Oye Moderates 'Census & Race' Talk A talk entitled Race, Ethnicity and the 2010 Census: Categorizing and Counting will take place on Saturday, November 7. Paul Watanabe, director of the Institute for Asian American Studies and associate professor of political science at UMass Boston, is the featured speaker. Melissa Nobles, associate professor of political science at MIT, will commentate; and Kenneth Oye, associate professor of political science and engineering systems at MIT, will moderate.

CIS Advisory Board led by Admiral Fallon Under the leadership of Adm. William J. Fallon (USN-ret.), the CIS Wilhelm Fellow in 2008-2009, the Center has formed an advisory board of distinguished individuals to provide guidance in the coming years. “This is an exciting development for the Center,” says Professor Richard Samuels, CIS director. “We now have an exceptionally knowledgeable, accomplished, and global cohort of thinkers and doers to give us frank advice and connect us ever more deeply to interesting people and networks around the world.” In addition to Admiral Fallon, the group includes Mary Boies, an attorney and high-level government adviser; Jon Borschow, a businessman based in Puerto Rico and an MIT alumnus; Susan Chira, foreign editor of the New York Times; Chas W. Freeman, Jr., former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia; M. Shafik Gabr, a Cairo-based head of a major investment group; Alexis F. Habib, managing director of Spinnaker Capital Limited, London; Dana Mead, Chairman of the MIT Corporation; Yukio Okamoto, former adviser to the Japanese government; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of the World Bank who earned her PhD at MIT; John Reed, retired Chairman of Citigroup, and an MIT alumnus; Siddharth C.R. Shriram, an industrialist based in New Delhi; Jeffrey L. Silverman, a graduate of the Sloan School at MIT and a commodities trader in Chicago; Anthony Sun, a high-tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who earned degrees in engineering at MIT; Lynn Chatman Todman, director of the Institute on Social Exclusion in Chicago, and a MIT PhD in urban planning; and Thomas Wolf, a political science PhD from MIT and a Pennsylvania businessman who has served in the governor’s cabinet.

New Research on Women and Security The Center is undertaking a year-long assessment of the UN’s mandate on women and security—namely, UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which obligates member states to include women in peace processes and peace building. A distinguished group of researchers from around the world will conduct case studies in Sri Lanka, Uganda, Aceh, Liberia, and Israel/Palestine to evaluate 1325’s impact on participation. Working with several key agencies in the UN system, the team will present their findings at the UN’s 10th anniversary observance of the resolution’s passage next year. John Tirman, CIS executive director and principal research scientist, and Sanam Anderlini, CIS research affiliate and director of the International Civil Society Action Network, are co-directing the project. The work is partially supported by the governments of Norway and Ireland.

Tellis on the Taliban Ashley Tellis delivers a talk entitled Reconciling with the Taliban? Toward an Alternative Grand Strategy in Afghanistan for the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar on South Asia. Tellis served as advisor to Ambassador Blackwill in Delhi and is currently a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. The talk will be at CIS (E40-496) on Thursday, November 5.

Obama & the Arab-Israeli Conflict Khalil Shikaki and Shai Feldman give an Israeli and Palestinian perspective on current state of affairs on Thursday, October 29. Shikaki has directed the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah since 2000, and has conducted more than one hundred polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1993. Feldman served as head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University from 1997-2005 and is the author and co-author of numerous publications, including: Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East and Track-II Diplomacy: Lessons from the Middle East.

MIT Announces Global Strategy MIT's Global Council, co-chaired by CIS director and Ford International Professor of Political Science Richard Samuels, released two reports that will help frame MIT's international engagement strategy for years to come. "Our students' hopes for productive, sustainable careers increasingly depend on acquiring stronger, deeper, and more refined international skills and understanding. Society's best hope for scientific advance depends on our ability both to draw on knowledge from the entire world and to contribute to knowledge creation across national and cultural boundaries," said MIT President Susan Hockfield and Provost L. Rafael Reif in a letter announcing the reports to the MIT community. The new strategy underscores the need for both students and faculty to be involved in global research activities, which is a hallmark of the Center's MISTI Program, the largest international program at MIT.

Book Talk with Kristof, WuDunn CIS and Harvard Book Store are delighted to host New York Times correspondents and Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn for a discussion of their new book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Kristof and WuDunn set out to expose the struggles of women across Asia and Africa, to tell their human stories, and to follow the progress of women who are ultimately given the opportunity to seize control of their own lives. Introducing the authors will be Diane Davis, professor of political sociology at MIT and head of the International Development Group. Davis also directs the Center's Jerusalem 2050 Program. The event will be Monday, October 5, at 6 PM, at the Brattle Theatre. Tickets are available at Harvard Book Store. Image courtesy Jason Koski, Cornell University.

Luce Fellowship Deadline Oct. 7 Wednesday, October 7, is this year's deadline for the Luce Scholars Program. The program is open to seniors, graduate students, and alumni from recent classes and junior faculty. Young scholars from a wide variety of intellectual fields will be placed in 10-month internships in selected countries in East and Southeast Asia. The fellowship is aimed for those with no prior experience in Asia.

BBC Journalist Joins CIS The Center welcomes Firle Davies, a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, as its 2009-10 IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow. The fellowship, which is offered through the International Women's Media Foundation, gives a woman journalist the opportunity to focus exclusively on human rights journalism and social justice issues. A journalist for more than two decades, Davies has worked for the BBC since 2000. She has reported for domestic and world service radio, domestic and world television, and has produced online and current affairs documentaries. Davis has worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Zairee, among other countries. Davis will spend nine-months at CIS in a tailor-made academic research program. The fellowship is named for Elizabeth Neuffer, a Boston Globe reporter who was killed on assignment in Iraq in 2003. Press Release

Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics The Center has joined together with the Watson Institute at Brown and the Weatherhead Center at Harvard to launch a new Inter-University Seminar on South Asian politics. The seminar is chaired by Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science at Brown and visiting fellow at CIS. Meetings are scheduled for Thursdays at 4 PM, unless otherwise noted. More details on speakers and the series are here.

Starr Forum on U.S.-Cuba Relations Cuban scholars Julia Sweig and Wayne Smith will be discussants at a Starr Forum entitled: Cuba-U.S. Relations: The Beginning of a Long Thaw? Sweig is a senior fellow and director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the award-winning author of Inside the Cuban Revolution, and, most recently, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know. Smith is senior fellow and director of the Cuba Program at the Center for International Policy, and a visiting professor of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. Smith served in the State Department as executive secretary of President Kennedy's Latin American Task Force and chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. The Starr Forum event, which is free and open to the public, will be on Wed, Sept 23, at 4:30 PM, in the Wong Auditorium, MIT Bldg E51.

CIS Moves to E40 CIS is delighted to announce our new location at E40-400. All of the Center's programs and people are now together on one floor, which will help foster better research and teaching. The Center will celebrate the new space with a formal reception soon after the fall semester commences.