News & Announcements

Excerpt from an October 24th installment of the “Inside the Middle East" Q&A Series, with Hicham Alaoui, Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and D.Phil. Candidate at Oxford University, on current trends in North African politics including Tunisia’s nascent democracy, North Africa’s unique position in the Middle East region, and the ongoing protests in Morocco’s Rif region.

Leading up to and during the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, Belfer Center experts released reports, published commentary, and provided insight and analysis into global nuclear security. In advance of the Summit, the Project on Managing the Atom set the stage for discussion with the report Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: Continuous Improvement or Dangerous Decline?

An in-progress compilation of the expert commentary and analysis is available here.

In this installment of “Inside the Middle East: Q&A,” recorded on April 16, 2015, Nabil Fahmy, Former Foreign Minister of Egypt and Dean and Professor of Practice in International Diplomacy, School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (GAPP), American University Cairo, discusses Egypt’s transitional process, public policy challenges, and foreign policy, including relations with Iran and intervention in Yemen.

In this installment of “Inside the Middle East: Q&A,” Ambassador Robert Ford, former United States Ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014 and Algeria from 2006 to 2008, discusses his experiences with the State Department in Iraq and Syria, US strategy in the Syrian Civil War, and Syria's future.

Former national security advisors from the United States and Israel discussed the latest efforts to halt Iran's nuclear program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s JFK Jr. Forum on September 16.  Belfer Center Director Graham Allison moderated a lively conversation between Thomas Donilon, U.S. national security advisor from 2010 to 2013 and currently a senior fellow with the Belfer Center, and Major General (Ret.) Yaakov Amidror, Israeli national security advisor from 2011-2013.

When Dr. David A. Hamburg led the Carnegie Corporation of New York in the 1980s and ‘90s, he drew on his roots as a physician to foster projects and research that advanced a simply stated goal: “the prevention of rotten outcomes.”

Now in his late 80s, Hamburg is still putting his medical instincts to work. He is discovering new ways to use early-prevention methods to avoid deadly conflict and enable healthy human development.

Hamburg spoke at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs on May 3 about his new book, Give Peace a Chance. His son and co-author, filmmaker Eric Hamburg, joined him at the event, along with two Harvard friends, Law School Dean Martha Minow and Belfer Center Director Graham Allison.

This seminar examined the prospects for further nuclear arms reductions between the United States and Russia, including the possibility that negotiations might be expanded to weapons not limited by the New START Treaty. The seminar covered U.S. and Russian differences over missile defense and how those might be resolved to allow a cooperative NATO-Russia missile defense arrangement for Europe.

In Harvard Professor Graham Allison’s view, “the significant unknowns” during the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly catapulted John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev into nuclear war. For former diplomat Nicholas Burns, the principal take-away from the crisis was the importance of giving an adversary a way out of a confrontation short of complete surrender. Allison and Burns were panelists on Oct. 14 at a forum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston to consider the modern lessons flowing from the missile crisis. The event kicked off an intensive series of seminars and workshops for scholars from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs to mark the 50th anniversary of the missile crisis. Panel moderator Juliette Kayyem, Kennedy School lecturer in public policy, reminded the audience that the missile crisis is often framed through the myth of the tough American president staring down the Russian foe and making him blink. Kayyem said that version fails to capture the nuanced secret diplomacy and the American concessions that made a deal possible.

An audio recording of Dr. Hugh Roberts' lecture at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School on October 15.

I had a chance to sit down and have tea with Altaf Qureshi, the founder of the Urdu Digest. Qureshi started the Urdu Digest, a monthly magazine, in 1959, and since then has grown into one of the most widely read Urdu publications and a mainstay of Pakistani intelligentsia.