The IGCC Washington Forum offers UC faculty doing policy-oriented research an opportunity to present their work at the UC Washington Center in Washington, D.C. (UCDC).

Any UC researcher working on a policy-oriented project in IGCC's areas of interest is eligible to participate. Programs take place at UCDC and are open to the public.

IGCC's Washington Representative, Joseph McGhee, can assist in making arrangements.

2007 Events

National Insecurity and Human Rights: Democracies Debate Counterterrorism
Alison Brysk, UC Irvine
Gershon Shafir, UC San Diego

November 2, 2007

All too often, the first casualty of national insecurity is human rights. How can democracies cope with the threat of terror while protecting human rights? This timely volume compares the lessons of the United States and Israel with the "best-case scenarios" of the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, and Germany. It demonstrates that threatened democracies have important options, and democratic governance, the rule of law, and international cooperation are crucial foundations for counterterror policy. Co-editors Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir of UC San Diego discuss these and related issues in the second installment in IGCC’s Washington briefing series on the impact of global terrorism.

"One of the most acute and lucid analyses of the moral and institutional challenges posed for liberal democratic societies by mega-terrorism."—Prof. Tom Farer, University of Denver and former President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

State Building After the Afghanistan and Iraq Interventions
Organized by Miles Kahler, UC San Diego

September 28, 2007

The Institute for International, Area and Comparative Studies and IGCC sponsored a one-day workshop on state building, drawing on research sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Panelists introduced current research on fragile states and state building, drawing out both the implications of that research for the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts and the implications for the state-building agenda of these two cases. Discussion included challenges to state building beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, from stalled negotiations on the future status of Kosovo to last year’s outbreak of violence in Timor-Leste. Financial support for the workshop was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The organizers hope to begin a dialogue on the following questions:

1. Do setbacks to state building in Afghanistan and Iraq reflect on the international state-building agenda, or are these two countries exceptional in the obstacles that they pose for international intervention?
2. Can lessons from other efforts to curb internal conflict and establish stable political institutions be applied to the Afghanistan and Iraq cases?
3. Will political conditions in the major powers (particularly the United States and Europe) support state-building interventions over the next decade?
4. Should the international agenda for state building be reformed or revised?

Speakers included Miles Kahler, David Lake, and Barbara Walter of UC San Diego, Bill Durch, (Henry L. Stimson Center), Ibrahim Elbadawi, (World Bank), Bruce Jentleson (Duke University), Stewart Patrick (Center for Global Development), and Timothy D. Sisk (University of Denver).

Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11
Amy Zegart, UCLA

with commentary by Scott Shane, New York Times Washington Bureau and Mark Lowenthal, former Assistant Director of Intelligence for Analysis and Production at the CIA.

September 27, 2007

The strength of an intelligence system comes from getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Spying Blind provides an authoritative account of how the current U.S. intelligence system is failing on these basic measures and how it is unlikely to adapt to respond to future threats. Zegart convincingly demonstrates that in order to protect the U.S. from internal and external threats, we must first repair the lingering organizational weaknesses that plague the intelligence community.

"Spying Blind is a timely and sweeping overview of the organizational challenges confronting our intelligence agencies in an age of terrorism."—Lee Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group

Amy Zegart is an associate professor at UCLA's School of Public Affairs, where she teaches courses in U.S. foreign policy and public management. Zegart's research focuses on the design problems of U.S. national security agencies. She received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, where she studied under Condoleezza Rice. Her first book, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC (Stanford University Press, 1999), won the highest national dissertation award in political science and has become standard reading for several U.S. military and intelligence training programs. More recently, she has written about adaptation failures in the CIA and FBI, the role of presidential commissions, organizational problems in nonproliferation policy, and port security. She is currently finishing a book about why U.S. intelligence agencies adapted poorly to the rise of terrorism after the Cold War.

Zegart has served as a national security analyst for CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and National Public Radio. A former Fulbright Scholar, she received a B.A. in East Asian studies from Harvard University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Political Change in Pakistan
Organized by Neil Joeck, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

September 20, 2007

Organized by Pakistan expert Neil Joeck, the day-long seminar took a close look at policy options for the United States and Pakistan now that it seems clear that military rule in Pakistan may soon be replaced by civilian government. Panelists took a close look at policy options for the United States and Pakistan to understand how previous missteps might be avoided in the future. The seminar included three sessions, each opening with introductory comments by the panelist, followed by an exchange of ideas with the workshop participants.

Agenda

8:45 a.m. Introduction
Neil Joeck, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

9:00 a.m. Democratic Learning Since the Coup
Michael Krepon, Stimson Center and Dan Markey, Council on Foreign Relations

10:45 a.m. Political Transition and Terrorism
Polly Nayak, former South Asia Issue Manager for the Intelligence Community

1:00 p.m. Implications of Political Transition in Washington and Islamabad
Amb. Jehangir Karamat, Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the United States

Global Health Policy Workshop
Organized by Thomas E. Novotny, UC San Francisco

May 30, 2007

The University of California San Francisco Global Health Sciences and the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation cosponsored a policy workshop that summarized findings from a UC workshop on Global Health Diplomacy held in March 2007, and presented multinational, governmental, and nongovernmental perspectives by a panel of experts.

Agenda

12:30 p.m. Defining Global Health Diplomacy: The Training Need
Thomas E. Novotny, MD MPH, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for International and Refugee Health; Education Coordinator, UCSF Global Health Sciences

12:45 p.m. Multi-nationalism in Global Health Diplomacy Begins at Home: Policy Coherence Through National Global Health Strategies
Ilona Kickbusch, Ph.D., Visiting Professor and Advisor to the Director, Graduate Institute of International Studies, HEI Geneva; Senior health policy advisor, Swiss Federal Office for Public Health

1:00 p.m. The Future for Global Health Diplomacy: A Global Health Service
Fitzhugh S. M. Mullan, M.D., Murdock Head Professor of Medicine and Health Policy, George Washington University

1:15 p.m. The Role of the Non-governmental Community in Health Diplomacy
Maurice Middleberg (INVITED), Vice President for Public Policy, Global Health Council

1:30 p.m. Investing in the African Global Health Workforce
Paul Davis, Health GAP

1:45 p.m. Discussion and Response
Stephen B. Blount, M.D., M.P.H., Director, CDC Coordinating Office on Global Health
Roger I. Glass, M.D., P.D., Director, Fogarty International Center, NIH

Thomas E. Novotny is the director of international programs at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine, coordinator of educational programs in global health sciences, and professor in residence in epidemiology and biostatistics. A graduate of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the UCSF family practice residency in Santa Rosa, California, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Novotny served for 23 years in the U.S. Public Health Service. During that career, he was a National Health Service Corps family physician in northern California, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and CDC liaison to UC Berkeley School of Public Health and to the World Bank. He most recently was Deputy Assistant Secretary for International and Refugee Health in the Department of Health and Human Services and an assistant Surgeon General.

Climate Change: The Impact of Air Pollution on the South Asian Rice Harvest and the Slowing of the Green Revolution
Jeffrey Vincent
V. Ramanathan, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Maximilian Auffhammer, UC Berkeley

April 30, 2007

Observations and climate models suggest that aerosol air pollution has decreased monsoon rainfall in India since the early 1960s, while the buildup of greenhouse gases has increased nighttime temperatures. Both changes can be expected to reduce rice harvests. The authors quantify the impacts of these changes by integrating a model of the Indian rice sector with a regional climate model. They find that mean annual rice harvests would have been 10–15 percent higher during 1985–98 if these negative climate changes had not occurred. Air pollution thus provides a hitherto unrecognized explanation for the slowdown of the Green Revolution, and reductions in air pollution could be a new source of growth for the Indian rice sector. Their Cozzarelli Prize–winning paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2006.

Jeffrey Vincent joined IGCC in 2001 as Research Director for International Environmental Policy after serving as a fellow at Harvard Institute for International Development (1990–2001) and an assistant professor at Michigan State University (1987–1990). His research focuses on natural resource and environmental management in developing countries, especially in Asian countries. He is lead author of Environment and Development in a Resource-Rich Economy: Malaysia Under the New Economic Policy (Harvard Studies in International Development, 1997), co-editor of the Handbook of Environmental Economics (North-Holland, 2002), and author of numerous articles in economics, development, and forestry journals. In addition to his research, Vincent has extensive experience on policy advising and capacity-building projects sponsored by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, USAID, the UN Commission for Sustainable Development, the UN Development Program, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and other international organizations.

V. (Ram) Ramanathan is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego. He received his M.Sc. at the Indian Institute of Science in India in 1970, and in 1974, he received his Ph.D. in planetary atmospheres from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Ramanathan studies the effects of various greenhouse gases on the earth's atmosphere. He helped to develop the first community climate model, which is now the major American climate simulation research model for studying the phenomenon of greenhouse warming. He has also conducted extensive research on clouds. He helped design the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) along with NASA and university scientists to examine the role of clouds and water vapor greenhouse effect on climate. Later, through a series of research projects, he discovered that the brown haze found over large parts of the Arabian Sea, the Sea of Bengal, and India is contributing to the rise in atmospheric temperature and has the potential to damage tropical areas, the growth of rice crops, and to reduce fresh water supply. Ramanathan has dozens of publications, which include both contributions in books and peer-reviewed journal articles.

Max Auffhammer is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in agriculture and resource economics/ international area studies. He received his M.Sc. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1998 and his Ph.D. in economics from UC San Diego in 2003. He has published several papers in refereed journals, such as Environmental and Resource Economics, Resource and Energy Economics, and the Journal of Regional Science as well as some book chapters and reports. Auffhammer has received numerous grants and awards, including an award for excellence in teaching. He has also given over a dozen presentations at various institutions.

Climate Change, Conflict, and Foreign Aid
Edward Miguel, Economics, UC Berkeley
Shanker Satyanath, New York University
Raymond Fisman, Columbia University School of Business

May 10, 2007

The speakers discuss their research, which strongly links climate "shocks," like drought, to the outbreak of civil wars in Africa. They note the implications of this research for foreign aid policy, in particular advocating a new type of aid that could stop conflicts before they start.

Edward Miguel is currently an associate professor (with tenure) of economics at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2000. His research interests include development, poverty, health, education, and children, among other topics. Much of his work concerns Africa, although he has also published works having to do with Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. Miguel has received numerous awards and grants from such sources as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Google Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and he was a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. He has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, and there have been more than a dozen popular media articles written about his research since 2003. He has is also a consultant for the government of Sierra Leone, and for non-governmental organizations, such as Innovations for Poverty Action Kenya and ICS-Africa in their development projects.

Shanker Satyanath is currently an associate professor at the New York University Wilf Family Department of Politics. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 2001. His principal research interests are the political economy of finance, the political economy of development, and the political economy of violence. Satyanath is the author of Globalization, Politics, and Financial Turmoil: Asia’s Banking Crisis (Cambridge, 2005). He is also the author of numerous articles in such journals as the Journal of Political Economy and the American Journal of Political Science.

Raymond Fisman is currently the William Lambert Professor of Economics and Finance at the Columbia University School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in business economics from Harvard University in 1998. He has published over a dozen articles in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Development Economics, and World Development as well as others. Fisman has received grants from the National Science Foundation for his work. He has also worked at the World Bank as a consultant for the Africa Technical Division and Development Economics Research Group.

Saving Coral Reefs: Progress and Problems
Nancy Knowlton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

May 8, 2007

Coral reefs are the most diverse and among the most threatened of all marine ecosystems. They are also exceedingly hard to protect for a number of reasons. From the natural science perspective, there are many uncertainties with respect to how human impacts affect corals, and how these impacts interact synergistically. From a social science perspective, reefs are typically interconnected across national boundaries, many reefs lie in the waters of developing countries, and the economic value of reefs is only now being carefully addressed. Nevertheless, recent developments provide some hope for the future. In particular, protection from local threats (e.g. overfishing) appears to provide resilience against global impacts (e.g. climate change).

Nancy Knowlton is a professor of marine biology and the director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation (CMBC) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her research interests include marine biodiversity, ecology, evolution, behavior, and systematics of coral reef organisms, and speciation. Knowlton has published numerous articles in a variety of journals on these and other subjects.

Joseph McGhee
IGCC Washington Representative
Phone: (202) 974-6295
Fax: (202) 974-6299
E-mail: joseph.mcghee@ucdc.edu

For more information on IGCC and its programs, please contact:
IGCC Central Office
Phone: (858) 534-3352
Fax: (858) 534-7655