Reports & Papers

Kyriakos Mitsotakis (Harvard BA ’89), president of the Greek opposition party Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy,) laid out his vision for a tough but achievable strategy to revitalize the Greek economy and strengthen the nation’s ties to the European Union in an October 13 seminar.

On 24 and 25 November 2016 experts from politics and academia, including FDP Executive director Cathryn Clüver, discussed the impact of Brexit on several policy areas in a series of workshops at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. All events took place under Chatham House rules.

During the spring 2015 semester, Professor Michael C. Hudson assembled eight leading Middle East scholars under the auspices of the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs to participate in a study group titled Rethinking the Arab State: the Collapse of Legitimacy in Arab Politics. Over the course of the semester these experts used a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to  analyze the crisis of legitimacy of the Arab state in the wake of the 2011 uprisings.

This report brings together a variety of perspectives on the state of Iraq ten years after the US-led invasion in 2003 and sets out some possible scenarios for the country's future.

David Manning, former UK Ambassador to the US, spoke widely on his thoughts on many of the pressing issues that are facing international diplomats in the coming decade in a November 26th, 2012, lecture to Harvard Kennedy School students and faculty.

The recent publications on WikiLeaks reveal a story about money, fame, sex, underground hackers, and betrayal. But it also involves fundamental questions regarding cyber-security and foreign policy. This paper argues WikiLeaks is only the symptom of a new, larger problem which is the result of technological advances that allow a large quantity of data to be 'stolen' at low or no cost by one or more individuals and to be potentially made public and to go 'viral', spreading exponentially online.

Iraq could be poised for a dramatic transformation in which it finally escapes the political and technical constraints that have kept it producing less than 4 percent of the world’s oil, writes Meghan L. O'Sullivan. Should Iraq meet its ambitions to bring nearly 10 million more barrels of oil on line by 2017, it would constitute the largest ever capacity increase in the history of the oil industry. Even half this much would represent a massive achievement.

The United States has a complex, multi-agency structure to plan, synchronize, and execute foreign policy and national security. By statute, the State Department is the lead agency for foreign policy. However, in practice, the much larger and better-funded Department of Defense conducts much of America's foreign policy activity, often with little coordination with the State Department or other relevant agencies. Over the past two decades, the military's Geographic Combatant Commands have taken an increasing lead in planning and executing foreign policy activities around the world. This has often effectively put a military face and voice on America's foreign policy, sometimes to the detriment of broader U.S. goals and relationships. More effective U.S. foreign policy requires greater interagency coordination at all levels and a greater role for the State Department as America's lead agency for foreign policy.

The paper argues that despite the widespread view of Saudi Arabia as "al-Qa'ida country," and despite the recent developments in Yemen, the jihad in Saudi Arabia has failed so far. The late 1990s saw no operations in the Kingdom because Bin Ladin's infrastructure there was too weak. The AQAP campaign, made possible by the massive influx in 2002 of al-Qa'ida members from Afghanistan, petered out in 2006. Today, practically nothing remains of the original AQAP organization. Nevertheless, its legacy and propaganda continues to inspire amateur cells, and al-Qa'ida in Yemen is actively planning operations in the Kingdom.