PolicyCast

International outrage over Russia's war on Ukraine could be a watershed moment for the advance of international justice and accountability, say Harvard Kennedy School Professor Kathryn Sikkink and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Assistant Professor Patrick Vinck. With the eyes of the world focused on atrocities in places like Bucha and Mariupol, Sikkink and Vinck say it is time for countries to invest both their geopolitical and financial capital in the International Criminal Court or the ICC. Established 20 years ago in The Hague, Netherlands, the ICC was the world’s first permanent international criminal court tasked with pursuing prosecutions for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and illegal aggression—charges the ICC is now pursuing against Russia.  Sikkink and Vinck say while there have been legitimate past criticisms of the ICC for being ineffective and for focusing too much on certain regions such as Africa, critics are missing the bigger picture—the remarkable story of how much traction the push for international humanitarian justice has gained since the end of World War II. And even if Russian President Vladimir Putin never sees the inside of a courtroom, they say, research shows that the act of identifying war crimes and pursuing prosecutions itself can lower the rate at which those crimes occur. Sikkink has been researching the nexus of human rights and international justice since she first witnessed the Trial of the Juntas in Argentina as a PhD student in the mid-1980s. Vinck is the Research Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and a pioneer in the field of data collection from conflict and crisis zones. 

HKS professors Meghan O’Sullivan and Jeffrey Frankel say the draconian sanctions on Putin’s regime—which came together faster than almost anyone predicted—will have far-reaching and lasting effects well beyond Russia’s borders. In a nuclear-armed world where direct superpower conflict can have apocalyptic consequences, the proxy battlefield has become economics and finance. Instead of firing missiles, combatants lob sanctions to inflict pain and achieve strategic goals. Rather than cutting off supply routes, opponents cut off access to capital reserves and international financial systems. And during the first weeks of Russia’s war on Ukraine, developments on both the physical and economic battlefields have been swift and unpredictable. But now with an international sanctions regime against Vladimir Putin’s Russia taking shape with a depth and a breadth that took many analysts by surprise, it’s possible to widen the lens on the war in Ukraine to explore not only how it may shape the conflict, but also its potential to disrupt the world order and even create a new one.  O’Sullivan is Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Program at HKS and a former Deputy National Security Advisor under President George W. Bush. Frankel is an international economist and a former member of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Bill Clinton. They join host Ralph Ranalli to discuss sanctions and what the world economic order could look like in a post-Ukraine War world. 

Jeffrey A. Frankel is the James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served at the Council of Economic Advisers in 1983-84 and 1996-99; as CEA Member in the Clinton Administration, Frankel's responsibilities included international economics, macroeconomics, and the environment. Before coming to Harvard in 1999, he was Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include currencies, commodities, crises, international finance, monetary policy, fiscal policy, regional trade blocs, and international environmental issues.

Meghan L. O’Sullivan is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and the Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. She is also the chair of the North American Group of the Trilateral Commission. Professor O’Sullivan has extensive experience in policy formulation and in negotiation. Between 2004 and 2007, she was special assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan during the last two years of her tenure. Dr. O’Sullivan spent two years from 2003-2008 in Iraq, most recently in the fall of 2008 to help negotiate and conclude the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and strategic framework agreement between the United States and Iraq. From July 2013 to December 2013, Professor O’Sullivan was the Vice Chair of the All Party Talks in Northern Ireland. She has  has written several books on international affairs and has been awarded the Defense Department's highest honor for civilians, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, and three times been awarded the State Department's Superior Honor Award.

Ralph Ranalli is the Host, Producer, and Editor of HKS PolicyCast. He is also a senior writer at the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications, as well as former journalist, television news producer, and entrepreneur.

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

Harvard Kennedy School Professors Alex Keyssar and Archon Fung say the U.S. political system, stripped of a consensus belief in democratic principles, is racing down a dangerous road toward political and social upheaval and possible minority rule. American democracy, they tell PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli, is in trouble to an extent not seen in many decades, possibly since the Civil War, or perhaps ever. If you believe in democracy as essentially one-person, one-vote, and as a system where every voter has a roughly equal say in how our country is governed, then frankly, you would never design a system of elections and governance like the one in the United States. But the U.S. system wasn’t built for that. It was built, compromise piled upon compromise, to somehow accommodate people with very different views—about what the country should be and who should have the power to decide—inside one system that, at a minimum, everyone could at least live with. But now, stripped of a consensus acceptance of underlying democratic principles by a Republican Party pursuing power at any cost, they say the same compromises that were designed to protect minority opinions are being exposed as mortal flaws that can allow for what would effectively be minority rule. And there seems to be little in the way of systemic failsafes to stop it. Alex Keyssar is a renowned historian and scholar on the American political system. Archon Fung is a leading political scientist and heads the democratic governance programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. They’re here to talk about what they call a dynamic, disturbing, and potentially very dangerous time for American democracy.

HKS faculty members Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes explore the vexing disconnect between the vast US system of restorative justice and the deep-rooted, intergenerational harms suffered by Black Americans. 

Every day, someone somewhere in America is being compensated under what is known as restorative justice, a type of justice that instead of meting out punishment to a wrongdoer, seeks to make the victims or their families whole—or at least repair them as much as possible. Restorative justice is also known as reparative justice, or, in the context of the experience of Black Americans from the first slave ships in the 1600s through to today, simply reparations. 

But unlike those other, everyday reparations, Black reparations are seen by many as a highly-charged political third rail, so last year Harvard Kennedy School faculty members Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes launched a research project to see if they could change the conversation. Cataloging the harms suffered by Black Americans through the centuries from slavery itself through segregation, disenfranchisement, economic and educational discrimination, wealth inequality, and more, they found that no group was perhaps more deserving of being made whole. They also studied and cataloged a huge system of American restorative compensation that works every day to make people whole for harms they have suffered. What they didn’t find, however, was a connection between the two.

Cornell William Brooks is a professor of the practice of nonprofit management, a former civil rights attorney for the U.S. Justice Department, and the former national president of the NAACP. 

Linda Bilmes is a senior lecturer in public policy, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration, and has made a career of re-examining assumptions about the costs, values, and priorities of public programs. They joined host Ralph Ranalli to discuss their research, which is due out in a paper to be published in the coming weeks.

It takes a lot to impress Professor Graham Allison when it comes to geopolitics. He is, after all, the Cold Warrior’s Cold Warrior—as one of America’s most influential defense policy analysts and advisors, he was twice awarded the Defense Department’s highest civilian honor for his work on nuclear disarmament with Russia. He’s a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, a founding member of the Trilateral Commission, and a renowned political scientist who has served as dean of the Kennedy School and head of the school’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Yet even Allison says he marvels at the rapid transformation of China, the world's rising economic, technological, and military superpower, and he says it’s well past time for the United States and the rest of the world to hear some hard truths about China’s power and potential dominance of world affairs during the 21st Century.

To explain how China has not only caught up with, but in numerous cases surpassed, the United States, Allison and a group of colleagues are writing a series of five research papers on the key areas of economics, technological advancement, military power, diplomatic influence, and ideology. The third paper, on China’s extraordinary rise as an economic superpower, states that while some may be tempted to still see China as a developing country, the truth is that it has been adding the equivalent of the entire economy of India to its GDP every four years and that the number of people in the Chinese middle class—some 400 million—now far outnumber the entire population of the United States.

Meanwhile, China is either catching up or leading in foundational technologies of the 21st century like AI, quantum computing, and green tech, while recent war games predict that China’s modernized, expanded military would likely win a military conflict over Taiwan. Graham Allison talks about China’s rise and what could be the next great superpower rivalry—but also about the possibilities for a new paradigm for the US-China relationship that goes beyond Cold War thinking.

About the Guest:

Graham Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University where he has taught for five decades.  Allison is a leading analyst of national security with special interests in nuclear weapons, Russia, China, and decision-making.  Allison was the “Founding Dean” of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and until 2017, served as Director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton Administration, Dr. Allison received the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal." This resulted in the safe return of more than 12,000 tactical nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics and the complete elimination of more than 4,000 strategic nuclear warheads previously targeted at the United States and left in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus when the Soviet Union disappeared.

Professor Allison is the author of numerous books, including: “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” (2017), “Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States and the World” (2013), “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe” (2004) and “Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971).

As "Founding Dean" of the modern Kennedy School, under his leadership, from 1977 to 1989, a small, undefined program grew twenty-fold to become a major professional school of public policy and government.

Professor Allison was the organizer of the Commission on America's National Interests (1996 and 2000), a founding member of the Trilateral Commission, a Director of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was educated at Davidson College; Harvard College (B.A., magna cum laude, in History); Oxford University (B.A. and M.A., First Class Honors in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics); and Harvard University (Ph.D. in Political Science).

PolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is hosted by Staff Writer and Producer Ralph Ranalli

PolicyCast is co-produced by Susan Hughes.

For more information please visit our web page or contact us at [email protected].

The Nobel Committee has awarded its 2021 Peace Prize to Maria Ressa for being a fearless defender of independent journalism and freedom of expression in the Philippines, and particularly for her work exposing the human rights abuses of authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte. But the prize is also a de facto acknowledgement that Ressa has become something of a one-woman personification of the struggles, perils, and promise of journalism in the age of social media. 

A longtime investigative reporter and bureau chief for CNN, she began thinking about how social networks could be used for both good and evil while covering terrorism and seeing how it was used to drive both radicalism and build movements for positive change. She originally founded Rappler, her Manila-based online news organization, as a Facebook page, but now she says that one-time Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg’s dominance as a worldwide distributor of news has become a boon to repressive regimes and a threat to democracy worldwide. 

Rappler’s mission statement is to speak truth to power and build communities of action for a better world—but for Ressa, speaking truth to power has come at a high personal cost. She has been subjected to harassment, criminal and civil legal action, and even arrest, even as she has refused to back off even an inch. When we spoke for this interview, Ressa was just finishing a visiting fellowship at the Kennedy School, where she was affiliated with both the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and the Center for Public Leadership. 

About our Guest:

Maria Ressa has been a journalist in Asia for 35 years and co-founded Rappler, the top digital only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. For her courage and work on disinformation, Ressa was named Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of Time’s Most Influential Women of the Century. She was also part of BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2019 and Prospect magazine’s world’s top 50 thinkers. In 2020, she received the Journalist of the Year award, the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, the Most Resilient Journalist Award, the Tucholsky Prize, the Truth to Power Award, and the Four Freedoms Award.

Before founding Rappler, Maria focused on investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia. She opened and ran CNN’s Manila Bureau for nearly a decade before opening the network’s Jakarta Bureau, which she ran from 1995 to 2005. She wrote Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism.

PolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is hosted by Staff Writer and Producer Ralph Ranalli

PolicyCast is edited by Ralph Ranalli and co-produced by Susan Hughes. Natalie Montaner is our webmaster and social media strategist. Our designers are Lydia Rosenberg and Delane Meadows.

For more information please visit our web page or contact us at [email protected].

Barely a news cycle goes by these days without someone in public office saying ‘We can’t afford that,’ while at the same time defending their favorite budget priorities and tossing around mind-numbingly large cost figures in the billions and trillions of dollars. Those debates can seem very cynical, and of course Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as a person who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing. But Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Linda Bilmes says things are even worse than that—not only are we not having discussions based on value, our understanding of what projects and policies actually cost is fundamentally flawed. 

A former CFO of the US Commerce Department and an internationally known expert in public budgeting and finance, Professor Bilmes has made it her mission to change the conversation about cost in the public sphere, and she’s helped identify the true costs of everything from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to our National Parks to the automobile economy in Massachusetts. She joins us to talk about her efforts to improve both the discussions and the decisions that are made about public money.

About our guest:

Linda J. Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, is a leading expert on budgetary and public financial issues. Her research focuses on budgeting and public administration in the public, private and non-profit sectors. She is interested in how resources are allocated, particularly defense budgets, costs of war, veterans, sub-national budgeting and public lands. She is a full-time Harvard faculty member, teaching budgeting, cost accounting and public finance, and teaching workshops for newly-elected Mayors and Members of Congress. Since 2005, she has led the Greater Boston Applied Field Lab, an advanced academic program in which teams of student volunteers assist local communities in public finance and operations. She also leads field projects for the Bloomberg Cities program. Dr. Bilmes served as the Senate-confirmed  Assistant Secretary and Chief Financial Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce under President Bill Clinton.  She currently serves as the sole United States member of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA), and as Vice-chair of Economists for Peace and Security. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University. She was a member of the National Parks Second Century Commission and served on the U.S. National Parks Service Advisory Board for eight years. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. She holds a BA and MBA from Harvard University and a D.Phil from Oxford University.

PolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is hosted by Staff Writer and Producer Ralph Ranalli

PolicyCast is co-produced by Susan Hughes.

For more information please visit our web page or contact us at [email protected].

Leaders from around the globe are meeting in Scotland today for the COP26 summit, talking about ways to speed up efforts to fight global warming. Yet even the optimists in Glasgow admit that the scientific consensus is that it’s already too late to cut emissions fast enough to avoid a dangerous rise in the earth’s temperature by 2 degrees Celsius, which is expected to lead to severe droughts, blistering heat waves, deadly flooding, and rising seas.

Despite these dire predictions, there has been one potential weapon in humanity’s anti-warming arsenal that, in terms of practical research, has been a taboo subject: solar geoengineering. Now Professor David Keith says it’s time for that to change. Keith is an award-winning physicist who holds professorships at both Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Working at the intersection of physics and policy, Keith is a pioneer in the field, which involves making man-made changes to the atmosphere that would cool the planet by either preventing some of the sun’s energy from getting through, or making it easier for heat already in the atmosphere to escape.

Critics have had a tough time wrapping their heads around solar geoengineering. They call it the stuff of science fiction, say it could be used as an excuse not to further cut emissions, and even suggest that governments might someday use it as a weapon. But Keith says that it’s now time to explore it as one of major strategies to fight warming, which include cutting emissions, capturing the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, and helping people and societies adapt to the effects already being felt. One of his primary arguments for starting serious research on solar geoengineering is inequality. After all, he says, planetary warming doesn’t play fair. It is mostly people in the world’s poorest countries who will suffer the worst harm from a warming climate, yet they are the least responsible for it in terms of per capita emissions. And amid all the recent talk of climate adaptation, there is comparatively little mention that it is much easier for a rich country in a colder latitude to adapt than it is for a developing one in a hotter region.

Keith is also known for his work on carbon capture and founded a company working on technology to pull carbon from the air — although he says that is at best a long-term strategy that could take decades to have any beneficial effect.

About the “Systems Failure” series:

To kick off the fall 2021 season, we’re launching a mini-series of episodes built around a theme we’re calling “Systems Failure.” Our conversations will focus on how the economic, technological, and other systems that play a vital role in determining how we live our lives can not only treat individuals and groups of people unequally, but can also exacerbate inequality more generally in society. We’ll also talk about strategies to change those systems to make them more equitable.

About our guest:

David Keith has worked near the interface between climate science, energy technology, and public policy for twenty five years. He took first prize in Canada's national physics prize exam, won MIT's prize for excellence in experimental physics, and was one of TIME magazine's Heroes of the Environment. Best known for work on solar geoengineering, David’s analytical work has ranged from the climatic impacts of large-scale wind power to an early critique of the prospects for hydrogen fuel. David is Professor of Applied Physics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Professor of Public Policy in the Harvard Kennedy School. He spends about a third of his time in Calgary, Canada where he helps lead Carbon Engineering, a company developing technology to capture CO2 from ambient air.

PolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is hosted by Staff Writer and Producer Ralph Ranalli

PolicyCast is co-produced by Susan Hughes.

For more information please visit our web page or contact us at [email protected].

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Jason Furman recently testified before the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth and called growing inequality the fundamental challenge for the U.S. economy. He says that slow income growth, coupled with growing disparities in how the overall economic pie is divided, have contributed to inequality that is now pervasive by race, ethnicity, gender, income, and education. That inequality hurts everyone, he says, limiting growth and depriving society of productive contributors to the economy. 

About our guest: 

Jason Furman is the Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy jointly at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He served for eight years as a top economic adviser to President Obama, including as the 28th Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from August 2013 to January 2017, acting as both President Obama’s chief economist and a member of the cabinet. Furman has conducted research in a wide range of areas, including fiscal policy, tax policy, health economics, Social Security, technology policy, and domestic and international macroeconomics. He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University. 

PolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is hosted by Staff Writer and Producer Ralph Ranalli

PolicyCast is co-produced by Susan Hughes.

For more information please visit our web page or contact us at [email protected].

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Latanya Sweeney is a pioneer in the fields of algorithmic fairness and data privacy and the founding director of the new Public Interest Tech Lab at Harvard University. The former chief technology officer for the US Trade Commission, she’s been awarded 3 patents and her work is cited in two key US privacy regulations, including the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). She was also the first black woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, and she says her experiences being the only woman of color in white male-dominated classrooms and labs may have contributed to her uncanny ability to spot racial and gender bias, privacy vulnerabilities, and other key flaws in data and technology systems.

About the “Systems Failure” Series: 

To kick off the fall 2021 season, we’re launching a mini-series of episodes built around a theme we’re calling “Systems Failure.” Our conversations will focus on how economic, technological, and other types of systems that play a huge role in determining how we live our lives can not only treat individuals and groups of people unequally, but can also exacerbate inequality more generally in society. We’ll also talk about strategies to change those systems to make them more equitable.

PolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is hosted by Staff Writer and Producer Ralph Ranalli

PolicyCast is co-produced by Susan Hughes.

For more information please visit our web page or contact us at [email protected].