Governance

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 invasion of Iraq prompted a deluge of work written on the country from a U.S. perspective, but Nussaibah Younis, a fellow with the Belfer Center's International Security Program, wants people to start considering Iraq as an actor in its own right. While at the  Center, Younis is working on a project that seeks to understand internal Iraqi foreign policymaking dynamics since 2003.

"The rise of political Islam in failed states is one of the most pressing security concerns in the world today. Given the increasingly tense interaction between the United States and Islamic countries, such as Pakistan and Iran, the potential for new Islamic regimes emerging out of failed states in Africa, Asia and the Middle East could add a notable degree of uncertainty to future international relations," writes Aisha Ahmad, a research fellow with the Belfer Center's International Security Program/Program on Religion in International Affairs.

As a child, Aisha Ahmad remembers vividly the arms bazaars in Peshawar and the throngs of bearded mujahedeen commanders as they passed through her grandfather’s smoke laden offices in the Pakistani frontier province.Though she was born in the UK and grew up in Canada, her family retained strong ties with their native community and during her youth Ahmad regularly traveled to the unruly Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Department of Energy, argues that despite not falling victim to a major terrorist event in the last 10 years, the United States must not be complacent in its counter-terrorism efforts. Mowatt-Larssen said in a Belfer Center seminar in September that he believes the possibility of a major attack is higher in the next 10 years than in the preceding decade.

The Spring 2011 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 issue highlights the Belfer Center’s continuing efforts to build bridges between the United States and Russia to prevent nuclear catastrophe – an effort that began in the 1950s. This issue also features three new books by Center faculty that sharpen global debate on critical issues: God’s Century, by Monica Duffy Toft, The New Harvest by Calestous Juma, and The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye.

"Belfer and Carr Center fellows and Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) students have been busy since fall supporting the work of the Joint Staff 's Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell (PACC). The PACC, created by General Stanley McChrystal and directed by Brigadier General John Nicholson, plays a crucial role in supporting counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan."

"A spate of recent terrorist plots-each originating from within the United States-has changed U.S. focus on how to respond to terrorism. In addition to attempting to dismantle a terrorist network in a distant country, the U.S. must also determine how to de-radicalize domestic threats. But before the U.S. can address de-radicalization, the following question must be answered: Why do individuals and communities radicalize? Several Belfer Center fellows and associates address this question in their research."

Rory Stewart is the Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and  director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a member of the Belfer Center Board of Directors. A former  officer in the British Army and deputy governate coordinator with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Stewart spent two years walking 6,000 miles across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal - a journey he describes in his critically acclaimed book  The Places in Between.

Meghan L. O'Sullivan is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. From July 2004 to September 2007, she was special assistant to President George W. Bush and served as deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan during part of that tenure. She spent more than two years in Iraq, most recently in fall 2008 at the request of Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Raymond Odierno, to help conclude the security agreement and strategic framework agreement between the United States and Iraq.