Andrew Miller, Senior Fellow at Center or American Progress and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs. A veteran diplomat and foreign policy official with more than a decade of experience, Miller was among the most senior officials focused full time on the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. He played a key role in discussions with U.S. partners about post-conflict governance, security, and reconstruction arrangements.

Location: Athenaeum POSTPONED to NOV 20!

Join professors Hicham Bou Nassif, Shervin Malekzadeh, and Yitzhak Brudny for a moderated discussion and dinner panel discussing Israel-Iran proxy wars in the Middle East.

Apply to join us at the event here.

Professors Koch, Pei, Appel, Taw and other international relations faculty will discuss the impact of the results of the 2024 United States presidential election on America’s place in the world.

Sign up here!

Location: Kravis 102

The Keck Center is hosting graduate school panel to provide insights into advanced degree programs in international relations and related fields. Panelists will include alumni from prestigious institutions, offering guidance on admissions and career prospects. This event aims to help students navigate the application process and explore diverse graduate pathways in global affairs.

Join Masha Gessen, one of the most trenchant observers of modern democracy, for a wide-ranging discussion of the past and future of global politics. Gessen is a journalist and bestselling author who has covered political subjects from Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Gessen's latest book is Surviving Autocracy, a bracing overview of the calamitous trajectory of American democracy under the Trump administration. As The New York Times Book Review noted in their review, “When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” Their understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. Winner of the National Book Award, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy, against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all. Gessen’s other books include the New York Times bestseller, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. An opinion writer at The New York Times, Gessen is the first Distinguished Professor at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and is a founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a digital archive focused on preserving the last two decades of independent Russian journalism. They live in New York City. 

Location: Athenaeum

Why does Russian president Vladimir Putin so often draw on WWII analogies to justify Russia’s war on Ukraine? How does the Putin regime use memory politics to explain Russia’s war aims and Ukraine’s resistance to them, and why do these claims have resonance with the Russian public? In this talk, Professor Juliet Johnson (McGill University) will focus on the Russia-Ukraine war to explore how and why the Putin regime has strategically used the past to legitimize its authoritarian, aggressive, and anti-Western turn. 

Juliet Johnson is Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, former President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2023), and former Director of the international research network Between the EU and Russia: Domains of Diversity and Contestation (2015-2023). Her research focuses on the politics of money and on memory politics, particularly in post-communist Europe. Her publications include Developments in Russian Politics (Duke 2024), Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Cornell 2016), A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell 2000), and numerous scholarly and policy-oriented articles.

Location: Athenaeum

In this year of elections, what can we learn about India and from India given its recent national elections? For example, what do the world’s largest and longest elections tell us about democracy? The quality and survival of democracy in India have attracted much scrutiny. This presentation will draw on the 2024 Indian election campaign and its outcomes to offer some reflections on themes related to democratic politics. 

Professor Amit Ahuja is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. He has studied this within the context of ethnic parties and movements, military organization, intercaste marriage, and skin color preferences in South Asia. Professor Ahuja’s book, Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movementspublished by Oxford University Press was the winner of the 2020 New India Foundation Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize. He has coedited a volume with Devesh Kapur, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State published by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on a book-length project titled, Building National Armies in Multiethnic States. In 2022-23, he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC. Professor Ahuja was awarded The Margret T. Getman Service to Students Award in 2015. Professor Ahuja’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Hellman Family Foundation, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan.

Location: Athenaeum

Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat will discuss his recent book, The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World (2024), in a talk co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies and the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

Location: Athenaeum

Scholars often point to the 1990s as the ideological high-tide of neoliberal globalization. More recently, however, populism has brought back into politics – on both the left and right - a consideration that the economy should be a moral realm, that is, a realm wherein purely transactional relationships of the neoliberal kind must give way to broader social obligations and reciprocities. If there is any economy that deserves the label “popular” – in terms of its widespread and global use and its association with the masses as opposed to the elites – it is surely the Cannabis economy. In contrast to the principles of neoliberal economy, Cannabis culture comprises a dense weave of collective norms, reciprocities, and obligations that govern not only how the plant is cultivated but how it is used and even sold. Rastafari are the exemplars of this culture, promoting a transnational moral economy of black self-determination. But the Rastafari use of Cannabis has been criminalized as part of a war on drugs with racist predicates. This presentation historically tracks the war across Caribbean and North American spaces, and via spiritual, cultural, economic and political dimensions, in order to examine a moral economy that might help us think differently about alternatives to neo-liberalism in a populist era.

Professor Robbie Shilliam is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University, He is a leading scholar of postcolonial politics and racial politics in the field of International Relations. He has authored numerous books including Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (2018); Decolonizing Politics (2021), The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (2015), and German Thought and International Relations (2009) and co-edited multiple volumes including Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (2014). He is co-editor of the Manchester University Press book series Postcolonial International Studies. Professor Shilliam is a long-standing active member of the Global Development section of the International Studies Association, having served as the association's Vice President. Professor Shilliam works with community and academic intellectuals and elders of the Rastafari movement to examine its impact on global affairs. Based on original, primary research, he helped to co-curate a history of the Rastafari movement in Britain, which was exhibited in Ethiopia, Jamaica and Britain.

Location: Athenaeum

Learn more about opportunities and how to get involved with the Keck Center, Mgrublian Center, and Salvatori Center. Walk through the centers and chat with students, faculty, and staff, while indulging in delicious treats from popular local eateries/bakeries.