Video

Juliette Kayyem talks about the new "Laptop Ban" with LAPD Director of Constitutional Policing and Policy Arif Alikhan.

Farah Pandith (@Farah_Pandith), Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project and formerly the first ever Special Representative to Muslim communities at the U.S. State Department, sits down with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) to talk about how to curb the spread of violent extremism, particularly among Muslim youth.

Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem), Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and former Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, sits down with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) to talk about everything from safeguarding mega events to safeguarding your home and family.

Thank you for inviting me to share my perspective and experience. My name is Farah Pandith, and for eleven years I served as a political appointee for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama, most recently as our government’s former first-ever Special Representative to Muslim Communities. I felt deeply honored to serve our nation at the highest levels in a post 9/11 environment and to work on an issue that is, in my opinion, one of this century’s most serious and misunderstood.

A superb intelligence analyst and briefer, Morell now presents THE GREAT WAR OF OUR TIME, where he uses his talents to offer an unblinking and insightful assessment of CIA's counterterrorism successes and failures of the past twenty years and, perhaps most important, shows readers that the threat of terrorism did not die with Bin Ladin in Abbottabad. Morell illuminates new, growing threats from terrorist groups that, if unaddressed, could leave the country vulnerable to attacks that would dwarf 9/11 in magnitude.

In Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes that a religious reformation is the only way to end the terrorism, sectarian warfare, and repression of women and minorities that each year claim thousands of lives throughout the Muslim world. She argues that the violent acts of Islamic extremists cannot be divorced from the religious doctrine that inspires them. Instead, she says, we must confront the fact that they are driven by a political ideology embedded in Islam itself.

In a Harvard Kennedy School IDEASpHERE session titled "Challenges to US Global Leadership," Graham Allison, Nicholas Burns, David Gergen, David Ignatius, and Meghan O’Sullivan discussed challenges as well as opportunities facing the United States. Burns moderated the session.

Challenges include the rise of China and the future of the U.S.-China relationship, the crises taking place around the world, and the reputation of the U.S. worldwide. An unexpected opportunity is the increase in available energy sources in the United States.

The last seven decades without war among the great powers – what historians describe as “the long peace” – is a remarkable achievement. “This is a rare and unusual fact if you look at the last few thousand years of history,” said Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center and moderator of the IDEASpHERE panel “Winning the Peace.” “Furthermore, it is no accident. Wise choices by statesmen have contributed to ‘the long peace,’ which has allowed many generations to live their lives.”

As evidence emerges, more is becoming known about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon attacks, writes Simon Saradzhyan. "They were reportedly devout Muslims who were born into a family of ethnic Chechens, lived in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, and studied in Russia’s North Caucasus, before coming to the United States as children. Over time, the older brother, Tamerlan, became a more radical figure. Whatever his motivation, he was following a similar path to that of some insurgents in the North Caucasus, who once focused on achieving secular independence for their homeland, but went on to become intertwined in international jihadist networks that share a belief that their number one enemy is America."