MIT Western Hemisphere Project Home Feedback Search Search Archives Meetings Courses Events About


The New Congress & US Foreign Policy:
Security, Trade, Human Rights, & the Environment
Thursdays / January 9, 16, 23, 30, 2003 / 7 p.m.
[Directions to the Seminar Room]

Washington


Mike Capuano Michael Capuano, a Democrat, is currently serving his third term as Representative for the Eighth Congressional District of Massachusetts (Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, and most of Boston). He was first elected to this office in November of 1998. Congressman Capuano serves on the House Democratic Leadership team as both a Regional Whip and a member of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. Among other things, he is a member of the House Human Rights Caucus; the International Workers' Rights Caucus; the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus; and the Congressional Friends of Human Rights Monitors. Among his legislative initiatives is an effort to assist women who are victims of rape during times of conflict or war. Rep. Capuano was educated at Somerville High School, Dartmouth College, and Boston College Law School. Prior to his service in Congress, he served the people of Somerville as Alderman and then as Mayor.


Mickey Edwards (Harvard) Mickey Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years and Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, the fourth-ranking Republican leadership position in the House of Representatives. He is now the John Quincy Adams Lecturer in Legislative Practice at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His research and teaching specialties are the US Congress, American election campaigns, political leadership, and conservative political philosophy, and he is a frequent participant in seminars on civic virtue and the role of the press in shaping public policy. A founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation, he has served as Co-Chair of a joint Brookings Institution/Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on International Affairs and has directed several other national projects for organizations such as the 20th Century Fund and the Soros Foundation. He is the author of three books, writes a weekly newspaper column on public affairs, and has been a regular political commentator on National Public Radio.


Daniel R. Glickman (Harvard) Daniel R. Glickman has spent more than 25 years in public service on both the federal and local levels, including 18 years in the United States House of Representatives, where he served as a member of the House Agriculture Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, and as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In 1995, President Clinton named Glickman Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After leaving the Cabinet in January 2001, Glickman became a partner at a law firm in Washington, where he advised clients on matters ranging from food and agriculture to biotechnology and international trade. He is now Director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.


J. E. Orduz Juan Esteban Orduz has just completed four years as Minister, Deputy Chief of Mission, at the Embassy of Colombia in Washington, D.C., where, among other things, he worked to obtain U.S. support for Plan Colombia and the renewal and enhancement of the Andean Trade Preferences Act. In previous diplomatic service he was the Consul General of Colombia in Frankfurt. An attorney and specialist in finance, Mr. Orduz has worked in the private sector, including a stint as Legal Vice President of Cemex Colombia. He has also been involved in Colombian politics: he served as Chief of Staff to the Minister of Economic Development in Bogotá; and when Andres Pastrana sought the presidency of Colombia in 1994 and 1998, he served as a campaign advisor. Mr. Orduz has a law degree from El Rosario University and a degree in finance from Los Andes University. Currently at Harvard, he is pursuing research on U.S. relations with Colombia and Latin America.


In addition to Secretary Glickman, Congressman Edwards, and Dr. Orduz, some of our participants from academia have also served in Washington: Professor Robert Lawrence was on the President's Council of Economic Advisors in the Clinton White House and before that an advisor to the Congressional Budget Office; while Juliette Kayyem served as a legal advisor to the Attorney General of the United States.


Activists


Kevin Batt (Tonantzin) Kevin Batt is an attorney at Palmer & Dodge in Boston. A former conservation manager for the city of Austin, Texas, he has represented numerous public- and private-sector clients in cases involving preservation of open space and conservation land, coastal access rights, zoning disputes, and clean-up of hazardous materials. Before he entered private practice, Mr. Batt clerked for the Honorable Margaret H. Marshall in the 1997-1998 term of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Fluent in Spanish and holding a master's degree in anthropology, Mr. Batt is a member of Tonantzin (the Boston Committee to Support the Native Peoples of Mexico), a human-rights advocacy group that works primarily in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. He first lived in Chiapas in 1968, where he taught elementary school in a Tzeltal-speaking village. Together with priests, nuns, lay people and indigenous leaders, he helped set up 23 small schools in the area, part of the social action mission of the Catholic diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, led by former Bishop Samual Ruiz. He last visited Chiapas with a Tonantzin delegation in May, 2002.


Catherine Benedict (BGAN) Catherine Benedict is a global justice activist whose work focuses on the "Free Trade Area of the Americas" and related trade arrangements. She is a member of the Boston Global Action Network FTAA Task Force, which is working to defeat several pending trade agreements because of their expected impact on workers, the environment, public health, and the democratic process. Benedict formerly served as a union steward when working as a pre-school teacher, and again when working as a researcher on documentary film at WGBH-Boston. She currently works as a Research Specialist for the Carpenters Labor-Management Program and is a member of the Jobs with Justice Global Justice Committee.


Joseph Gerson (AFSC) Joseph Gerson is Director of the Peace and Economic Security Program and Director of Programs for the New England Regional Office of the American Friends Service Committee. He has been active in U.S. justice and peace movements since the mid-1960s. He received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and his Ph.D. in Politics and International Security Studies from the Union Institute. His work has long focused on building opposition and alternatives to U.S. hegemony, with concentrations on the Middle East, nuclear weapons, and the Asia-Pacific region. After September 11, 2001, he initiated the United for Peace With Justice coalition in the Boston area; helped to launch United For Peace; and organized two major New England-wide conferences for peace activists; he also helped launch a number of efforts devoted to peace-making, including the Cordoba Dialog, the European Network for Peace and Human Rights (in Brussels) and the Asia Peace Assembly (in Manila). His books include: The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of U.S. Foreign Military Bases, and With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination.


Lisbeth Gronlund (UCS) Lisbeth Gronlund is the Co-Director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She holds a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University. Her recent research interests include ballistic missile defense, ballistic missile proliferation, international fissile material controls, and nuclear arms control. She is a co-author of Countermeasures: A Technical Analysis of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned US National Missile Defense System (2000). Among her other achievements, Dr. Gronlund helped establish and is a primary organizer of the International Summer Symposiums on Science and World Affairs, which each year since 1989 have brought together some 40 young scientists working on international security issues from different countries. These meetings are designed to help foster expertise in arms control and security issues and to create an international community of technical researchers working on these issues. For this work and her research on arms control, Gronlund was a co-recipient of the American Physical Society's 2001 Joseph A. Burton Forum Award.


Patrick Keaney (Green Party) Patrick Keaney is a human-rights activist whose work focuses on the impact of corporate-led globalization, particularly its effects on members of the working class in the United States and elsewhere. He is a legislative coordinator for Amnesty International in Massachusetts and a member of Massachusetts Jobs With Justice's Solidarity Committee. An active member of the Massachusetts Green Party, Keaney served as campaign manager for Jill Stein's recent gubernatorial bid. Last January, he was a member of a "Witness for Peace" labor & environment delegation to Colombia.


Daniel Moss Daniel Moss is Development Director at Grassroots International. He has worked for over twenty years in community organizing and community development, both in the US and in Latin America — from public-housing issues to the rights and welfare of refugees after a civil war. He received a Master's degree in International Development and Regional Planning from MIT in 2000. Most recently Daniel served as South America Program Officer for Oxfam America, where he campaigned with indigenous organizations to increase the accountability of Andean governments and the global mining industry.


Micho Spring Micho F. Spring is Chairperson, Weber Shandwick Worldwide (U.S. Corporate Practice and New England Region), where she helps corporate clients use communications strategies to support their business strategies and to take part in the making of public policy. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on U.S.-Cuban Relations in the 21st Century. Ms. Spring has extensive experience as a senior manager in both the public and private sectors: among other things, she was President and CEO of Boston Telecommunications Company; and served four years as Deputy Mayor of the City of Boston. As a public official, civic leader, and independent commentator, Ms. Spring has helped shape public debate. She has managed numerous political and public-issue campaigns and was a panelist on WCVB-TV's public affairs show, "Five on Five." Ms. Spring has received several awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999 from the Women's Network of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Leadership Award from the Hispanic-American Chamber of Commerce, and the Order of Isabel La Catolica presented by King Juan Carlos of Spain.


David Wright David Wright is Co-Director and Senior Scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a Research Scientist in the Security Studies Program at MIT. Working primarily on technical analysis of ballistic missile defense and proliferation, Dr. Wright helped author the recent UCS-MIT study Countermeasures, and has testified before the US Senate on missile defense technology. In addition, he has done extensive work to analyze and understand the implications of the North Korean ballistic missile program. Dr. Wright received his Ph. D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from Cornell University in 1983. Before joining UCS, he held positions in the Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and at the Federation of American Scientists. Since 1990 he has worked to organize an annual conference series intended to engage scientists from the international community — especially Russia, China, and South Asia — in technical analysis of security issues.


Michael Yogman (Harvard) Michael Yogman is a pediatrician in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he provides general care and consultation for developmental and behavioral concerns. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School, and has written and edited numerous books and articles about children's health and development. He is a member of the Harvard Working Group on Child Health Policy and has served as a consultant to the Congressional Select Panel on Child Health, the NIH Advisory Committee on Physical Growth, and the Massachusetts Daycare Committee. In the early 1980s he testified in support of paternity leave before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families. He returned recently from a fact-finding mission to Cuba organized by the Boston Children's Museum, of which he is a trustee.


Academics


Nicholas Ashford (MIT) Nicholas A. Ashford is the Director of the Technology and Law Program at MIT. His research interests include sustainability, trade & environment; environmental justice; labor's participation in technological change; regulatory law & economics; and the design of government policies for encouraging technological innovation as well as improvements in health, safety and environmental quality. Dr. Ashford holds both a Ph.D. in chemistry and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He has chaired the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety & Health; and the Committee on Technology Innovation & Economics of the EPA National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and 2003 chair of its Section on Societal Impacts of Science and Engineering. He serves as an advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme.


Margaret Burnham (Northeastern) Margaret Burnham (Northeastern University Law School) began her career at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, litigating school-desegregation cases. In 1978, she was appointed an associate justice of the Boston Municipal Court, and in 1989 returned to law practice as a founding partner of Boston's first law firm headed by African-American women. In 1992, South African President Nelson Mandela asked Burnham to serve on a commission to investigate human-rights violations committed by his African National Congress party. Professor Burnham's fields of expertise include civil rights, human rights, and employment. She has held fellowships at Harvard's DuBois Institute and Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute. She has taught at MIT — where, among other things, she supervised our seminar on political prisoners. She has also taught at Boston College Law School and Brandeis University. At Northeastern, she now teaches Constitutional Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, and Federal Courts and the Federal System.


Ryan Goodman (Harvard) Ryan Goodman is the J. Sinclair Armstrong Assistant Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. He has worked at the U.S. Department of State, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and non-governmental human rights organizations in Geneva, India, South Africa, and Thailand. Professor Goodman's primary research areas include public international law, human rights law, humanitarian law, and immigration and asylum law. His publications include "State Sovereignty and National Security in the World Polity," 55 Stanford Law Review (forthcoming 2003) (with Derek Jinks); "Measuring the Effects of Human Rights Treaties," 13 European Journal of International Law (forthcoming 2003) (with Derek Jinks); "Human Rights Treaties, Invalid Reservations, and State Consent," 96 American Journal of International Law 531 (2002); and "Norms and National Security: The WTO as a Catalyst for Inquiry," 2 Chicago Journal of International Law 101 (2001).


Juliette Kayyem (Harvard) Juliette Kayyem (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard) directs the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness — a standing task force of leading practitioners and academics assembled to examine America's response to terrorism. From 1999-2001, she served as a member of the National Commission on Terrorism, to which she was appointed by Richard Gephardt, Minority Leader in the US Congress. Prior to serving on the Commission, she was a legal advisor to the Attorney General and Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the US Department of Justice. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Bar Association's committee on National Security Law. She has served as adjunct faculty at Boston University School of Law and has taught at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government. She has written and edited numerous items on counterterrorism law and domestic preparedness, including the forthcoming First to Arrive: State and Local Response to Terrorism (MIT Press). She is a 1991 graduate of Harvard College and a 1995 graduate of Harvard Law School.


Robert Z. Lawrence (Harvard) Robert Z. Lawrence (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard) is Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment. His research and writing focus on trade policy. From 1998 to 2000, he served as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. He has taught at Johns Hopkins University and at Yale; and has served on the advisory boards of the Congressional Budget Office, the Institute for International Economics, the Overseas Development Council, and the Presidential Commission on United States-Pacific Trade & Investment Policy. Professor Lawrence is the author of numerous articles and books on international trade, including Single World, Divided Nations; A Prism on Globalization; Globaphobia: Confronting Fears About Open Trade; and Saving Free Trade: A Pragmatic Approach.


J. Lemaitre Julieta Lemaitre is Associate Professor of Law at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, where she teaches and does research in women's rights as well as sexual and reproductive rights. She has served as legal counsel to the Colombian government's program against domestic violence; as an attorney at the National Office for Women (Bogotá); and at the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (New York). Among her publications are Sexual and Reproductive Rights in the Interamerican Human Rights System (Profamilia, 2001); "Criminalization of Abortion as a Violation of Fundamental Human Rights: An Analysis of Decision C-647/01"; and "International Law Framework for Sexual and Reproductive Rights: an Opportunity for Human Rights Activists," a paper presented to the UN Population Fund.


Allison Macfarlane (MIT) Allison Macfarlane (MIT) is a Senior Research Associate in the Security Studies Program at the Center for International Studies. After receiving her Ph. D. in geology from MIT in 1992, she taught at George Mason University. Since then she has done research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University. For the past two years she has served on a National Academy of Sciences panel on the spent fuel standard and excess weapons plutonium disposition. Her research focuses on the issues surrounding the management and disposal of high-level nuclear waste and fissile materials.


Jeremy Pressman (Harvard) Jeremy Pressman (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard) is a post-doctoral fellow at the Belfer Center, where he studies international relations, the politics and history of the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy. From 1991 to 1996, he worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is co-author of Point of No Return: The Deadly Struggle for Middle East Peace (Brookings, 1997). He is also author of an article on the Cuban Missile Crisis which appeared in Security Studies. His dissertation, Leashes or Lemmings? Alliances as Restraining Devices (2002) examined the moderating effect that allies have on their partners. His current research focuses on Israeli-Palestinian conflict and negotiations.


Charles Stewart III (MIT) Charles Stewart (MIT, Political Science) is an expert on congressional politics and American political development. His recent textbook, Analyzing Congress, is the first comprehensive introduction to the subject from the perspective of rational-choice theory. Prof. Stewart co-founded the MIT Washington Summer Internship Program in 1994, and is a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which has suggested reforms to the electoral process in the wake of Election 2000. He has also received numerous teaching awards, including the Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.


Steve Van Evera (MIT) Steve Van Evera teaches international relations at MIT, where he is professor of political science. He received his B.A. in government from Harvard and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include the causes and prevention of war; U.S. foreign policy; and U.S. national security policy. He is author of Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Cornell, 1999), and has written articles on, inter alia, nationalism and war, American intervention in the Third World, and American defense policy. During the 1980s he was managing editor of the journal International Security.


Pre-registering: Let us know if you plan to attend!

Space is limited, so please let us know in advance if you plan to join us. You can attend (or skip) any session. There is no registration fee. Your pre-registration helps in our planning and allows us to inform you about background materials you might want to look at before each session.