Visit our website and events calendar for a complete listing of spring 2015 activities. Many of our events are captured on video and available to view on YouTube.

Seminar XXI Celebrates 25th Anniversary

Seminar XXI is the Center's educational program for senior military officers, government and NGO officials, and executives in the national security policy community. The program's objective is to provide future leaders of that community with enhanced analytic skills for understanding foreign countries and the relations among them. Seminar XXI began in 1986 as an experimental program adapted from several graduate-level courses taught at MIT. Over the years it has provided an opportunity for frank and challenging exchanges of ideas between policymakers and university scholars, as well as among the fellows, who themselves represent a wide range of institutions and organizations in the policy-making community. Seminar XXI is now in its twenty-fifth year and has more than 1,600 alumni/ae. Watch the video

CIS Audits the Crisis in Krygyzstan

The Center's series Audit of the Conventional Wisdom continues with a look at the security implications of the crisis in Krygyzstan. On June 15, 2010, Carol Saivetz, a visiting scholar at CIS and a researcher in the Center's Security Studies Program interviewed Bakyt Beshimov, a visiting scholar at CIS, a former Kyrgyzstan Opposition Leader, former member of Kyrgyzstan Parliament, and former Kyrgyzstan ambassador to India. Watch the video. 

Report Card on President Obama

MIT experts Barry Posen, Henry Jacoby, and Simon Johnson assessed President Obama's work on Afghanistan, climate, and the economy. The Starr Forum event took place on November 9, one week after the mid-term elections. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and director of the Center's Security Studies Program. Jacoby is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Managment and co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Simon Johnson is Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He served as economic counselor and director of the research department at the IMF from March 2007 to August 2008 and is the co-author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown. Richard Samuels, Ford International Professor of Political and director of CIS moderated the discussion. Watch the video 

PEGS Initiates New Fellows Program

The Center’s Program on Environmental Governance and Sustainability (PEGS) is initiating a new fellows program for graduate students at MIT. The award period runs from November 2010 through November 2011. This year's theme is "Environmental Change and Conflict" and the faculty directors for the 2010-2011 fellows are Diane Davis and PEGS director JoAnn Carmin, both from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. The students will be working across the globe on issues related to environmental change and conflict. More details on the fellows and their projects can be found on the PEGS Web site. 

SSP Wednesday Seminars

The Security Studies Program's lunchtime lectures included: Samuel Wells, from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, on "Korea and the Escalation of the Cold War,"; Graham Allison, from Harvard University, on "Nuclear Terrorism: Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and the Fragility of the Global Nuclear Order,"; Nuno Monteiro, from Yale University, on "Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself? Nuclear Proliferation and Preventive War,"; and Lawrence Wilkerson, from The College of William and Mary, on "A No-Strategy Nation: Muddling Through Will No Longer Do." A full listing of SSP Seminars for fall 2010 is available here. 

"Cultures of War" Book Talk by John Dower

John Dower spoke about his new book Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, and Iraq. Dower is professor emeritus of history at MIT and founder/co-director of the online Visualizing Cultures project, established at MIT in 2002 and dedicated to the presentation of image-driven scholarship on East Asia in the modern world. The talk was co-sponsored by the MIT-Japan Program.

Bustani Middle East Seminar

The Bustani Seminar invites scholars, journalists, consultants, and other experts from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States to MIT to present recent research findings on contemporary politics, society and culture, and economic and technological development in the Middle East. This fall the seminar featured two talks: "Lebanon: Consensus in Times of Enmity" with Augustus Richard Norton, Boston University; and "What Happened to the End of Ideology and the Triumph of Liberalism in the Arab World?" with Michaelle Browers, Wake Forest University. 

IAP Courses

The Center is hosting a range of IAP courses for January 2011 including: Beginning Kyudo, Contemporary Military Topics, Ikebana: The Art of Japanese Flower Arranging, Introduction to Chinese Calligraphy, U.S. Defense Process (from Policy to Planning to Programming and Budgets). For a full listing, go here.