For Debora Plunkett, joining forces with the Belfer Center’s Defending Digital Democracy project was much more than an academic opportunity—it was her duty as an American. Russian meddling in the 2016 election “hit at the core of me as an American,” she said. “I am offended that anyone would try to limit, distort, or alter the rights of Americans to vote, and so I’m interested in helping to develop and deliver security guidance that will help campaigns better understand and respond to current-day cyber threaats and vulnerabilities.”

Jeh Johnson, a Senior Fellow with the Belfer Center, was Secretary of Homeland Security from December 2013 to January 2017. Johnson is currently a partner with the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP. As Secretary of Homeland Security, Johnson was responsible for the TSA, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration, U.S. Citizenship Services, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and FEMA. Here, Juliette Kayyem, Director of the Belfer Center’s Homeland Security Project, asks Secretary Johnson about his experience at DHS.

Events and speakers hosted by Belfer.

In July, the Belfer Center launched a new, bipartisan initiative called the Defending Digital Democracy Project  (D3P). Led by Belfer Center Co-Director Eric Rosenbach, along with the former campaign managers for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, the project aims to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements has released a volume of 17 briefs summarizing research on options for implementing Article 6, the evolution of market-based systems, and how these two processes might best support each other.

During his keynote address at the 2017 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavík, Iceland on October 13, John P. Holdren announced the establishment of The Arctic Initiative: Science, Technology, Education, and Policy Innovation for a Sustainable Arctic at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. The Arctic Initiative is a joint project of the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP), headed by Henry Lee, and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program (STPP), co-directed by Holdren, who led  the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and served as President Obama’s Science Advisor from January 2009 until January 2017. 

Sri Lanka is ostensibly a country at peace, eight years out from the end of its bloody civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an insurgency that fought for an independent state for the Tamil ethnic minority. Sri Lanka today is also a democracy, one whose turn away from authoritarianism over the last two years has been enthusiastically welcomed by the international community. And yet, members of a marginalized ethnic minority are reporting ongoing sexual assault and torture by the state.

In his recent Center report, A Lasting Defeat: The Campaign to Destroy ISIS, Ash Carter outlines several key lessons from the campaign he led to defeat ISIS.

On December 3, 2015, then Secretary of Defense Ash Carter made an announcement that would transform the U.S. military: all combat jobs in every branch of the military would be open to women. At a Harvard Kennedy School event this fall, Carter talked about his historic decision.