From the Director
- Members of the Center for International Affairs, 1959–1960. On November 15, 2007, the Weatherhead Center will begin a year-long commemoration of its first fifty years with a Warren and Anita Manshel Lecture to be delivered by the Most Reverend Dr. Desmond Tutu.
People commonly ask me whether I have a “vision” for the future of the Weatherhead Center. This question always makes me smile, and I usually start by saying, “To maintain and to enhance this Center’s position as the world’s premier research institution on international affairs.” Of course, who could argue with that goal? What most people mean when they ask me “the vision question” is, What do I think are the central issues with which the WCFIA should be concerned?
Answering this question takes a good deal more thought. International affairs in the 2000s are radically different than in the 1950s, the decade of this Center’s founding. When the Center for International Affairs was founded in 1958, David Atkinson’s forthcoming history reveals that some people thought there was no need for such a center.¹ After all, what more was there to study other than what the Russian Research Center was already covering?
Fifty years have changed our world drastically. The “war against terror“ has replaced the cold war as the primary security concern of the United States. WMD proliferation has replaced earlier concerns about bilateral nuclear balance. Civil wars are both more enduring and often more destructive to civilian populations than the interstate wars of the past fifty years. Moreover, the humanitarian disasters often left in their wake are among the world’s modern tragedies. Globalization has led to a tremendous increase in the intensity and nature of contacts among nations. This has led to greater economic opportunities, but also to more vulnerabilities than ever before. With 1.2 billion (that is 20 percent) of the world population now living on less than $1/day, and another 1.8 billion (30 percent) living on less than $2/day, political and economic development issues seem more urgent than ever before. In my opinion, there seems to be a new sense of moral interdependence that transcends nation-state boundaries. Human rights, international public health concerns, and basic issues of equity across and within nations all demand attention from scholars of international affairs these days.
The research we are pursuing and conversations we are having here at the Weatherhead Center reflect the changing global agenda. This spring, interested affiliates gathered for dinner to discuss “Religion in International Affairs”—a topic it would have been hard to imagine taking center stage only a decade ago. Graduate students we support are researching topics that range from how ethnically diverse communities provide public goods, to how media, globalization, and traditional Buddhist ideology are influencing changing ideas about feminine duty and moral responsibility in contemporary Thailand. With Weatherhead Center support, our faculty affiliates are pursuing research as diverse as Professor of Economics Sendhil Mullainathan’s study of how farmers in Bali, Indonesia, decide to experiment with new technologies, and the study of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants in Colombia by Kimberly Theidon, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology. The Weatherhead Initiative, the “grand prize” that supports collaborative faculty research with up to a quarter of a million dollars, was awarded this year to an innovative project led by Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, to study how individuals and stigmatized groups cope with systemic racism in Brazil, Israel, and Canada.
Some of the most intriguing research topics the Center has funded have been those of our Undergraduate Associates (see the Student Programs section for a complete listing of Undergraduate Associates). Generously supported by a Rogers Family Research Grant, Claire Provost combined field research in Tanzania with satellite imagery to understand the effects of refugees on land-use and environmental outcomes. Kaya Williams spent the summer of 2006 in Peru interviewing female prisoners from the Shining Path movement in an effort to understand attitudes of (and toward) women involved in violent resistance. Wei Kevin Gan, concentrating in Biomedical Sciences and also funded by a Rogers Family Research Grant, researched the establishment of a pilot HIV treatment center near Durbin, South Africa. These projects are illustrative of a thriving research program among our undergraduate affiliates to understand the impact of global and transnational influences at the local level.
The world is a much more complicated and interconnected place than the one that occupied the Center’s great minds of the past. Today, no one could reasonably assume that we understand “international affairs” if all that we understand is the strategic relationships among the major powers. Today, international affairs must include an understanding of how international and transnational forces are changing life as experienced in a variety of local contexts worldwide. As we begin to contemplate our second fifty years, the rich diversity of our research community—from our undergraduates to our most senior professors—is the most valuable resource this Center has to offer.
Beth A. Simmons, Center Director
1. The book, In Theory and In Practice: Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, will explore the various institutional and intellectual impulses, both internal and external, that facilitated the foundation of the Center for International Affairs in 1958. The book will also trace the development of the Center’s research agenda and concomitant involvement in American foreign policy formulation from 1958 to 1983. David Atkinson uses primary source material from the Harvard University archives and personal interviews with the Center’s founding director and first associates.