Diplomacy and International Politics

Diane Moore, director of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School, traveled to Iraq where she heard from Syrian refugees frustrated that so many people know so little about them. (Kirk Carapezza/WGBH)

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Farah Pandith, senior fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project and adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, about the evolution of presidential rhetoric on acts of terrorism and the groups that perpetrate them.

In an interview with Amin Arefi of French magazine Le Point, Ambassador (ret.) Nicholas Burns reflects on the first ten days of the Trump administration and the trajectory of American foreign policy going forward. Burns explains the fundamental differences between Donald Trump and George W. Bush, and the  worrying implications of Trump's indifference towards the US-backed system of alliances that has upheld the liberal world order for the past seven decades.   

Audio recording of a February 2, 2017 MEI Book Talk with Dr. Olivier Roy, Joint Chair Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies, Chair in Mediterranean Studies, European University Institute on his most recent book Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of the Islamic State.

Former State Department Undersecretary Nicholas Burns on the potential impact of President Trump's immigration ban.

Free media is a key instrument of social autonomy - which can be destroyed. Unfortunately, this mechanism seems to be deteriorating in many of those countries with which Germany maintains close relations. How can the freedom of words and images be defended? Is press freedom without democracy possible - and differently? On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the magazine Der Spiegel, the director of the foreign bureau Britta Sandberg and editor-in-chief Klaus Brinkbäumer discussed with the journalists Galina Timchenko from Russia, and Can Dündar from Turkey, and Harvard Future of Diplomacy Project Executive Director Cathryn Clüver from the USA in the KörberForum. A conclusion: "The solution to the international problem of threatened press freedom is called solidarity" (Can Dündar). 

In German, Russian, and Turkish with German subtitles. 

A podcast from the Advanced Training Program on Humanitarian Action produced from a Middle East Initiative event on humanitarian negotiations with non-state armed groups featuring Professor Claude Bruderlein; Ashley Jackson; Stig Jarle Hansen; and Abdi Ismail Isse.

The fall of Aleppo is a human catastrophe. It’s also a demonstration of the perils of choosing the middle course in a military conflict. Sometimes it’s possible to talk and fight at the same time. But in Syria, the U.S. decision to pursue a dual-track, halfway approach made the mayhem worse.

On 24 and 25 November 2016 experts from politics and academia, including FDP Executive director Cathryn Clüver, discussed the impact of Brexit on several policy areas in a series of workshops at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. All events took place under Chatham House rules.