South Asia

See a sampling of recent books from the Belfer Center

Farah Pandith, America’s first special representative to Muslim communities, joined the Belfer Center this fall as a Fisher Family Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project and as a senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative. Jairam Ramesh, a member of Parliament from Andhra Pradesh, India, and a leader in international climate negotiations, joined the Belfer Center this fall as a 2014 Fisher Family Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project.

Dara Kay Cohen is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a core faculty member of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center. Her current research examines variations in the use of sexual violence during recent conflicts and draws from fieldwork in Sierra Leone, East Timor, and El Salvador, where she interviewed more than 200 ex-combatants and noncombatants. Here, she answers questions related to her research on the causes of wartime rape. She recently co-authored a policy report for the United States Institute of Peace titled "Wartime Sexual Violence: Misconceptions, Implications, and Ways Forward."

As a child, Aisha Ahmad remembers vividly the arms bazaars in Peshawar and the throngs of bearded mujahedeen commanders as they passed through her grandfather’s smoke laden offices in the Pakistani frontier province.Though she was born in the UK and grew up in Canada, her family retained strong ties with their native community and during her youth Ahmad regularly traveled to the unruly Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.

More than 250 people joined experts from around the world in April for “Revolution & Reform: The Historic Transition in the Middle East,” a conference sponsored by the Belfer Center’s Dubai Initiative (DI). Leading scholars assessed the political, economic, and legal aspects of the turmoil engulfing the region this spring.

The Belfer Center's Graham Allison, Nicholas Burns, Ashraf Hegazy, Joseph S. Nye, and Stephen Walt consider the U.S.'s shifting foreign policy in the Middle East.

The Summer 2010 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center's involvement with the Nuclear Security Summit, which was organized by Center alumni Gary Samore and Laura Holgate.

Managing the dangers of global climate change will require developing countries to participate in a global climate regime. So far, however, those nations have been nearly universal in their refusal to make commitments to reduce growth in their greenhouse gas emissions. This paper describes how a set of international "Climate Accession Deals" could encourage large policy shifts that are in developing countries' interests and also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.