News & Announcements

Putin and his government seek respect, stability from next U.S. administration, panel says.

Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter was in Cambridge on Tuesday, July 26 to open the east coast office of the Defense Department's Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx). The DIUx was launched by Carter a year ago to "rebuild the bridges between our national security endeavor...and America's wonderfully innovative and open technology community."

As part of the India and South Asia Program’s annual speaker series, Ambassador MaleehaLodhi, the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to the United Nations discussed her country’s regional agenda.

An audio recording from Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School.

On April 29, 2015 at MEI, Prof. Stephen Walt assessed U.S. policy and interests in the Middle East, arguing that scaled back involvement might yield better results for the U.S. and the region.

In this “Conversation in Diplomacy" with former NATO Secretary-General and 2015 spring Fisher Family Fellow, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Future of Diplomacy Project Director R. Nicholas Burns discusses NATO's collective security issues, Russian aggression in Ukraine, and the destined leadership of the U.S. in the liberal democratic global community.

Harvard Kennedy School MPP students Léa Steinacker, Julia Stern, and Olivia Zetter traveled to Washington D.C. in February to attend part of the first-ever White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). Three years after the release of President Obama’s national security strategy on domestic CVE, the event brought together practitioners from local, national, and foreign governments, academia, and the private sector, to share best practices on community-based approaches. The Kennedy School students were recommended for the summit by Farah Pandith, Belfer Center senior fellow, who served previously as the first-ever special representative to Muslim communities, appointed by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Following President Barack Obama's December 5th nomination of Ashton B. Carter for Secretary of Defense, Belfer Center Director Graham Allison commented on the nomination:

President Obama's nomination of Ash Carter to be the next Secretary of Defense makes all of us at the Belfer Center proud.  Ash is a model of the Belfer Center's mission to advance policy-relevant knowledge about the central challenges of international security and train future leaders in making policy in this arena.

Planting a forest to improve air quality may prove to be as cost-effective as expensive new pollution control equipment, according to preliminary results from a novel experiment at a Freeport, Texas chemical plant. Officials involved in the study say this innovative approach could become a test case before the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which has identified reforestation as a potential air quality improvement strategy.

Leaders of an unusual collaboration between The Nature Conservancy, the world's largest conservation group, and the Dow Chemical Company, a Fortune 100 corporation, told a Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) audience this week that they were encouraged by initial findings validating a dollars-and-cents approach to valuing nature that may help businesses with their bottom line while improving the environment in local communities.

The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University announced today that the Dow-TNC collaboration on valuing ecosystem services, a partnership between The Dow Chemical Company and The Nature Conservancy, is the winner of the 2013 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership. The innovative collaboration between the chemical company and environmental conservancy develops tools and models that incorporate the value of resources provided by nature into business decisions.