Belfer Center announces fellows

The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) is the hub of research, teaching, and training in international security affairs; environmental and resource issues; science and technology policy; and conflict studies. The center’s mission is to provide leadership in advancing policy-relevant knowledge about the most important challenges of international security and other critical issues where science, technology, and international affairs intersect.

At the heart of the center is its resident research community — 150 scholars including Harvard faculty, analysts, practitioners, and each year a new, international, interdisciplinary group of research fellows.

The fellows

The International Security Program (ISP) addresses the most pressing threats to U.S. national interests and international security, analyzing the forces shaping these problems and identifying opportunities for effective intervention into the policy process.

The 2000-01 ISP Fellows are as follows:

• Ivan Arreguín-Toft focuses on asymmetric conflict: how powerful actors — states or nations — can lose when they engage in conflict with what appear to be much weaker adversaries.
• Eitan Barak examines the potential for eliminating chemical weapons arsenals in the Middle East through the implementation of comprehensive arms control under the rubric of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
• Stephen Black was historian to the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), serving on 15 UNSCOM chemical and biological weapons inspections in Iraq. His research focuses on verification and implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
• Nathan Busch is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto. His research involves the risks associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
• Gavin Cameron is a joint fellow with the Belfer Center’s Executive Session on Domestic Terrorism. Cameron focuses on the threat of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and possible responses to terrorist threat.
• Laura K. Donohue is a joint fellow with the Belfer Center’s Executive Session on Domestic Terrorism. She focuses on 20th century state responses to terrorist movements in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Southern Africa, Turkey, and continental Europe.
• David Edelstein focuses on how states form beliefs about other state’s intentions and how governments respond to those beliefs. He is interested in international security studies, international relations theory, and U.S. foreign and defense policy.
• Chrystia Freeland is deputy editor for The Globe and Mail in Toronto and previously was the Financial Times Moscow bureau chief. She recently published a book about Russia’s transition to capitalism.
• John Garofano writes about Asian security, peacekeeping, and civil/military relations and is completing a book on U.S. decisions for and against military interventions since 1950.
• Peter Grose is a former editor of Foreign Affairs and former New York Times reporter. Grose is writing on intelligence history during the Cold War.
• Sergei L. Konoplyov, associate director of the Harvard Ukrainian National Security Program and Black Sea Security Program, is a doctoral candidate at the Kyiv Institute for International Relations and studies security policies in Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.
• Alan Kuperman is a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kuperman focuses on the causes of violent ethnic conflict and genocide, and the feasibility of effective humanitarian military intervention, with emphasis on the Balkans, the Great Lakes region of Africa, and Iraq.
• Jens Meierhenrich is a doctoral candidate at Oxford University. His current research is on constitutional frameworks and war; the consequences of democratization for national and international security; and the state as a conceptual variable in international politics, with particular emphasis on South Africa.
• Susan Moeller is currently writing a book that deals with relationships among the media, public policy, international affairs, human rights, and children. Moeller is a professor at Brandeis University, where she is the director of the journalism program.
• Peter W. Singer is a doctoral candidate at Harvard and researches the rise of privatized military firms and changes in international relations after the Cold War. He also focuses on changes in modern warfare, peacekeeping operations, internal conflict, and failed states.
• Jessica Stern is a senior fellow and a lecturer at the Kennedy School. She served as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council, and focuses on nuclear smuggling, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction.
• Alexander S. Yereskovsky served with the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and focuses on issues involving nuclear weapons, anti-ballistic missile defenses, nuclear testing, chemical and biological weapons, and efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project (SDI) catalyzes support for transformations in Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet Union to sustainable democracies, free market economies, and cooperative international relations.

The 2000-01 fellows for SDI are as follows:

• Vladimir Boxer became active in the Russian pro-democratic movement in 1988 and was a leader of “Democratic Russia” — the leading Russian democratic movement. At Harvard he studies democratization and elections in Russia.
• C. Maury Devine is a former Mobil executive affiliated with SDI’s Caspian Studies Program. She is researching oil pipeline politics and how business-government relations affect oil and gas development in the Caspian Sea region.
• Peter Rutland, affiliated with SDI’s Caspian Studies Program, is a professor of government at Wesleyan University. He is writing about the Russian oil industry and the politics of economic policy in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
• Brenda Shaffer is a fellow in ISP and is research director of SDI’s Caspian Studies Program. Her main research interests include political, social, and security trends in the Caucasus and Central Asia, with emphasis on Azerbaijan; ethnic politics in Iran; Russian-Iranian relations; Iranian policy in Central Asia and the Caucasus; and the Karabagh Conflict.

The World Peace Foundation (WPF) Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution analyzes the causes of ethnic, religious, and other inter-communal conflict, and seeks to identify practical ways to prevent and limit such conflict.

The 2000-01 fellows for WPF are as follows:

• David Carment, a joint WPF/ISP Fellow, studies conflict resolution and development. He focuses on the international dimensions of ethnic conflict, the role of communication technologies in conflict situations, early warning, peacekeeping, conflict prevention, and peace building.
• Nasrin Dadmehr is a doctoral candidate at l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and is researching the civil war and peace process in Tajikistan. She focuses on international security, politics in Islamic nations, and social tensions in Central Asia.
• Lise Morjé Howard is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and is writing a dissertation on U.N. peacekeeping in civil wars. She is a joint WPF/ISP Fellow.
• Erin Jenne, a joint WPF/ISP Fellow, studies ethnic warfare and nationalism. Studying cases of ethnic mobilization, Jenne believes that ethnic elites come to power after individual decisions on the grassroots level lead to the politicization of ethnic over economic cleavages.

For more information about events, activities, and research at the Belfer Center, visit the Web site at http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/bcsia/.