Friday, September 30, 2022 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Moncef Marzouki
Former President of Tunisia
“Is the Arab Spring Over or Has it Just Begun?”
Moncef Marzouki was president of Tunisia from 2011 to 2014, Tunisia’s first democratically elected leader. After graduating from medical school in France, he practiced and taught medicine in France and in Tunisia. From 1982 until 2000, when he was fired for his political activism, Marzouki was professor of public health at the Medical University of Sousse, where he implemented programs for prenatal health, health education, and vaccinating poor children. During this period, he founded and became the first president of the African Network for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. Marzouki also helped found and became the president of the Tunisian League for Human Rights, the Arab Commission for Human Rights, as well as other political and human rights organizations. Since leaving the presidency, he has continued to be active in politics and human rights, both in Tunisia and internationally. In December 2021, he was sentenced to four years in prison in Tunisia for undermining the security of the state from abroad. Marzouki is currently a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
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October 13, 2022 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
John Culver
Former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia
Central Intelligence Agency
China’s Catastrophic Success: US Strategic Blunders Fuel Rivalry
John Culver was national intelligence officer for East Asia at the CIA from 2015 to 2018. In this position, he represented the intelligence community’s views to top US policymakers. He was a senior intelligence officer at the CIA for 35 years, and in 2013 received the William L. Langer Award for extraordinary achievement in the CIA’s analysis division. Culver is currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
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October 21 2022 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Erik Goldstein
Professor of International Relations and History
Boston University
Queen Elizabeth and Her Legacy
Erik Goldstein is professor of international relations and history at Boston University, where he was chair of the international relations department from 1998 to 2010. He has also taught at the universities of Cambridge, Birmingham, and East Anglia, and at the US Naval War College and King’s College, London. Goldstein is the author of numerous books and articles on diplomacy and international rivalries, and is a fellow of Britain’s Royal Historical Society.
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November 3, 2022 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Monica Toft
Professor of International Politics
and
Director, Center for Strategic Studies
Fletcher School, Tufts University
Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy
Monica Toft is professor of international politics and director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tuft’s Fletcher School. She has also taught at Harvard and Oxford, where she continues to hold research positions, and at the Naval War College. Toft is also a global scholar at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo. Before becoming an academic, she was a sergeant in the US Army, where she served as a Russian linguist. Toft is the author of numerous articles and several books, including The Geography of Ethnic Violence; Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars; God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics; and People Changing Places: New Perspectives on Demography, Migration, and the State.
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November 15, 2022 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Sir Paul Tucker
Former Deputy Governor
Bank of England
Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World
Sir Paul Tucker began his career at the Bank of England in 1980, where he worked on bank regulation, corporate finance, and monetary policy before becoming deputy director for financial stability from 2009 to 2013. In 2014 he was knighted for his services to central banking. Tucker has also been a member of the G20 Financial Stability Board, a director of the Bank for International Settlements, and chair of the Systemic Risk Council from 2015 to 2021. Since 2013 he has been a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and its Center for European Studies. After leaving the Bank of England, Tucker has written two books, Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State, and Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World, published this fall.
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November 29, 2022 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Stefan Löfven
Former Prime Minister of Sweden
Common Security in a New Geopolitical Landscape
Stefan Löfven was prime minister of Sweden from 2014 to 2021. He began working as a welder, then soon became active in the Swedish Metal Workers Union, and eventually became its president, serving from 2006 to 2012. In 2012, Löfven became the leader of the center-left Social Democrats, and in 2014 he became Sweden’s prime minister. Since leaving office last November, Löfven has been chairman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He is spending this semester as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
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January 20, 2023 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Alisha Holland
Associate Professor
Department of Government
Harvard University
Another Pink Wave? Normal Politics or a Turn Back to the Left in Latin America
Alisha Holland is associate professor in Harvard’s government department. She has also been a junior fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows and has taught at Princeton. Holland published Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America in 2017. She has won several prizes for her book and her numerous academic journal articles. Her next book, Creative Construction: The Rise and Fall of Mass Infrastructure in Latin America, is forthcoming.
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January 30, 2023 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
General Jack Weinstein
Retired Lieutenant General, US Air Force
The State of Nuclear Deterrence in the World
General Jack Weinstein was Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration in the US Air Force until he retired from the military in 2018. In this position, he commanded two of the three US nuclear weapons programs, including long distance nuclear-armed bombers and land-based ICBMs. General Weinstein was previously Commander of the 20th Air Force, which is in charge of our land-based ICBMs and in 1945 dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He has also commanded the Air Force’s 30th Space Wing, which is responsible for all Defense Department space and missile launch activities on the West Coast, and has also commanded the 90th Operations Group, which maintains and operates our ICBMs on alert. General Weinstein has served as Director of the Air, Space, and Cyberspace Operations, and deployed as Director of Space Forces in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2005. Since his retirement from the Air Force, General Weinstein has been a professor of the practice of international security at Boston University.
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February 10, 2023 Hybrid Coffee, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Oleksandra Matviichuk
Head, Centre for Civil Liberties, Kyiv, Ukraine; winner, Nobel Peace Prize, 2022
Russian War Crimes in Ukraine
Oleksandra Matviichuk is a Ukrainian civil rights lawyer and head of the Centre for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, which she helped found in She has actively defended political prisoners in Ukraine and Russian political prisoners in Russia, Crimea, and the Donbas. Matviichuk has submitted numerous reports to various UN agencies, the Council of Europe, the European Union, and the International Criminal Court in the Hague. In 2016 she won the Democracy Defender Award of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and in 2022 the Centre for Civil Liberes won the Nobel Peace Prize for its “outstanding effort to document war crimes, human rights abuses, and abuses of power.”
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Friday, February 24, 2023 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Michael Kimmage
Professor and Chair, Department of History, Catholic University of America
“One Year of War in Ukraine: Where Do We Go From Here?”
Michael Kimmage is a professor at Catholic University in Washington, and chair of its history department. He has also taught at the Free University of Berlin, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and Vilnius University. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage worked in the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning in charge of relations with Russia and Ukraine. He has published four books, most recently The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020).
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Tuesday, March 14, 2023 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Shai Feldman
Professor of Politics and Founding Director Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University
“Israel at 75: Democracy at Risk”
Shai Feldman is professor of politics and founding director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and until last June was president of Sapir Academic College, located in the Negev about 2 miles from Israel’s border with Gaza. Feldman was head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University from 1997 to 2005, and was also a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament from 2001 to 2003. He is the author of numerous articles and six books, including Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East (2013), co-authored with a Palestinian and an Egyptian.
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Wednesday, April 19, 2023 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Kenneth Roth
Former Executive Director, Human Rights Watch
“How Should We Respond to the Autocratic Challenge?
Kenneth Roth was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 until last year. Before joining Human Rights Watch, he worked as a lawyer for the Justice Department on the Iran-Contra investigation. Roth has written numerous articles and reports on human rights violations in many countries for a wide range of publications. He has been refused admission to several of these countries. And he has been awarded honorary degrees from four universities in the US, Canada, and France. Roth is currently a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
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Friday, June 9, 2023 Hybrid Luncheon, Union Club of Boston and via Zoom
Calder Walton
Assistant Director of Harvard’s Belfer Center’s Applied History Project and Intelligence Project
“Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West”
Calder Walton is assistant director of the Intelligence Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School and is also assistant director of its applied history project. He was previously a senior research fellow at the University of London and a junior research fellow at Cambridge University. Walton is general editor of the Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence. He has written numerous journal articles and Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War, and the Twilight of Empire (2013). His latest book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, will be released in early June.
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Friday, June 16, 2023 ZOOM-only
Ambassador Volcker Stanzel
former German ambassador to China and Japan
“China and the West in 2023: The European Perspective”
Volker Stanzel served as Germany’s ambassador to China from 2004 to 2007 and as her ambassador to Japan from 2009 to 2013. He has also worked for the German Foreign Ministry in Italy, Hungary, and Yemen, and as director of its Department for Non-Proliferation and Civilian Use of Nuclear Energy. Since retiring from the Foreign Service in 2013, Stanzel has taught at Claremont-McKenna College, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Dokkyo University in Japan, the Free University of Berlin, and the Hertie School in Berlin. He is currently a senior fellow at the German Institute for Foreign and Security Affairs in Berlin.
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Wednesday, June 28, 2023 ZOOM-only
Arzan Tarapore
Research Scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University
“An Exceptional Partner: What Makes India Important – and Different”
Arzan Tarapore is a research scholar at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where he is charged with restarting its research effort on South Asia. He previously served for 13 years in Australia’s Defense Department, including in the Australian embassy in Washington. Tarapore has also held research positions at the RAND Corporation, Georgetown University, the East-West Center in Washington, and the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. He is the author of numerous articles and op-ed pieces on India’s military strategy and foreign policy.
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Wednesday, July 12, 2023 ZOOM-only
Yoshua Bengio
Professor of Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal
“Socio-Technical Schemes for Safe and Useful AI”
Yoshua Bengio is professor of computer science and operations research at the University of Montreal. He is also the founder and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), as well as the founder of several start-ups that use AI for commercial purposes. Bengio is a fellow of Britain’s Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2018, he shared the Turing Prize, known as the Nobel Prize of computing, for his work on deep neural networks. He and his co-winners are sometimes referred to as the godfathers of artificial intelligence. Bengio is the author of hundreds of journal articles, which have been cited by hundreds of thousands of other computer scientists. His brother and sometime co-author, Samy Bengio, is senior director of AI and machine learning research at Apple.