Articles

10 Items

Clockwise from top left, Madeleine Albright, Nicholas Burns, Dina Powell McCormick, Ezinne Uzo-Okoro on screen during the event.

Kris Snibbe

Newspaper Article - Harvard Gazette

Three Notable Immigrants Who Served Their Adoptive Land

    Author:
  • Clea Simon
| May 13, 2021

America is a country built on immigrants and refugees, a truth acknowledged by former President George W. Bush in his recent collection of post-White House paintings, “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants.” That spirit inspired a namesake Belfer Center Future of Diplomacy Project event featuring three notable women portrayed in the book who discussed the role of foreign-born Americans and their own decisions to enter public service in their adoptive nation.

U.S. President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat sign the historic Oslo accord at the White House in September 1993.

Wikicommons/Vince Musi

Magazine Article - Harvard Magazine

The Indispensable Power

| June 16, 2020

When we emerge finally from the grip of the coronavirus, Americans will need to account for a public-health disaster that has killed well over 100,000 people to date and shuttered nearly every institution in our society (including Harvard) for much of the spring and into the summer.

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Journal Article - Journal of Conflict Resolution

Sovereignty Rupture as a Central Concept in Quantitative Measures of Civil War

| May 27, 2019

Empirical studies of the causes or consequences of civil war often use measures that do not correspond to theory and results are sensitive to small changes in the coding of civil wars. Civil war is an instance of “sovereignty rupture” and is inherently a polity-level phenomenon, but that understanding of civil war is not reflected in data in which civil war is coded as a dyadic conflict—the state fighting a domestic challenger. We demonstrate the consequences of conceptual ambiguity about which conflicts to code as civil war and when to code the start and end of a civil war. Using a new data set of civil wars from 1945 to 2016 that is consistent with the concept of sovereignty rupture, we replicate several studies and find that their results are often overturned or weakened when we use our data. We advocate for greater deliberateness in data selection in civil war studies, focusing on the fit between the question of interest and the concept of civil war that is underlying a given data set.

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Magazine Article - Vanity Fair

"Trial By Fire”: Will John Bolton Push Trump Toward War in Syria?

| Apr. 09, 2018

According to Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador who served Bill Clinton and in both Bush administrations, Trump’s approach in Syria has more in common with Obama’s than either would likely admit. “I think that the president’s tweet yesterday was specific enough that he has effectively drawn a red line as well. I think that the president needs to respond to this.”

Newspaper Article - The Hindu

Hard Choices at Copenhagen

    Author:
  • Jairam Ramesh
| June 19, 2014

During the Climate Change Conference in 2009, the Obama-BASIC meeting was a watershed, saving Copenhagen from a complete collapse and also marking the emergence of the BASIC quartet as a major force in international climate policy diplomacy.

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Magazine Article - GlobalPost

Iran nuclear deal: 3 Questions with Ambassador Nick Burns

| November 24, 2013

Iran and six world powers clinched a deal on Sunday curbing the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for initial sanctions relief. Sounds pretty good, but of course nothing is that simple and already Israel has called it a "historic mistake." Which is it? And what's going to happen next? Harvard Kennedy School professor and GlobalPost senior foreign affairs columnist, Nicholas Burns, weighs in.