Past Events

Past IIS Events

Trita Parsi, President, National Iranian American Council
Obama's Diplomacy with Iran
Tue - April, 10th, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

12-1:30 p.m.

Have the diplomatic efforts of the Obama administration toward Iran failed? Was the Bush administration's emphasis on military intervention, refusal to negotiate, and pursuit of regime change a better approach? How can the United States best address the ongoing turmoil in Tehran?  A Single Roll of the Dice - Obama's Diplomacy with Iran (Yale University Press 2012), provides a definitive and comprehensive analysis of the Obama administration's early diplomatic outreach to Iran and discusses the best way to move toward more positive relations between the two discordant states.  For this book, Trita interviewed 70 high-ranking officials from the U.S., Iran, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Brazil—including the top American and Iranian negotiators—for this book. Parsi uncovers the previously unknown story of American and Iranian negotiations during Obama's early years as president, the calculations behind the two nations' dealings, and the real reasons for their current stalemate. Contrary to prevailing opinion, Parsi contends that diplomacy has not been fully tried. For various reasons, Obama's diplomacy ended up being a single roll of the dice. It had to work either immediately—or not at all. Persistence and perseverance are keys to any negotiation. Neither Iran nor the U.S. had them in 2009.

Trita Parsi is the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East.  He is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press 2007), for which he conducted more than 130 interviews with senior Israeli, Iranian and American decision-makers.  Treacherous Alliance is the silver medal winner of the 2008 Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations.  
 
Ambassador Robert Gallucci, President, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Nuclear Proliferation: What's to Worry About?
Mon - April, 9th, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

Preventing nuclear proliferation continues to be one of the biggest foreign policy challenges for the United States.  Iran is only the most recent country aspiring to develop nuclear weapons despite having signed the Treaty on the Prevention of Nuclear Proliferation.  Iran follows the example of North Korea, who formally withdrew from the treaty after acquiring the necessary technology for a bomb.  Libya was on the same path before shifting gears in the mid-2000s, while Pakistan, India, and Israel stayed out of the treaty and took their own paths to a nuclear arsenal.  Before serving as Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and President of the MacArthur Foundation, Ambassador Robert Gallucci spent a storied career in the State Department addressing these challenges.     

Part of the U.S. Foreign Policy Seminar.

 

Tom Farer
The Enduring Crisis of Humanitarianism
Thu - April, 5th, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

University Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, Tom Farer is the former President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS), the first American ever to head a principal organ of the OAS. He has also served as President of the University of New Mexico. He has direct experience of humanitarian missions, having served as legal consult for the UN's Somalia intervention in 1993 and in connection therewith prepared a report for the Security Council on how war broke out between the UN and a key internal actor.  He will shortly be published an essay on the same topic in the Carnegie Council journal, "Ethics and International Affairs."  Within the United states Government, he has served as special assistant first to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and then to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. He has taught law at Columbia University, American University, Rutgers, Tulane and Harvard and international relations at Cambridge University, Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. And he has been a Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Dr. Neil Joeck, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Security Research
Why Pakistan Matters in US Foreign Policy
Wed - April, 4th, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

US foreign policy challenges with respect to nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and China come together in its relationship with Pakistan.  Few would have predicted that this state, which began improbably out of the ashes of British colonialism in 1947, would assume such importance.  But as the war in Afghanistan continues, Pakistan may play an important role either in prolonging the conflict or in achieving a peaceful resolution.  Beyond the war in Afghanistan Pakistan's continuing insecurities about India and its ambivalent approach to terrorism make it, in the words of former President Clinton, "the most dangerous place in the world."  Dr. Neil Joeck, currently a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, recently completed two years as the National Intelligence Officer for South Asia, and also served as Director for Counterproliferation Strategy at the National Security Council and Member of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department.

Part of the U.S. Foreign Policy Seminar.  Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia Studies.

Avner Cohen, Karim Sadjadpour, and Shibley Telhami
The Iranian Crisis: Is War Inevitable?
Mon - March, 19th, 2012. Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall

4-6 p.m.

To view the video of the The Iranian Crisis: Is War Inevitable? please visit here.

As the U.S. and Israel reach a dangerous turning point in their relations with Iran, a panel of distinguished analysts will focus on these issues:
• Can Iran be stopped in its drive to produce nuclear weapons?
• If Iran succeeds, what will be the consequences for regional stability?  
• In what ways do domestic politics and regional dynamics drive the principal actors—the U.S., Iran, and Israel—in their choice of war or diplomacy?  
• How has the Arab Spring changed the dynamics of regional politics and the outlook for proliferation? 
• How will the American Presidential elections affect the crisis? 
 
Avner Cohen is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies  and a Professor in the Graduate School of International Policy and Management.  He is widely known for his path-breaking history of the Israeli nuclear program, is an internationally recognized author and expert on nonproliferation issues, focusing on the Middle East. His most recent publication is The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb.
 
Karim Sadjadpour is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment. He joined Carnegie after four years as the chief Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Washington and Tehran, where he conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian officials, and hundreds with Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries, businessmen, students, activists, and youth, among others.  He is a regular contributor to BBC TV and radio, CNN, National Public Radio, PBS NewsHour, and Al-Jazeera. He contributes regularly to publications such as the Economist, Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and Foreign Policy.
 
Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park, and non-resident senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution.  His publications include his best-selling book, The Stakes: America and the Middle East.  He has been a principal investigator in the annual Arab Public Opinion Survey, conducted since 2002 in six Arab countries. 
 

 

Dr. Ashley Tellis, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy
Wed - March, 14th, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

The war in Afghanistan has been going on for over a decade, but there is now an end in sight — at least for US forces.  President Obama has decided that all US troops will be withdrawn by the end of 2014.  As part of the drawdown, the US has committed to training the Afghan National Security Forces so that they will be able to assume all security responsibilities.  Furthermore, the administrative transition process is underway with 18 new areas recently turned over to Afghan governance.  Yet the Taliban continue to attack throughout Afghanistan, suggesting that regardless of US policy, war will continue.  Given this dynamic, what are our policy options?  Dr. Ashley J. Tellis is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and brings to this issue his extensive previous experience as Senior Advisor to the US Ambassador in India, as Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council, and as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of Political Affairs at the State Department.  

Part of the U.S. Foreign Policy Seminar.  Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia Studies.  

 

Ambassador Mitchell Reiss, President, Washington College
Should We Talk to Terrorists?
Wed - March, 7th, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

The threat of terrorism to US security and international peace and stability did not begin with the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US and will not end when US troops leave Afghanistan.   How best to respond to terrorists has been a challenge to past Administrations, not just to Presidents Bush and Obama.  It has recently been reported that in addition to military means, the Obama Administration is engaged in some form of discussion with at least part of the Taliban leadership.  Negotiating with an enemy has always been a delicate diplomatic undertaking.  Ambassador Mitchell Reiss brings extensive experience to this issue in addition to his recent e-book, Negotiating with Evil.  As Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Office, he negotiated the Northern Ireland peace agreement and as the Director of the Korea Energy Development Organization he negotiated the implementation of the Framework Agreement with North Korea.

Part of the U.S. Foreign Policy Seminar.

Federico Rampini
Is Democracy on the Retreat? Europe Between Market Pressure, German Rigour, and Technocracy
Thu - March, 1st, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

Federico Rampini is la Repubblica's New York Bureau Chief.  Previously, he has served as a columnist and correspondent for la Repubblica in Beijing, where he inaugurated the publication's China bureau in July 2004.  As a special envoy, he travels frequently to India, Japan and Southeast Asia.  From 2000 to 2004, Rampini was la Repubblica's West Coast correspondent based in San Francisco, California.  From 1997 to 2000, he was the European editor of la Repubblica.  He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism and at the Shanghai University of Economics and Finance.

Sponsored by the Institute of International Studies.  Co-sponsored by the Institute of European Studies.    

Chris Kojm, Chairman, National Intelligence Council
Ten Years after 9/11: The Changing Role of the Intelligence Community in US Foreign Policy
Wed - February, 22nd, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

Intelligence collection and analysis play a critical supporting role in the development and implementation of foreign policy.  The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 exposed critical shortcomings in the US intelligence community.  In the decade since those attacks, major organizational and substantive changes have been made in how the US intelligence community functions.  Chris Kojm is the current Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and one of the authors of the 9/11 Commission report that identified the problems within the Intelligence Community and recommended reforms to improve its performance.  He will discuss how intelligence has changed, the role it currently plays in the policy process, and what more needs to be done to ensure that the US intelligence community provides the kind of support US policy makers need as they confront current challenges in US foreign policy.

Part of the U.S. Foreign Policy Seminar.

 

Steven A. Cook
The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square
Mon - January, 30th, 2012. 223 Moses Hall

12-1:30 p.m.

The recent revolution in Egypt has shaken the Arab world to its roots. The most populous Arab country and the historical center of Arab intellectual life, Egypt is a linchpin of the United States' Middle East strategy, traditionally receiving more aid than any nation except Israel. This is not the first time that the world has turned its gaze to Egypt, however. A half-century ago, Egypt under Nasser became the putative leader of the Arab world and a beacon for all developing nations. Yet in the decades prior to the 2011 revolution, it was ruled over by a sclerotic regime plagued by nepotism and corruption. During that time, its economy declined into near shambles, a severely overpopulated Cairo fell into disrepair, and it produced scores of violent Islamic extremists such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atta.
 
Hervé Piégay (CNRS Lyon)
Promotion of adaptation in river management, conservatism and universal values: examples from Mediterranean France
Tue - December, 6th, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

12:30-2 p.m.

Hervé Piégay is the Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) Lyon.

Sponsored by the IIS Water Management Colloquium.  

 

Erica Chenoweth (Wesleyan)
Weapons of the Strong? Explaining the Global Diffusion of Nonviolent Uprisings
Mon - December, 5th, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

Erica Chenoweth (Ph.D., University of Colorado) is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. She also directs Wesleyan’s Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research, which she established in 2008. Chenoweth is an Associate at the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Chenoweth’s research interests include terrorism, the outcomes of nonviolent and violent protest, the consequences of political violence, democratization, and repression.

Sponsored by the International Relations Theory Colloquium.

Brinda Sarathy (Pitzer College)
Interrogating the EJ Narrative: The Risks and Rewards of Moving 'Beyond Race'
Fri - December, 2nd, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

3-5:30 p.m.

Brinda Sarathy is assistant professor of environmental analysis at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.  Her book, Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest (forthcoming in Fall 2011 from UBC Press), provides a social history of Latino immigrants and forestry in the Pacific Northwest, and a comparative analysis of pineros today with Anglo loggers and tree-planters from prior decades.

Sarathy received her Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management in 2006 from the University of California, Berkeley, and held a post-doctoral position at the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UCMEXUS).  Her research on pineros has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rural Sociological Society, the Morris K. Udall Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
 
 
Stewart M. Patrick
Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security
Tue - November, 29th, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

12-1:30 p.m.

Conventional wisdom holds that weak and failing states are the source of the world's most pressing security threats. After all, the 9/11 attacks originated in an impoverished, war-ravaged country, and transnational crime appears to flourish in weakly governed states. However, our assumptions about the threats posed by failing states are based on anecdotal arguments, not on a systematic analysis of the connections between state failure and transnational security threats. Analyzing terrorism, transnational crime, WMDs, pandemic diseases, and energy insecurity, Stewart Patrick shows that while some global threats do emerge in fragile states, most of their weaknesses create misery only for their own citizenry. Moreover, many threats originate farther up the chain, in wealthier and more stable countries like Russia and Venezuela. Weak Links will force policymakers to rethink what they assume about state failure and transnational insecurity.
 
 
Ben Oppenheim (UC Berkeley)
Are Fragile States 'Breeding Grounds' for International Terrorism?
Mon - November, 28th, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

4-5:30 p.m.

Fragile and failing states are widely believed to pose one of the greatest dangers to global security, and have been linked by scholars and policymakers to threats as diverse as transnational terrorism and pandemic disease outbreaks.  The new conventional wisdom— that weak states pose greater risks than “rogue” or strong rival powers— has driven significant realignments in foreign and development policy. But is the conventional wisdom right? The anecdotal evidence is at best ambiguous: terrorist organizations have found sanctuary and recruits in remote, ungoverned spaces as well as global metropoles, and major pathogenic threats have emerged from fast-developing, globally integrated countries as well as weakly governed, conflict-affected states.  In my dissertation research, I trace and test the causal mechanisms thought to connect state failure and a range of transnational security threats: terrorist recruitment; infectious disease emergence and transmission via displaced populations; and the expansion of armed groups’ operational space from failing states to neighboring countries.

Sponsored by the International Relations Theory Colloquium.

Holly Doremus (Boalt School of Law)
Climate Change and the Evolution of Land and Water Rights
Tue - November, 15th, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

12:30-2 p.m.

Doremus brings a strong background in life sciences and a commitment to interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship to her work at Berkeley Law. She earned her PhD in Plant Physiology from Cornell University and was a post-doctoral associate at the University of Missouri before making the transition to law. In addition to her law school teaching experience, she has taught in the graduate ecology program at UC Davis, in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley, and at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. She has been a principal investigator on two major NSF IGERT interdisciplinary training grants and a multidisciplinary grant dealing with hydropower relicensing in California. She has co-authored papers with economists and ecologists, and has been a member of two National Research Council review committees.
 
Doremus received her JD and Environmental Law Certificate from Berkeley Law, where she was an articles editor for the Ecology Law Quarterly and a member of the Order of the Coif honor society. She then clerked for Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, practiced municipal and land use law with the firm of Eickelberg & Fewel in Corvallis, Ore., and taught at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University before beginning her law teaching career at UC Davis in 1995. She is a Member-Scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform and an elected member of the American Law Institute. She was honored as a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow for 2001-2006.
 
Sponsored by the IIS Water Management Colloquium.  
 
Lisa Ford (University of New South Wales)
The King's Colonial Peace: Magisterial jurisdiction and the transformation of the British empire after 1800
Tue - November, 8th, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

4-6 p.m.

The British Empire transformed itself after the American Revolution. It not only turned its attention to acquiring new colonies, it adopted new methods of ordering subjects in distant colonies, particularly those dependent on unfree labor. In this paper, I begin to explore how the magistracy was used in the early nineteenth century to bring settlers to order from New South Wales to the Caribbean. In places of recent settlement, cession and conquest, the Empire either encouraged or imposed regimes of summary jurisdiction that tested eighteenth-century boundaries of British subjecthood. By the 1830s, new kinds of magistrates wielded new summary jurisdictions over convicts, slaves and indigenous people and their settler masters and neighbors. This jurisdictional imperialism and local controversies surrounding it, made keeping the King's Peace one of the most important theatres of empire building in the early nineteenth century.

Sponsored by the Institute of International Studies, the Center for British Studies, and the Berkeley Seminar on Global History.  

Roya Hakakian
Roya Hakakian: "Assassins of the Turquoise Palace"
Thu - October, 27th, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

4-6 p.m.

In 1992, four leading opponents to the Iranian government were assassinated in a Berlin café. In her new book, Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, award-winning Iranian poet, writer, and journalist Roya Hakakian tells the story of a survivor and widow's extraordinary quest for legal justice against one of the world's most dangerous regimes.

Dan Caldwell, Pepperdine University
Dan Caldwell: "Vortex of Conflict"
Mon - October, 3rd, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

12-2 p.m.

With the passing of the eighth anniversary of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, Dan Caldwell, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine, aims to rectify the absence of a comprehensive reference work for a holistic view of the resulting wars in his latest book.  While many books have been published on each of these wars, Vortex of Conflict: U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq (Stanford University Press) gives a clear, accurate account of their origins, especially how and why the U.S. became so involved in the affairs of Pakistan.

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, British Ambassador to the United States
Sir Nigel Sheinwald: "Britain, America and Asia: New Cooperation in the Pacific Century"
Thu - September, 29th, 2011. 223 Moses Hall

4-5 p.m.

For North Americans and Europeans alike, ensuring that a newly enriched and strengthened Asia becomes a partner in the international system, and not an adversary, will be one of the dominant themes of the new century.  The EU and US need to build an effective transatlantic partnership on Asia-Pacific issues, a partnership that fits the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. In a globalised world the interests of European, North American and Asian powers are bound together; the challenge is how to satisfy those interests and find ways to accommodate or overcome the inevitable differences in perspective between the established and the rising powers.
 
At the same time, we should be careful not to over-estimate or misinterpret the change that is occurring in the world, or to become paralysed by fear of Western decline. Even while China and India grow faster and catch up with the global economy, the products and innovations of the future are being developed and designed in America and Europe, and European investment in the US and American investment in Europe dwarf anything that of China, India or other Asia-Pacific powers.
 

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