Tag: War

  • Nation & World

    Tanner lecturer, peacemaker Nusseibeh in search of the improbable

    Prior to delivering the first of this year’s Tanner Lectures, political activist Sari Nusseibeh gave the audience a laugh — and a cheat sheet. “My normal attitude in lectures is to doze off when someone is reading them,” he quipped, “so if you do doze off I just want to tell you that my message…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Rights champion Goldstone speaks

    In human rights terms, Richard J. Goldstone, the 70-year-old veteran of South Africa’s highest courts and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, has walked the walk and talked the talk — chiefly by having a role in a number of this generation’s most important humanitarian events.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    New president, new challenges

    In introducing the featured speaker at last week’s (Oct. 29) John F. Kennedy School Forum, Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said, “If there were a really serious national security problem and we could only consult one person, that person, in my view, is Brent Scowcroft.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Post-colonial wars parsed at Radcliffe

    Last week, a two-day interdisciplinary conference on post-colonial wars got under way at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Oct. 30-31 event was the capstone of two years of private meetings at Radcliffe by high-level experts on the wars that followed independence movements in Africa and Asia after World War II.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Spirited discussion brings some clarity to Obama’s strategy on Middle East

    In the final days before the U.S. presidential election, the two leading candidates were too busy dashing from one rally to the next in a few battleground states to make it to the reliably blue Bay State in person.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Global ‘chump change’ could provide biodiversity protection

    Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson said the Earth’s major biological hot spots could be conserved for roughly $50 billion— an amount he termed “chump change” in a world of trillion-dollar financial bailouts.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Nunn wants to eliminate nukes

    Sam Nunn, former Democratic senator from Georgia (1973-97), is well known as an eminence in the realm of U.S. security policy.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Sam Nunn to deliver inaugural McNamara Lecture at HKS

    Former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn will deliver the inaugural Robert S. McNamara Lecture on War and Peace, titled “A Race Between Cooperation and Catastrophe,” at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) on Friday (Oct. 17).

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    HMS’s VanRooyen earns Humanitarian Award

    At its annual dinner on Sept. 5, the Hippocrates Society honored Harvard Medical School Associate Professor of Medicine Michael VanRooyen with the 2008 Humanitarian Award. VanRooyen, who is also associate professor in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), was recognized for his extensive work in humanitarian…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    HLS student makes journey back to Iraq

    Those looking for a relaxing summer break may have opted for somewhere other than Iraq. But for one Harvard Law School (HLS) student, the visit to the country in August was about work — and duty.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Undergrads spend summer studying international law, child soldiers

    Trevor Bakker ’10 spent this summer at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the world’s first permanent war crimes court.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    This month in Harvard history

    Sept. 7, 1775 — The “New-England Chronicle or Essex Gazette” advertises that the Harvard Corporation and Overseers have chosen the Town of Concord as “a proper place for convening the Members of the said public Seminary of Learning” as the Revolution rages in Cambridge. Students are due in Concord by Oct. 4; probably less than…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Nasredeen Abdulbari: ‘Lawyers are the cement of society.’

    Nasredeen Abdulbari identifies no particular “aha!” moment when he knew what his life’s work would be.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Surgeon describes horrors that ensue when rape is a ‘weapon of war’

    Denis Mukwege, a recent visitor to Harvard, is slow-spoken, weary, and grave. And well he might be. For nearly a decade, Mukwege has been doctor to thousands of women raped in the course of a long civil war in south central Africa — in effect, that continent’s World War II — which has so far…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Lens on politics: Life in Serbia, Kosovo

    Impulse, activism, and perhaps a bit of naiveté. That’s what led Jeff Silva, a teaching assistant in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, to make his way to war-torn Belgrade just days after the NATO bombing campaign ended in June of 1999.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Seminar calls Iraq conflict America’s first ‘credit card war’

    The five-year-old Iraq conflict is America’s first “credit card war.” And like anyone who has run up a huge credit card bill knows, a credit card debt can turn into a crushing burden with long-term consequences. This, too, will be a legacy of the Iraq War.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Exploring the shadows

    “If you wouldn’t tell Stalin, don’t tell anyone else!” In the early years of the Cold War, a billboard near an atomic bomb testing site in New Mexico urged passersby to keep research developments close to the vest. Secrecy was of the utmost importance in that era — and not just in scientific circles —…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    War and changing concepts of masculinity

    The Vietnam War cost the United States just over 58,000 dead — less than 5 percent of the 1.4 million Vietnamese, French, and other military personnel killed in Indochina combat going back to 1950.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Gorbachev calls for new move to eliminate nukes

    Former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev called for a renewed commitment to eliminate the world’s nuclear weapons Tuesday (Dec. 4), saying the current generation of world leaders cannot coast on disarmament treaties of the past.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Tutu sees lots of negatives, a few positives, in American foreign policy

    Desmond Tutu was a high school teacher in Johannesburg before he entered the ministry, and all these years later he is still very much the pedagogue. “Good afternoon,” he said…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Atrocities attract healing hands to the Congo

    The rape itself was brutal enough, but the woman’s nearly severed hand shocked Susan Bartels.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Med students don’t study war, ethics

    A new survey of U.S. medical students shows they receive little training about what they should or should not do in wartime, despite ethical questions over physician involvement in prisoner interrogation and a legal framework making a “doctor draft” possible.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Rehding finds ‘monumental’ works key to German political history

    In December 1989, a few weeks after the reunification of Germany, Leonard Bernstein ’39 raised his baton above the ruins of the Berlin Wall and conducted a special arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The central statement of the work — “all men will be brothers” — captured the sentiment of those who saw a brighter…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Remembering with the Memorial Church at 75

    When the 11th hour struck on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the four-year nightmare of World War I — “The Great War” — officially ended. The world awoke to find some 22 million dead and a like number physically wounded. Never before had any generation witnessed such concentrated death and destruction.…

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    JFK and the Cuban missile crisis — a new assessment

    The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 has been called the “single most serious moment in human history.” During the 40 years of the Cold War, it was the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Provocative Civil War exhibit at Fogg to coincide with inauguration

    An exhibition opens at the Fogg Art Museum this Saturday (Oct. 6) that will have lots of people talking.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Phillips Brooks House welcomes first fellow

    With its long tradition of service and community involvement, the Phillips Brooks House (PBH) — composed of the Phillips Brooks House Association, the student-run, public service organization, and the Harvard Public Service Network, which supports more than 45 student-led service groups — extended its scope last week as it welcomed the first Phillips Brooks House…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Kennedy School launches Initiative on Religion with Luce Foundation grant

    Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has announced a new academic research program, the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs. The interdisciplinary initiative, based at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, will be directed by Monica Duffy Toft, associate professor of public policy, and J. Bryan Hehir, Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Pre-emption: Preventive, coercive, or both?

    In the wake of 9/11, how to defend the country in a new age of terrorism has sparked an ongoing, often divisive debate. Some consider tactics like pre-emption, the right to use force to respond to an imminent threat, and preventive war, the use of force to prevent a serious threat from worsening over time,…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    At Kennedy School, Iraqi foreign minister outlines recent progress

    “Iraq is back,” the country’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, told his audience at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Kennedy School of Government Oct 1. With the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein replaced by a “constitutional, democratically elected government,” Iraq is in the midst of “a truly historic transformation” as important as “any…

    4 minutes