Addressing War Legacies and Reconciliation: How Philanthropies and NGOs Inspire Progress
2025 marked fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, and efforts to address the legacies of war and support reconciliation have become the cornerstone of an increasingly robust US-Vietnam relationship. The comprehensive strategic partnership that now exists between the US and Vietnam was not inevitable, but rather the result of significant effort […]
The Challenges of International Funding for Myanmar’s Civil Society Organizations
Myanmar’s pro-democracy civil society organizations (CSOs) are operating in an environment of increasing repression by the ruling junta. But they also face the challenge of navigating a constantly shifting international funding landscape, constraining their resources and activism. Aye Lei Tun, an expert on Myanmar’s CSOs, will delve into the complexities of how CSOs are strategizing […]
South Asia 2025: A Year of Shocks and Shifts
2025 was a year that saw seismic shifts in the geopolitical landscape of South Asia. A youth-led protest movement in Nepal overthrew the nation’s government, despite attempted suppression of the protests. The after-effects of similar movements in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka continued to be felt both domestically and in their foreign policy. Regional alignments also […]
Testing the Waters: Unregulated Mining in the Mekong Region
The Mekong River is widely perceived to be a clean river system that sustains local communities and national economies, feeds millions of international tourists, and enables the export of safe food products to the rest of the world. A new interactive dashboard providing novel data on nearly 800 locations of unregulated rare earth and gold mines along Mekong tributaries […]
The Future of International Criminal Law
Our distinguished panel of international lawyers, Professors Harold Koh (Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and former Legal Adviser to the US State Department), Dermot Groome (Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Penn State Dickinson Law School), and Clint Williamson (Senior Director for International Justice at Georgetown University, Presiding Arbiter of […]
Responsible AI in Democratic Society
The rapid development of generative AI and its ability to produce convincing audio and visual content has introduced challenges for democratic societies across the globe. As these technologies continue to blur the line between real and synthetic information, concerns have grown over their potential to erode public trust and facilitate disinformation campaigns. This presentation brings […]
Enduring Hostility: A Book Talk on Why the U.S. and Iran Remain Adversaries
Dalia Dassa Kaye’s new book, “Enduring Hostility: The Making of America’s Iran Policy,” recounts and analyzes the root causes behind more than four decades of failed efforts at reconciliation between the U.S. and Iran. Distinguished Fellow Barbara Slavin will discuss the book with Kaye and veteran diplomat Ryan Crocker, the current fraught situation in the […]
Empowering Multilingual AI Innovation
Developing accurate and representative multilingual language models remains a major challenge as AI systems expand globally. In particular, differences in resources, data availability, and cultural context in the Global South can make it difficult to build models that perform consistently and fairly across the world’s thousands of languages. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced […]