News & Announcements

As climate change and economic activity in the region accelerate in the Bering Strait region, the United States and Russia have a common interest in mitigating these shared environmental risks. A November workshop hosted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative, the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) brought together seventeen experts to explore potential actions that the United States and Russia could pursue, jointly or independently, to protect the Bering Strait’s sensitive marine ecosystem and coastal communities. 

“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.”

Former White House advisor Jason Bordoff, professor and founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), says the incoming Biden-Harris Administration will have the opportunity to both lift the nation out of recession and combat global climate change by crafting a thoughtful economic stimulus plan containing a significant green energy investment component.

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

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.