The Future of Warfare

December 6, 2024

This conference is open to the Harvard community.

The day-long conference will be open to the Harvard community writ large. It will consist of four panels, each focusing on a critical issue in the changing nature of war: the implications of nuclear multipolarity, cognitive/information warfare, internal security and political change, and the intersection of interstate conflict with the biological sciences. For each issue, we seek to bring to Weatherhead a number of leading scholars and policymakers who worked with Stephen Rosen—some as undergraduates, some as PhD students, some as postdocs, and others as collaborators—to examine what we do and don’t know about these crucial questions. In addition to commenting on the panel topics, we will ask participants to propose concrete research projects designed to fill identified gaps in our knowledge about changing means and goals of warfare. We will then publish a collection of short essays based on the panel presentations with a concluding essay by Professor Rosen laying out a research agenda for the broader academic international security studies community. In this way we envision the conference serving as an incubator of future research on the future of war more broadly.