Events

Speaker: Sumin Lee, ACES Assistant Professor, Department of International Affairs, The Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University

What are the long-term effects of wartime sexual violence on trust? Rape is an old feature of warfare, but the intergenerational transmission of such trauma in communities remains poorly understood. Scholars theorize how wartime sexual violence has disparate effects on social and political trust. While sexual violence sours public opinion of the state for its security failures, it forces affected communities to turn to private kinship and social bonds as a coping mechanism, increasing social trust in the long run.

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

Please join the Belfer Center’s Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy Program (DETS) for a seminar on “Near Peer Competition: Reimagining Defense for the Emerging World Order’” on Tuesday, November 14th at 3:00 PM in the Ellwood Democracy Lab (Rubenstein 414-AB).  Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP here​.

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.

Please join the Belfer Center’s Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy Program (DETS) for a seminar on “Great Power Competition in the Indo-Pacific, a view from ‘Down Under’” on Tuesday, October 7th at 3:00 PM in the Ellwood Democracy Lab (Rubenstein 414-AB). 

Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP here.

The Defense Project will be hosting an Anzac Day Ceremony on Tuesday, April 25th at 8:00 AM. Please join us in the HKS East Courtyard for this significant event.

Please RSVP here​. 

Speaker: Nate Grau, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This seminar traces the evolution of France's Cold War counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine from the Second World War to France's 1954 defeat in Indochina. Grau reveals the underappreciated roles of civilian colonial reformers in this process, tracing a network of "Free French" policymakers circulating from Algeria to the French wars in Madagascar (1947–1948) and Indochina (1945–1954). In each of these revolutionary independence struggles, reformist plans to encourage economic growth and develop local state capacity became tools of counterinsurgent repression that only escalated inter-communal cycles of violence.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAud-qurjkpE9LULcdi7fEzEUmflmTOWvYC

​​Please join the Belfer Center’s Defense Project and the Asia-Pacific Initiative for “AUKUS, the Quad, and Australia's Strategic Vision for the Indo-Pacific: Perspectives from Australia's Defense Experts”, a panel featuring the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

Attendance is limited to Harvard ID holders only. Please RSVP here. 

As the United States reflects on its infamous history of “forever wars” and searches for lessons to avoid similar entanglements in the future, join the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project for an open session of our Applied History Working Group. Its members—distinguished historians and public servants—study the past to illuminate the most pressing challenges we face today.

As the United States faces alignment between a violently resurgent Russia and a full-spectrum competitor in China, join the Belfer Center's Applied History Project for an open session of our Applied History Working Group. Its members—distinguished historians and public servants—study the past to illuminate the most pressing challenges we face today.

Speaker: Annette Idler, Director, Global Security Programme, Pembroke College; Senior Research Fellow, Dept. of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

50 years after U.S. President Nixon declared the War on Drugs, this "War" has failed to significantly reduce the scale or impact of illicit drug production and trafficking. Yet consensus on the way forward is missing from the international policy debate: some states have introduced national reforms; others continue to champion militarized approaches.  How can the international community tackle the complex causes and consequences that this war is intended to address? 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuf-CgqzgsHNcwtJ0Vz3hVVjKJWHqj8UdO