries strengthen their regional innovation systems, the Belfer Center will join Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Education in sponsoring a high level executive program beginning May 28.

Since the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) emerged 50 years ago to counter the dominant power blocs of the Northern Hemisphere, a new global order has taken shape. In her June 2011 discussion paper, “Diplomacy and Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Navigating the Non-Aligned Movement,” Belfer Center fellow Yvonne Yew argues that developing countries now stand at a pivotal moment for nuclear engagement.