News & Announcements

Apekshya Prasai, a political science doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was recently named a 2023 Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Emerging Scholar.   The Emerging Scholars (nine in all) are doctoral candidates who are in the final year of writing dissertations on the nature of and responses to violence around the world.

“Everyone feels helpless in the face of such violence and such great premeditated, purposeful catastrophe,” says Mariana Budjeryn, a scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Budjeryn holds a political science degree from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the 500-year-old Ukrainian university that was prominent in Orange Revolution activities. “The difference between 1939 and today is that there is no doubt what is going on and the entire world is in solidarity with Ukraine. That was not the case when the Nazis and the Soviet Union overran Poland and no one provided military assistance to them.”

Egypt's only democratically elected president died on Monday while attending a court session in Cairo.

Understanding the ongoing conflict in the middle east is complicated. Differences in ideologies have resulted in wars and impact the entire world.  Rami Khouri is a journalist who has spent 50-years working in the middle east.  Burns Hargis sat down with Khouri to get his perspective on the conflicts in that region.

Audio recording of a May 1, seminar with Hugh Roberts, Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History, Tufts University.

Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center enthusiastically welcomes back Ambassador Laura Holgate, who began her career at the Center in 1990. Holgate, who joins the Belfer Center as a Senior Fellow, was until January Ambassador and U.S. Representative to United Nations-Vienna and International Atomic Energy Agency. Previously, she served in the Obama administration as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism and Threat Reduction where she also played a major role in planning all four Nuclear Security Summits.

Natalie Jaresko (MPP ’89), former Finance Minister of Ukraine, returned to Harvard on October 31^st, 2016 to take part in the Future of Diplomacy Project’s international speaker series. In a public seminar moderated by Faculty Director Nicholas Burns, Jaresko, who currently serves as chairwoman of the Aspen Institute Kyiv, reflected on her time in office from 2014 to 2016. In her two years in office, the Ukrainian government  had to contend with the Russian annexation of Crimea, a national debt crisis, widespread governmental corruption, and political instability.