Activities

Visit Programs, Events and Seminars, and Opportunities to learn about the Center's activities and how to engage with our community. You can also connect with us here and watch many of our past events on YouTube. Below is an editor’s pick of recent programming.

Climate Change Research, Education, and Programming
CIS supports an expansive range of research and initiatives at the intersection of climate, policy, and international relations. Evan Lieberman, CIS director, leads several projects focused on climate preferences, global water access, and elite climate action, while Mihaela Papa’s BRICS Lab analyzes the role of emerging powers in climate governance and food security. The Center's MIT-Amazonia program fosters sustainability collaboration in the Amazon region. Through Global Seed Funds, CIS has supported this annual cycle over $2.6 million in international faculty research, much of it focused on decarbonization, environmental resilience, and equitable urban development. Graduate students receive support for climate-related research, including fieldwork, working groups, and MISTI-facilitated international internships. CIS also engages the broader MIT community through events, pre-departure trainings, and workshops, such as the last April's Global Climate Adaptation workshop which brought together scholars and policymakers focused on climate-related political and policy challenges in the Global South.

Research Workshops at CIS 
CIS hosted several faculty-led research workshops and conferences, aimed to advance international studies, cultivate emerging areas of scholarship, and engage scholars and policymakers in interdisciplinary dialogue. Workshops included: The Origins of State Strength and Economic Development: Insights from Historical Political Economy; Amazonia Community Building: Co-Designing Research for Impact; Global Climate Adaptation: Overcoming Political and Policy Challenges. Learn more about our Research Workshops here. 

Join the Center’s M3 (Mens, Manus, Mundus) Initiative
M3 is an initiative at CIS to further amplify the work of CIS and foster connections across the Institute that organizes communications across regions (Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, MENA). To learn more about the work being done at CIS within any of these specific regions sign up here to get an M3 newsletter delivered to your email.

New Undergraduate Fellowship Program
The new program supports 4–6 fellows each semester who demonstrate strong interest in global issues such as climate policy, foreign relations, security, democracy and human rights, trade, and international technology governance. It is open to MIT undergraduates from all majors who have completed a substantive international experience, either through MISTI, D-Lab, PKG, or another program. Learn more. 

MIT Starr Forums 
The Center hosted several Starr Forums on a range of topics including: The Israel-Gaza crisis and US policy (Melani Cammett, Harvard University; Dennis Ross, Washington Institute for Near East Policy); The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: The World is Watching (Katrina Burgess, Tufts University; John Githongo, MIT; Prerna Singh, Brown University; Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard University; Evan Lieberman, MIT); Syria and the Middle East (Marwa Daoudy, Georgetown University; Rana Khoury, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Richard Nielsen, MIT); Sudan Under Fire (Cameron Hudson; Center for Strategic and International Studies; Kholood Khair, Confluence Advisory; Ahmed Kodouda, policy specialist; Mai Hassan, MIT); The U.S. and the World under Trump (Juliette Kayyem, Harvard University; Kori Schake, American Enterprise Institute; Evan Lieberman, MIT). Starr Forums are available to watch on demand and are archived here on the CIS YouTube channel. Join the Starr Forum email list to learn about upcoming events.

MENA Minicourse for the MIT Community
MIT-MENA hosted the online mini-course Israeli, Palestinian, and American relations: Now and in the future for the MIT community, taught by Peter Krause, associate professor of political science at Boston College and research affiliate at the Security Studies Program. All three sessions are available to watch here on our YouTube channel. MIT-MENA will host another mini-course this fall, Understanding Different Perspectives on International Relations in MENA.

Global Research & Policy Seminars
The Global Research & Policy Seminar series, launched in fall 2024, fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and critical analysis, bridging theoretical insights with practical solutions. The seminars run every other Monday during the semester, starting on the second Monday in September. Past seminars include: The Next 50 Years of Global Anti-Corruption (John Githongo, MIT); US-China Science Cooperation and Chinese American Scientists in the Trump 2.0 Era (Yasheng Huang, Gang Chen, David Goldston, Mihaela Papa, MIT); Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: Evidence from West Africa (Noah Nathan, MIT); and Healthcare Access Among Forcibly Displaced Persons: The Intersection of Trust, Technology, and Basic Science (Muhammad Zaman, Boston University). Upcoming seminars for the fall semester are available here. 

SSP Wed Seminars
The Security Studies Program (SSP) Wednesday Seminar series runs weekly during the academic year from 12:00pm to 1:30PM, EST.  In-person attendance is limited to the MIT community while the public can watch on the SSP YouTube channel. A selection of spring seminars included: The UN Summit of the Future: Reinvigorating Multilateralism (Michèle Griffin, United Nations); Nuclear Threats (Lisa Koch, Claremont McKenna College); What is Contemporary Interstate Conflict About? (James Fearon, Stanford University); and America’s Military After Two Decades of War (Mara Karlin, Johns Hopkins University). All seminars are archived on the SSP YouTube channel. Upcoming seminars are available here. 

SSP Wargaming Lab Offers "Boot Camp"
The Security Studies Program’s Summer Wargaming Institute is a four-day “bootcamp-style” program hosted by the MIT SSP Wargaming Lab. The Institute's goal is to teach practitioners and scholars how to design and run wargames for research, training, and analysis. The bootcamp took place on July 20-24, 2025 at the MIT Endicott House in Dedham, MA. Participants engaged in hands-on training and courses led by Wargaming Lab co-directors Erik Lin-Greenberg and Eric Heginbotham.

GMAF Ukraine
The Global MIT At-Risk Fellows (GMAF) Ukraine program is designed to enhance educational and research experiences of Ukrainian scholars and researchers by introducing them to MIT campus methods and strategies in their areas of specialty. Three GMAF-Ukraine fellows arrived at MIT in spring 2025: Oleksandr Hrytsyna, Volodymyr Tkach, and Tetiana Zakharchenko. Learn more about the 2025 fellows here. Nataliia Fihurka, a 2024-2025 GMAF-Ukraine fellow, discusses her research in the Multifunctional Metamaterials Lab at the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering in a video here. 

Emile Bustani Seminar 
Since its inception, the Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar brought over 200 experts to campus to discuss the history, political science, economics, anthropology, architecture, and urban studies of the Middle East and North Africa. After 40 years of activity, the final Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar took place on April 8, 2025. Past seminars include: Gaza: ‘Can Anyone Hear Us?’ (Sara Roy, Harvard University); An Urban Geography of Boston’s Little Syria (Chloe Bordewich, University of Toronto; Lydia Harrington, The Syria Museum); Does Knowing Matter?: US Policy in the Palestine Conflict, 1948-2023 (Irene Gendzier, Boston University); and Lebanon's Struggle to Survive in the Post-Arab Spring Middle East (Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington). 

Focus on Eurasia
The Focus on Eurasia speaker series invites the MIT community and the general public to investigate ongoing issues in Eurasian domestic and foreign policy. The seminars are co-chaired by Carol Saivetz and Elizabeth Wood. Past events included: What’s Next for Ukraine and Europe? A Conversation with Dmytro Kuleba, former foreign minister of Ukraine and Lessons from Battlefield Ukraine: A Conversation with Ukraine’s former defense minister Oleksii Reznikov. Focus on Eurasia events are available to watch on our YouTube channel.