Diplomacy and International Politics

In this installment of “Conversations in Diplomacy," the Future of Diplomacy Project's Faculty Director Nicholas Burns is joined by Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, for a conversation on tackling global security challenges in the digital age and the changing nature of intelligence agencies.

William Drozdiak, former Foreign Editor for the Washington Post, talks with Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, Executive Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project about Europe's current fissures and risks.

Currently, scholars and political leaders are facing various global challenges: failing states, conflicts over distribution, terrorism and the refugee crisis represent only some of them. In this book, acclaimed experts from Germany and abroad offer a panorama of the international security threats of the 21^st century. With a particular focus on the role of Germany, these experts present strategic approaches through which these challenges can be tackled in the most effective and sensible way, thus providing new impulses for the security policy debate in Germany.

Faculty Director Nicholas Burns speaks with Douglas Alexander about the future of the UK just days after Prime Minister Theresa May triggered Article 50, initiating the separation between Europe and the United Kingdom Alexander previews the road ahead, identifying the underlying contradictions that that led to Brexit and how they might manifest themselves in other parts of the world.

Forty-four years after the United Kingdom entered into an often tempestuous but not always loveless union with Europe, Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger formal divorce proceedings Wednesday.

At the heart of the British position in these complex negotiations is a simple trade-off between sovereignty and prosperity.

This week, we discovered that Nicola Sturgeon’s answer to new divisions, grievances and borders is . . . more divisions, grievances and borders. Since the vote on 23 June last year, it has become fashionable for some on the “liberal left” south of the border to cope with their Brexit grief by supporting, for Scotland, more nationalism as the answer to nationalism. According to this perspective, the rise of nationalism across Europe is negative, except on this island.

Ambassador João Vale de Almeida, European Union Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke at the Kennedy School as part of the Future of Diplomacy Project’s annual ‘Europe Week’ series.

Cambridge, MA- Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger, during the Harvard Future of Diplomacy Project’s Europe Week series, gave a pragmatic view of the future of European security and Germany’s changing role in geopolitics during a seminar moderated by FDP Executive Director Cathryn Cluver.