News

Israel’s assassination of a top Hamas leader in Tehran in July, Ukraine’s incursion over the summer into Russia, and a recent series of increasingly assertive Chinese air and maritime interceptions in the South China Sea have fanned fears that long-simmering conflicts could escalate into broader wars. In the wake of these provocations, analysts fret about the heightened risk of military accidents and strategic misperceptions.

US President Joe Biden said he would not support any Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites in response to its ballistic missile attack. Jim Walsh, a senior research associate at the MIT’s Security Studies Program who was with the Iranian president last week, says it needs to ‘be tested’ whether Biden can be persuasive 30 days shy of an election.

MIT professors Michael Short and Manduhai Buyandelger launched the Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale, an initiative intended to advance a heat bank prototype in Mongolia and ultimately demonstrate its potential as a scalable clean heat source in comparably challenging sites around the world. The project received funding from the MIT Global Seed Funds program.

CIS research affiliate and head of the political science department David A. Singer discusses a new Strengthening Democracy initiative focused on the rigorous study of elections, public opinion, and political participation.

Three PhD students of the Security Studies Program (SSP) received the 2024-2025 Peace Scholar Dissertation Fellowships from the U.S. Institute of Peace for demonstrating the greatest potential to advance the peacebuilding field and the strongest likelihood to inform policy and practice.