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News@E40

December 2, 2009

Web site seeks visions for Jerusalem

Protests, anger, controversy, arrests, evacuation—words used in the news to describe Jerusalem today. Still, the Center's Jerusalem 2050 Program seeks visions for a city of peace by mid-century—now through a web site: www.envisioningpeace.org. The site is loaded with interactive tools and resources to help foster dialogue, ideas, and solutions for cities of conflict, beginning with Jerusalem. Envisioningpeace.org is the next phase in the Program’s efforts to organize a global problem-solving exercise. News Release

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November 23, 2009

Cold War Cinema series

The Center is delighted to introduce a Cold War Cinema series exploring the impact of this era on cinema. The first feature, presented on December 2, is Billy Wilder's 1961 film One, Two, Three. Discussing the film is journalist Christian Caryl, who was in Berlin covering the fall of the wall in 1989. Caryl is currently with Foreign Policy and Newsweek. He is also a senior fellow at CIS. Event Details

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November 23, 2009

Immigration, Islam, and the west

Christopher Caldwell comes to MIT on November 30 to discuss his latest book: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. "In Europe, the author argues, the clash between Western civilization and the Muslim world has already been lost—in the latter's favor." Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a regular contributor to the Financial Times and Slate. His essays and reviews appear in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Event Details

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November 18, 2009

Tirman on women & migration

A new volume drawing from a major CIS project has just been released by Springer. Women, Migration and Conflict: Breaking a Deadly Cycle, resulted from a research effort commissioned by the UN Population Fund in 2007 and managed by CIS. The project brought together leading analysts on this timely topic—mainly, how to mitigate the impacts of forced migration on women and children—in two workshops, and this book is the major product. Co-edited by Susan Forbes Martin of Georgetown University and CIS executive director John Tirman,the contributors include Dr. Jennifer Leaning of Harvard, a member of the Inter-University Committee on International Migration, which also helped advise the project. “This work shows the vital link between migration and security, and the role that multilateral organizations play in helping women deal with often dangerous, chronic dislocations,” Tirman says. “We’re pleased that we could productively work with a major U.N. agency and this excellent cohort of scholar/practitioners to produce such a useful work.”

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November 5, 2009

Oye moderates 'Census & Race' talk

A talk entitled Race, Ethnicity and the 2010 Census: Categorizing and Counting will take place on Saturday, November 7. Paul Watanabe, director of the Institute for Asian American Studies and associate professor of political science at UMass Boston, is the featured speaker. Melissa Nobles, associate professor of political science at MIT, will commentate; and Kenneth Oye, associate professor of political science and engineering systems at MIT, will moderate.

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November 2, 2009

CIS Advisory Board led by Admiral Fallon

Fallon, the group includes Mary Boies, an attorney and high-level government adviser; Jon Borschow, a businessman based in Puerto Rico and an MIT alumnus; Susan Chira, foreign editor of the New York Times; Chas W. Freeman, Jr., former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia; M. Shafik Gabr, a Cairo-based head of a major investment group; Alexis F. Habib, managing director of Spinnaker Capital Limited, London; Dana Mead, Chairman of the MIT Corporation; Yukio Okamoto, former adviser to the Japanese government; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of the World Bank who earned her PhD at MIT; John Reed, retired Chairman of Citigroup, and an MIT alumnus; Siddharth C.R. Shriram, an industrialist based in New Delhi; Jeffrey L. Silverman, a graduate of the Sloan School at MIT and a commodities trader in Chicago; Anthony Sun, a high-tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who earned degrees in engineering at MIT; Lynn Chatman Todman, director of the Institute on Social Exclusion in Chicago, and a MIT PhD in urban planning; and Thomas Wolf, a political science PhD from MIT and a Pennsylvania businessman who has served in the governor’s cabinet.

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October 29, 2009

New research on women and security

The Center is undertaking a year-long assessment of the UN’s mandate on women and security—namely, UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which obligates member states to include women in peace processes and peace building. A distinguished group of researchers from around the world will conduct case studies in Sri Lanka, Uganda, Aceh, Liberia, and Israel/Palestine to evaluate 1325’s impact on participation. Working with several key agencies in the UN system, the team will present their findings at the UN’s 10th anniversary observance of the resolution’s passage next year. John Tirman, CIS executive director and principal research scientist, and Sanam Anderlini, CIS research affiliate and director of the International Civil Society Action Network, are co-directing the project. The work is partially supported by the governments of Norway and Ireland.

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October 23, 2009

Tellis on the Taliban

Ashley Tellis delivers a talk entitled Reconciling with the Taliban? Toward an Alternative Grand Strategy in Afghanistan for the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar on South Asia. Tellis served as advisor to Ambassador Blackwill in Delhi and is currently a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. The talk will be at CIS (E40-496) on Thursday, November 5.

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October 23, 2009

Obama & the Arab-Israeli conflict

Khalil Shikaki and Shai Feldman give an Israeli and Palestinian perspective on current state of affairs on Thursday, October 29. Shikaki has directed the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah since 2000, and has conducted more than one hundred polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1993. Feldman served as head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University from 1997-2005 and is the author and co-author of numerous publications, including: Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East and Track-II Diplomacy: Lessons from the Middle East.

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October 2, 2009

MIT announces global strategy

MIT's Global Council, co-chaired by CIS director and Ford International Professor of Political Science Richard Samuels, released two reports that will help frame MIT's international engagement strategy for years to come. "Our students' hopes for productive, sustainable careers increasingly depend on acquiring stronger, deeper, and more refined international skills and understanding. Society's best hope for scientific advance depends on our ability both to draw on knowledge from the entire world and to contribute to knowledge creation across national and cultural boundaries," said MIT President Susan Hockfield and Provost L. Rafael Reif in a letter announcing the reports to the MIT community. The new strategy underscores the need for both students and faculty to be involved in global research activities, which is a hallmark of the Center's MISTI Program, the largest international program at MIT.

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September 25, 2009

Book talk with Kristof, WuDunn

CIS and Harvard Book Store are delighted to host New York Times correspondents and Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn for a discussion of their new book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Kristof and WuDunn set out to expose the struggles of women across Asia and Africa, to tell their human stories, and to follow the progress of women who are ultimately given the opportunity to seize control of their own lives. Introducing the authors will be Diane Davis, professor of political sociology at MIT and head of the International Development Group. Davis also directs the Center's Jerusalem 2050 Program. The event will be Monday, October 5, at 6 PM, at the Brattle Theatre. Tickets are available at Harvard Book Store. Image courtesy Jason Koski, Cornell University.

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September 18, 2009

Luce Fellowship deadline Oct. 7

Wednesday, October 7, is this year's deadline for the Luce Scholars Program. The program is open to seniors, graduate students, and alumni from recent classes and junior faculty. Young scholars from a wide variety of intellectual fields will be placed in 10-month internships in selected countries in East and Southeast Asia. The fellowship is aimed for those with no prior experience in Asia.

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September 15, 2009

Joint seminar on South Asian politics

The Center has joined together with the Watson Institute at Brown and the Weatherhead Center at Harvard to launch a new Inter-University Seminar on South Asian politics. The seminar is chaired by Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science at Brown and visiting fellow at CIS. Meetings are scheduled for Thursdays at 4 PM, unless otherwise noted. More details on speakers and the series are here.

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September 8, 2009

BBC journalist joins CIS

The Center welcomes Firle Davies, a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, as its 2009-10 IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow. The fellowship, which is offered through the International Women's Media Foundation, gives a woman journalist the opportunity to focus exclusively on human rights journalism and social justice issues. A journalist for more than two decades, Davies has worked for the BBC since 2000. She has reported for domestic and world service radio, domestic and world television, and has produced online and current affairs documentaries. Davis has worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Zairee, among other countries. Davis will spend nine-months at CIS in a tailor-made academic research program. The fellowship is named for Elizabeth Neuffer, a Boston Globe reporter who was killed on assignment in Iraq in 2003. Press Release

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September 8, 2009

Starr Forum on U.S.-Cuba relations

Cuban scholars Julia Sweig and Wayne Smith will be discussants at a Starr Forum entitled: Cuba-U.S. Relations: The Beginning of a Long Thaw? Sweig is a senior fellow and director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the award-winning author of Inside the Cuban Revolution, and, most recently, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know. Smith is senior fellow and director of the Cuba Program at the Center for International Policy, and a visiting professor of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. Smith served in the State Department as executive secretary of President Kennedy's Latin American Task Force and chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. The Starr Forum event, which is free and open to the public, will be on Wed, Sept 23, at 4:30 PM, in the Wong Auditorium, MIT Bldg E51.

News@E40

August 26, 2009

CIS moves to E40

CIS is delighted to announce our new location at E40-400. All of the Center's programs and people are now together on one floor, which will help foster better research and teaching. The Center will celebrate the new space with a formal reception soon after the fall semester commences.

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August 4, 2009

MISTI interns share global insights

The Center's MISTI Program has placed more than 400 MIT students as interns in nine countries this year. Shirin Kasturia (Brain and Cognitive Science '10) is researching healthcare technology for elderly and disabled people at Innovaciones Socio Sanitarias in Valencia, Spain; Alyssa Roque (Mechanical Engineering '11) is developing thermal systems powered by solar energy at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology; Ken Lopez (Management '12) is working on a Braille screen at Tecnologico de Monterrey University in Cordoba, Mexico; and Julian Hernandez (EECS '09) is developing new iPhone technology at France Telecom in Paris—to name just a few. Learn more about the MISTI experience by reading the students' online posts from around the globe.

News@E40

July 27, 2009

MIT-Italy Director receives Italian honors

Serenella Sferza, director of the Center's MIT-Italy program, was named Cavaliere della Repubblica Italiana for her work promoting Italian culture and research. She was one of five individuals honored at a ceremony by the Consul General of Italy in Boston on June 2, 2009. The honorees were selected by the president of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano.

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July 13, 2009

Fearless Iranian exile speaks out

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a leading advocate of human rights and democracy in Iran, and a former visiting scholar at CIS, is profiled in the Boston Globe. Haghighatjoo, who has been in exile since 2005, first came to the United States with the help of John Tirman, executive director and principal research scientist at CIS. Since her time at CIS, she has been a visiting scholar at the Kennedy School at Harvard, the University of Connecticut, and now resides at UMass-Boston. Called fearless and outspoken, Haghighatjoo was a member of the 6th Majlis, Iran's reform parliament, and was the first to resign when the anti-reform measures of the Supreme Leader began to take shape. Haghighatjoo, a psychologist with a Ph.D. in counseling, was president of the student movement faction in the Majlis and a deputy in the Mosharekat Party. According to Haghighatjoo, "democratization is the central issue for Iran." Read article» 

News@E40

June 26, 2009

Fotini on 'Flipping the Taliban'

Fotini Christia, member of the Center's Security Studies Program and assistant professor of political science at MIT, co-authored an essay on Afghanistan in the July/August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs. The authors write, "Although sending more troops is necessary to tip the balance of power against the insurgents, the move will have a lasting impact only if it is accompanied by a political 'surge,' a committed effort to persuade large groups of Taliban fighters to put down their arms and give up the fight." Read the full essay: "Flipping the Taliban: How to Win in Afghanistan." Related is a Starr Forum event on Afghanistan featuring a discussion between Fotini and Admiral William Fallon, USN (RET). Watch the video» 

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