Summer Lecture Series 2024

Wednesday, July 10:
U.S. Global Leadership Challenged

COST: $35 per person
Register: In-person (link to come)
Register: Livestream (link to come)

Description to come.

Speaker: To Be Announced

Wednesday, July 17:
Autocracy's Rise, Sharp Power, and the Growing Threat to Democracy

COST: $35 per person
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Register: Livestream (link to come)

Over a protracted period of time, authoritarian powers have mobilized and taken the initiative, and in the process sought to reshape the global landscape. Led by ambitious regimes in China and Russia, the multiyear authoritarian surge poses enormous challenges to democratic standards, principles, and ideas. If the United States and its democratic allies are to meet this top order challenge and set the global trajectory on a more positive course, they will need a new, more competitive mindset.

Speaker: Christopher Walker

Vice President for Studies and Analysis, National Endowment for Democracy

Christopher Walker is Vice President for Studies and Analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy, an independent, nonprofit, grant-making foundation supporting freedom around the world. Walker oversees the department that is responsible for NED’s multifaceted analytical efforts, which pursues it goals through several interrelated initiatives: the leading edge work of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, which undertakes a diverse range of analytical initiatives to explore critical themes relating to democratic development; the Journal of Democracy, the world’s leading publication on the theory and practice of democracy; the Reagan-Fascell fellowship program for international democracy activists, journalists, and scholars; and the Center for International Media Assistance, which is dedicated to improving efforts to promote independent media in emerging democracies and developing economies around the world.

Prior to joining the NED, Walker was Vice President for Strategy and Analysis at Freedom House. Walker has testified before legislative committees in the U.S. and abroad, appears frequently in the media, and frequently conducts briefings on critical issues relating to democratic development. He has been at the forefront of the thought leadership on authoritarian influence on democratic systems, including through the exertion of sharp power, a concept he and his colleagues developed. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Journal of Democracy. He is co-editor (with Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner) of Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy (2016), and co-editor (with Jessica Ludwig) of Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence (2017). He is a co-editor with William J. Dobson and Tarek Masoud of the book Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power (2023).

Wednesday, July 24:
Climate Change—Its Impact on Prosperity

COST: $35 per person
Register: In-person (link to come)
Register: Livestream (link to come)

Speaker: Virginia Burkett

Chief Scientist for Climate and Land Use Change 

U.S. Geological Survey, Office of International Programs

U.S. Department of the Interior

Virginia Burkett is a graduate of Northwestern State University of Louisiana, where she received her Bachelor of Science and her Master of Science degrees in zoology and botany, respectively. Her doctoral degree in forestry was awarded from Stephen F. Austin State University in 1996. She began her research career at Louisiana State University’s Sea Grant program, followed by progressively responsible leadership positions in science and natural resources management at the state and federal level.

Burkett has been appointed to over 70 Commissions, Committees, Science Panels and Boards during her career. She currently serves as Co-Principal representative of the US Department of Interior to the US Global Change Research Program. She currently represents the US Department of the Interior on the National Academies’ Climate Security Roundtable. She is a member of the Louisiana Governor’s Climate Initiatives Task Force and is the Co-Chair of the Science Advisory Group to the Task Force. She co-chairs the International Activities Working Group of the U.S. Group on Earth Observations.

Wednesday, July 31:
DRIVEN OUT—Human Displacement and the Challenge of Forced Migration

COST: $35 per person
Register: In-person (link to come)
Register: Livestream (link to come)

Speaker: James Hollifield

Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Political Science, SMU

Director of the Tower Center at SMU

Wars, instability, poverty, and desperation mean that forced migration and human displacement touch every corner of the globe, including the US southern border. How can liberal democracies like the United States balance the need for security with their commitment to protecting the human rights of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants?  In this lecture, Dr. James Hollifield will provide an overview of the global migration crisis, addressing the dilemmas of migration governance, and assessing the role of the U.S. in confronting the challenges of human displacement and forced migration.

James F. Hollifield is Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Political Science, and Director of the Tower Center at SMU.  He also is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC and a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Hollifield is a scholar of international and comparative political economy, and he has written widely on issues of political and economic development, with a focus on migration. In addition to many scientific articles, his major books are Immigrants, Markets and States (Harvard UP 1992), L’Immigration et l’Etat Nation (L’Harmattan 1997), Pathways to Democracy (Routledge, 2000), Migration, Trade and Development (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 2009), Herausforderung Migration— Perspektiven der vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft (Lit Verlag 2006), and more recently Understanding Global  Migration (Stanford UP 2022) and Controlling Immigration 4th edition (Stanford UP 2022), Migration Theory 4th edition (Routledge 2023), and International Political Economy:  History, Theory and Policy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Hollifield has served as an advisor for governments around the world and for many international organizations on matters of migration and human and economic development. In 2016, Hollifield received a Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Studies Association. In 2021-22 he was named as a Fellow of the French Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris, and in 2023 he received a Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association.

Wednesday, August 7:
Disinformation, Misinformation—Finding the Truth

COST: $35 per person
Register: In-person (link to come)
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Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often credited with the observation that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” and 40 years ago, when Moynihan popularized this quip, it was generally accepted. No longer. Especially since the rise of social media and the 2016 election, there has been increasing recognition that facts themselves have become a battleground, amid widespread disinformation (that is, the often viral circulation of falsehoods) and misinformation (the intentional promulgation of untruths) are considered epidemic by many.

Our conversation about this will consider how prevalent the problems really are, what practical difference they are making, including in our politics, how the press has been responding (for both better and worse), how these phenomena in America interact with similar issues elsewhere, and what might be done to get us back closer to Moynihan’s vision.

Speaker: Dick Tofel

Principal, Gallatin Advisory LLC, author of Second Rough Draft

Richard Tofel is the principal of Gallatin Advisory LLC and author of the newsletter Second Rough Draft. He was the founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until 2021. As president, he had responsibility for all of ProPublica’s non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. During the period of Tofel’s business leadership, ProPublica published stories that won seven Pulitzer Prizes.

Tofel is an Instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he led a faculty seminar on “The Pandemic, the Press, and Public Health” and teaches a course on “Engaging with the Press.” He was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, with responsibility for its international editions and U.S. special editions, and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper, vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company, and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones. Just prior to ProPublica, he served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Speaker: Brandy Zadrodzny

Features reporter, NBC News

Brandy Zadrozny is an award-winning digital and television investigative and features reporter for NBC News where she covers disinformation, extremism, and the internet. She is a former research fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and host of the NBC News' podcast, “Tiffany Dover is Dead.”

Speaker: Joel Simon

Founding director, Journalism Protection Initiative, CUNY

Joel Simon is the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative. Simon began his career as a journalist in Latin America, before joining the Committee to Protect Journalists in 1998. He served as CPJ executive director from 2006 to 2021. In 2022 Simon was a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and also Senior Research Fellow at Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia. He is the author of four books, most recently The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, co-authored with Robert Mahoney. He writes regularly on press freedom issues for The New Yorker and Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. You can visit his personal website here. 

Wednesday, August 14:
Geopolitics, Lessons From the Cold War, and the Way Forward

COST: $35 per person
Register: In-person (link to come)
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This session will start with the geopolitical cards dealt to the United States, Russia, and China. While the United States and its partners and allies are attempting to maintain a maritime global order to foster trade, China and Russia are great continental powers increasingly fixated on dominating territory. These differences have precipitated a Second Cold War. The second section will examine how the democracies won the First Cold War without fighting a hot war by turning to the conclusions of those on both sides who oversaw its end. The final section will suggest some possible ways forward based on the geopolitical hand that the United States holds, the potential strategies that such a hand can support, and the strategies that proved most fruitful the last time around.

Speaker: Sarah Paine

William S. Sims University Professor, U.S. Naval War College

Sarah C. M. Paine is William S. Sims University Professor of History and Grand Strategy in the Strategy & Policy Department of the U.S. Naval War College. Nine years of research in Australia, China, Japan, Russia, and Taiwan form the basis for her publications: The Japanese Empire (Cambridge, 2017); Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 (Cambridge, 2012, Gelber prize longlist; Leopold Prize and PROSE award for European & World History), The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 (Cambridge, 2003), and Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier (M. E. Sharpe, 1996, Jelavich prize). She has also written: Nation Building, State Building, and Economic Development (edited, M.E. Sharpe, 2010); Modern China: Continuity and Change 1644 to the Present, 2nd ed. (co-author with Bruce A. Elleman, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); and five naval books: Naval Blockades and Seapower: Strategies and Counter-Strategies 1805-2005, Naval Coalition Warfare: From the Napoleonic War to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Naval Power and Expeditionary Warfare: Peripheral Campaigns and New Theaters of Naval Warfare, Commerce Raiding: Historical Case Studies, 1755-2009, and Navies and Soft Power: Historical Case Studies of Naval Power and the Nonuse of Military Force (all co-edited with Bruce A. Elleman, Routledge, 2006-11; Naval War College Press 2014-15). Most recently she co-edited with Andrea J. Dew and Marc A. Genest, From Quills to Tweets: How America Communicates about War and Revolution (Georgetown University Press, 2019). Her degrees include: BA Latin American Studies, Harvard University; MIA Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs; certificates from both the East Asian and Russian Institutes; MA Russian, Middlebury College; and PhD history, Columbia University. She is currently working on a history of the Cold War from 1917-1991, and three edited books on fleets in being, sanctions, and World War II Pacific.