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2017 Oct 12

UN Treaty Bodies: The Work of the Committee on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights

9:00am to 10:00am

Location:

Nye A, 5th floor, Taubman Building, (Harvard Kennedy School)

The Carr Center is delighted to host Maria Virginia Bras Gomes, Chair of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Ms. Bras Gomes will discuss the Committee's work on diverse economic, social, and cultural rights issues, and provide an insight into the work of critical UN treaty bodies addressing human rights policy.

Selected participants for the Carr Center's delegation to the UN General Assembly are required to attend this event, but all others are also welcome to attend.

*Breakfast will be served.

United Nations Student Delegation

The deadline for this application cycle has passed. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on our latest opportunities.

The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School seeks applications from students to participate in a special delegation to the United Nations in New York for the occasion of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

The trip, being held over two full days and will include meetings with senior UN policymakers, with a particular focus on the Rights of Indigenous...

2017 Apr 10

Violence and cell phone communication patterns: Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location:

Nye A, Taubman 520, Taubman Building, 79 JFK St, Cambridge MA 02138

About the seminar:

"When and where will violent conflict break out?" The answer to this question is critically important to people who might fall victim to violence, to policy makers who are charged with preventing and resolving deadly disputes, and to academics who strive to understand human behavior. The social science literature on reducing political violence mostly concerns answering the question, "Which countries are likely to experience violence?" Recent research has refined geographic predictions to identify local level danger zones....

Steven Livingston and Jonathan Drake. 1/9/2017. “We tried to save 150 people in Aleppo from 5,000 miles away.” The Washington Post .Abstract

Article in The Washington Post by Carr Center Senior Fellow Steven Livingston.

"With Russian and Syrian forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad’s regime rapidly closing in, the situation for those trapped in eastern Aleppo in the first week of December was growing grimmer by the hour. It was especially dire for the White Helmets, a Syrian first-responders group that had won international acclaim for its humanitarian work, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Assad regime held a different view, describing the group as rebels and terrorists.

On Dec. 8 at 3:30 p.m. in Boston, one of the first messages from the White Helmets to reach researchers at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative said that “three gas bombs have been dropped in the area within the last two hours and they [the White Helmets] feel they have less than 48 hours to evacuate before they are seized.” The Harvard group was asked to help find an escape route out of Aleppo for the White Helmets and their families, about 150 people in all.

How could Harvard scholars sitting in Cambridge, Mass., help 150 people find their way out of a war zone? We hoped it could be done with commercial remote-sensing satellites."

Read the full article in The Washington Post.

Steven Livingston is a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a professor at George Washington University.

Jonathan Drake is a senior program associate with the Geospatial Technologies Project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Pippa Norris. 2/27/2017. “What is a Populist?” The Atlantic . Publisher's Version Abstract

The Atlantic features HKS's Pippa Norris, the Paul. F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics.

Why does Donald Trump exaggerate the size of his inauguration crowd, brag about his election win in conversations with world leaders, and claim without evidence that voter fraud may have cost him the popular vote? Why does he dismiss protesters who oppose him as “paid professionals” and polls that reflect poorly on him as “fake news”? Why does he call much of the media the “enemy of the people”?

There are explanations for these things that focus on the individual, characterizing Trump as a self-centered reality-TV star obsessed with approval and allergic to criticism.

But there is also an ideological explanation, and it involves a concept that gets mentioned a lot these days without much context or elaboration: populism.

Read the full article in The Atlantic.