Africa

Peter Ajak is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center’s International Security Program. A South Sudanese peace activist, a scholar, former political prisoner, and a former child soldier and Lost Boy of Sudan, Ajak’s life has been consumed with the commitment to bring freedom to his people.

This spring, the Belfer Center organized a new event series called Africa in Focus to examine the many factors driving political transitions and geostrategic relations in Africa. This workshop series aims to kickstart an initiative that recruits more African policymakers and experts to discuss African politics and affairs with the Harvard Kennedy School community. 

In this issue, we highlight five new books by Belfer Center members.

This Q&A focuses on Erica Chenoweth, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her research focuses on political violence and its alternatives. Foreign Policy magazine ranked her among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013. Her forthcoming book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, explores what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance.

As soon as Paul Doty launched what is now Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 1974, he began planning a scholarly journal on international security. He shrugged off colleagues’ concerns that there would be little market for such a journal.Thirty-six years after the first issue appeared in the summer of 1976, the Belfer Center’s quarterly International Security consistently ranks No. 1 or No. 2 out of over 70 international affairs journals surveyed by Thomson Reuters each year.