Asia & the Pacific

David Saperstein, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom, spoke on Monday, November 14^th at the Harvard Kennedy School on “U.S. Efforts to Promote Religious Freedom Abroad.” In a wide-ranging discussion moderated by Future of Diplomacy Project Executive Director Cathryn Clüver, the diplomat and rabbi explained the importance of religion and human rights as part of an integrated approach to foreign policy.

Dr. Ian Bremmer, expert in political risk and founder of the Eurasia Group, gave a seminar sponsored by the the Future of Diplomacy Project on Thursday, November 9 at the Harvard Kennedy School, titled “Managing Risk in an Unstable World."

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Washington last week, making his fourth trip to the United States since taking office just two years ago. India and South Asia Program Fellow, Ronak Desai examines the strategic approach to India's relations with the United States.

The Project on Managing the Atom offers fellowships for pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and mid-career researchers for one year, with a possibility for renewal, in the stimulating environment of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. The online application for 2016-2017 fellowships opened December 15, 2015, and the application deadline is January 15, 2016. Recommendation letters are due by February 1, 2016.

"...[T]he central challenge in the greater Middle East is the lack of effective and legitimate political institutions — especially in places like Libya, Syria, Yemen, and post-invasion Iraq. Military force is useful for certain purposes, but the ability to blow things up and kill people does not translate into a workable set of governing institutions. In fact, the more the United States relies on military force to 'manage' these problems, the more it encourages others to take up arms against us or against our clients, which in turn allows those with a taste and talent for violence to dominate the political landscape."

This book is a collection of the author's blogposts from 2008–2013, almost all of them from the Huffington Post and reposted on the website of the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs by the International Security Program. Most of them deal with the author's particular area of expertise, from Morocco to Bangladesh, but also with Europe and transatlantic issues. A few are film reviews, and others deal with the U.S. Presidency and the Congress.

Policymakers have long focused on preventing nuclear weapons proliferation by controlling technology. Even developing countries, however, may now possess the technical ability to create nuclear weapons. The history of gas centrifuge development in twenty countries supports this perspective. To reduce the demand for nuclear weapons, policymakers will have look toward the cultural, normative, and political organization of the world.

"In our view, the field has moved away from a careful reliance on theory, and is just mindlessly going out and testing hypotheses without thinking very hard about what's really causing what."