May 16, 2014
Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science and director of the Brown-India Program, comments on the pledge by Narendra Modi, a front-runner in the race for prime minister in India, to clean up the Ganges River. Varshney says that while all would embrace the idea, it wouldn't necessarily get Modi more votes.
May 15, 2014
Watson Visiting Fellow Timothy Edgar talks to Forbes about reform in the NSA: “I think it would be naive to assume we are going to limit intelligence collection to only international security threats.”
May 12, 2014
Watson Visiting Scholar Stephen Kinzer says in the Boston Globe that although Russia’s treatment of Ukraine may be unjust, it is not unheard of among superpowers.
May 9, 2014
Watson Visiting Scholar Timothy Edgar tells the New York Times that restricting government officials’ rights to cite news reports with unauthorized disclosures keeps them out of the conversation.
May 7, 2014
Faculty fellow Nina Tannenwald explains in the Providence Journal that involvement from the international community is needed in order to find a solution in the Israel-Palestine peace negotiations.
May 5, 2014
In an op-ed in the Providence Journal, Watson Postdoctoral Fellow Amy Austin Holmes writes about the unrest in Egypt and anticipation of a new President.
May 2, 2014
Patricia Herlihy, professor of history emerita and adjunct professor at the Watson Institute, writes about Vladimir Putin’s disregard for Russian and Ukrainian history in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times.
May 1, 2014
According to a report by the National Research Council, the rise of incarceration in the US caused a 400 percent increase in state spending between 1980 and 2009. An article in the Washington Post examines the findings of the two-year study, which "concludes that all of its costs — for families, communities, state budgets and society — have simply not been worth the benefit in deterrence and crime reduction." Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Social Science and professor of economics at Brown and an expert on the economics of race and inequality, serves on the National Research Council’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice, which commissioned the report. Loury is a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute.
April 25, 2014
Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science, comments on the changes creeping into India's future elections: “A rapidly urbanising India is going to be less accepting of dynasties, more open to new types of candidates.”
April 23, 2014
Did you miss a lecture? Did you see something you’d like to see again? Subscribe to the Watson Institute’s YouTube channel and click through dozens of full length and abbreviated versions of past lectures and one-on-one interviews with topics ranging from climate change, to the history of vodka. Videos are posted weekly, and are annotated for single-click access to different segments within the clips. Subscribe to WatsonInstitute today!
April 21, 2014
Stephen Kinzer, visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, writes about the impending release of a congressional report on the CIA’s use of extreme tactics like “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” and why the U.S. and other countries should own up to their "misdeeds."
April 21, 2014
David Kertzer talks about his excitement at the announcement that Steven Spielberg plans to make a film based on his 1997 nonfiction book “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.”
April 17, 2014
At a conference on climate change in Latin America held at Brown on Wednesday, Manuel Pulgar Vidal, Peru’s Environment Minister, spoke about how countries could work together to make progress at the upcoming UN climate summit in Peru this fall.
April 16, 2014
Beshara Doumani, professor of modern Middle East history, appears in a new documentary, "It's Better to Jump," about the port city of Akka (also known as Acre), one of the places where the conflict over ownership of Palestinian history and culture is most stark.
April 15, 2014
Director of the Brown-India Initiative Ashutosh Varshney discusses the correlation between opinion polls and results in India’s parliamentary elections in the Financial Times.
April 14, 2014
Brown University is taking steps to establish itself as the premier center in the U.S. for the study of Brazil, and it’s starting things off by making a trove of once-classified documents accessible to the public.
April 10, 2014
Watson Adjunct Faculty Catherine Kelleher, and Judith Reppy of Cornell University receive the MacArthur Foundation grant at Cornell for research on “Creating Conditions for a Stable Transition to a New Nuclear Order".
April 9, 2014
On RTCC, Watson Faculty Fellow J. Timmons Roberts and Center for Environmental Studies Research Fellow Guy Edwards consider China’s potential to undermine Latin America’s climate change policies.
April 7, 2014
Stephen Kinzer, visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, writes about the cautious negotations that the U.S. and Iran taking part in and the two countries shared problems with opiate addiction, which Kinzer suggests could be tackled together.
April 3, 2014
In an blog post for the Monkey Cage in the Washington Post, Jeff Colgan, who will be assistant professor of political science and international studies at the Watson Institute starting July 1, outlines concerns over energy’s role in the crisis in Ukraine: “Europeans should get serious about an energy policy that is consistent with their political and environmental values.”