Events

Join us for the next Energy Policy Seminar featuring Wake Smith, Senior Fellow, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government and Lecturer, Yale College. He will present "After Net Zero".

Attendance: This event is open to the public and hosted on Zoom. For those who cannot attend live, the seminar will be recorded and available to watch via the EPSS homepage.

Amidst mystery, secrecy, and denial it appears that American intelligence officers, military personnel, and diplomats are under a sustained attack which has left officials and family members suffering traumatic neurological injury. Incidents in Havana first came to public light in 2016, but since then the scale and breadth of these mysterious events has accelerated, leaving grievously injured officers and shaken agencies.

As the U.S. government and intelligence community scrambles to determine the source and reason for these attacks, it is becoming clear that clear that the answers to the investigation will raise profound policy issues. Can a cause and culprit be identified? What technology is being used, and for what purpose? What should the U.S. policy response be in reaction to these assaults?

Join the Intelligence Project for a discussion with former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos and New Yorker journalist Adam Entous on these questions and more. This conversation will be moderated by Director of the Intelligence Project, Paul Kolbe.

Russia has transformed its military from one based on conscription and mass mobilization to one that is “professional” with ready active-duty forces that field more maneuver units than the US. With new weapons designed to asymmetrically counter US advantages, a “hybrid” war capability that has been employed in the Crimea and Ukraine, and increased use of private military organizations such as the Wagner Group, Russia poses a complex and formidable military challenge.

This discussion with Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan, the founding director of Belfer’s Defense and Intelligence Project and the Elbe Group, will provide a fascinating and important look at the current state of the Russian Armed Forces. The session will weave current video clips of Russian maneuvers and training together with facts and insights obtained by personal contact with Russian active duty and retired officers.  Ryan served as the U.S. Defense Attache in Moscow, and has been working on the Soviet and Russian military since 1980.  In February, he led a group of retired military experts in delivering a month-long course on the Russian military for the US Army Europe and Africa Command.

This conversation will be moderated by Director of the Intelligence Project, Paul Kolbe. For limited in-person attendance, (first 50 students to sign up) please register here:  https://forms.gle/YoewT5x5cpU9z4bA6 if selected you will received a confirmation email. 

To join via Zoom, please register below.

This event is closed to Harvard students, fellows and faculty and is NOT open to the public. 

Join the Cyber Project as we explore the grave impacts of ransomware on our national (and international) security.  We will explore recent lessons from attacks on the healthcare and financial industries, discuss recommendations from the Ransomware Task Force, and ask what role the US government should take to combat the threat, especially through the Department of Defense (reports linked below).

The Cyber Peace Insitute: Playing with Lives: Cyberattacks on Healthcare are Attacks on People https://cyberpeaceinstitute.org/publications/sar001-healthcare/

Ransomware Task Force Report: Combatting Ransomware. A Comprehensive Framework for Action: Key Recommendations from the Ransomware Task Force: https://securityandtechnology.org/ransomwaretaskforce/report/ 

What Is Cyber Command’s Role in Combating Ransomware? https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-cyber-commands-role-combating-ransomware 

Speaker: David M. Wight, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Dr. David M. Wight will discuss his book Oil Money, which offers a new framework for understanding the course of Middle East–U.S. relations during the 1970s and 1980s: the transformation of the U.S. global empire by Middle East petrodollars. During these two decades, American, Arab, and Iranian elites reconstituted the primary role of the Middle East within the global system of U.S. power from a supplier of cheap crude oil to a source of abundant petrodollars, the revenues earned from the export of oil.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYvdeuprDgjHtBXnMPUS-FwCo1LlJklN1JX

Why is jihadism so difficult to predict, and what, if anything, can social scientists hold on to as reliable indicators and frameworks for estimating its future? In this talk, Dr. Thomas Hegghammer, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment in Oslo, will review the forty-year history of scholarly prediction attempts, reflect on his own misjudgments, and draw up tentative - and likely wrong - scenarios for the coming years.

Join us for the next Energy Policy Seminar of the 2021 Fall Semester featuring Judy Chang, Undersecretary of Energy and Climate Solutions for Massachusetts. Undersecretary Chang will present "Planning for Decarbonization at the State Level." HKS Professor Henry Lee will moderate the discussion and Q&A.

Attendance: This event is open to the public and hosted on Zoom. For those who cannot attend live, the seminar will be recorded and available to watch via the EPSS homepage.

Artificial intelligence is changing our world. While AI applications promise great advances from new medical treatments to radical solutions to the climate crisis, they will likely also bring challenges ranging from autonomous weapons to supercharged surveillance states.

With, Beth Sanner, Former Deputy DNI for Mission Integration, PDB Briefer for President Trump. Moderated by Paul Kolbe, Belfer Center Intelligence Project Director

The role of intelligence is to provide leaders and policymakers with facts and context which enable better decisions and the formulation of more effective policies. However, this is not a one-way flow of secrets and insight from intelligence producers to intelligence consumers where assessments are just delivered into an inbox for leisurely perusal. Critical intelligence needs often go hand in hand with crisis, pressure, and unrelenting decision deadlines. The Intelligence Community (IC) gets drawn into the thick of the fray, and often finds itself delivering unwelcome news of a policy failure, unintended consequence, or horrific event. The IC may also be placed in the awkward position of grading its own Covert Action homework. It is crucial for intelligence agencies to engender trust, confidence, and understanding in the customers it serves. The complex relationship between intelligence producers and policy consumers is perfectly embodied in the delivery of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), and the role of the PDB Briefer.

In this session, Ms. Sanner will explore core issues on the nexus between intelligence and policy. How do agencies deliver bad news?  What is intelligence politicization and how do agencies prevent it?  How can intelligence both be used and acted upon, while still protecting fragile sources and methods? Should intelligence engage more transparently with the public, or is too much already revealed by a relentless press?

For limited in-person attendance, (first 50 students to sign up) please register here:  https://forms.gle/URhvgV3vb8Uw5s9u9 if selected you will received a confirmation email. 

To join via Zoom, please register below.

Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, the first woman to be elected to the highest decision-making body of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its official spokesperson until 2020, will speak about the future of Palestine and the current challenges in negotiating an end to the conflict.