The Institute of World Politics

Sneak Peek into forthcoming book “The Bonfire of the Verities” Pathologies of Public Policy Decision-Making and How to Fix Them.

About the Book: Recent times in America are scarred by rampant public policy failures, leading to catastrophic involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 2008 financial crash. More are coming.

Why do highly intelligent leaders, with degrees from the world’s greatest universities, with equally intelligent and skilled staffs and with limitless research and intelligence budgets, continue to make catastrophic decisions–even while warned in advance of catastrophes to come? And what can actually be done to stop this sickness? This presentation, summarizing the forthcoming book’s analysis, draws lessons from America’s Vietnam experience and its involvement in the Middle East, from an innovative form of economic analysis, and from case studies of what has failed–and worked–in the areas of anti-corruption and anti-spam programs. The steps it proposes–the verities–offer a decision-making alternative which overcomes the current squishiness of political and economic discussions in which “there are no wrong answers and nothing is ever concluded.”

About the Speaker: Jeffrey Race has an AB, AM, and PhD in Government from Harvard and began this project while an Ash Fellow of the Kennedy School. He has taught political science and economics, and is the author of the War Comes to Long An, a highly original case study of human motivation in the Vietnam War which Amazon lists as one of the top ten military theory studies of all time. In a parallel engineering career Race is a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and in this talk brings to bear on the pathologies of public policy making the insights of hard science.

Title: National Security, Whistle-Blowers and the Nature of Secrecy

This event is a part of the Global Impact Discussion Series by Founder and Moderator Patricia Schouker, IWP Alumna.

About the Lecture: The significance of Edward Snowden’s revelations has been viewed primarily through the prism of threats to citizen privacy. Instead, Dr. Christopher Moran argues that the most dramatic change has been a decline of government secrecy, especially around national security. While the ethical aspects of state secrets and ‘whistle-blowing’ have received recent attention, few have attempted to explain the dynamics of this growing climate of exposure. The argument is largely technological and is grounded by the changing nature of intelligence work, which is increasingly merging with ‘big data’. Dr. Moran also identifies a related cultural change: many intelligence contractors are at best agnostic about the national security state. Meanwhile, the Internet itself provides the perfect medium for the anonymous degradation of secrets. Because the main driver is technology, Dr. Moran suggests this trend is likely to accelerate, presenting national security chiefs with one of their biggest future challenges.

About the Speaker: Dr. Christopher R. Moran is a Reader in US National Security in the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) at the University of Warwick (UK). He is the author of several books including Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Company Confessions: Secrets, Memoirs, and the CIA (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Funded by the British Academy, he is currently writing a history of the turbulent relationship between President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the CIA, featuring new revelations about White House ‘dirty tricks’ as well as critical reflections on the role played by the Agency in facilitating SALT, American withdrawal from Vietnam, and triangular politics between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. Together with colleagues from John Hopkins and Leicester University, he is the co-editor of the new ‘Georgetown Studies in the History of Intelligence’ book series.

About the Lecture: This lecture is a part of the 12th Annual Kościuszko Chair Conference that was held on November 23, 2019, at The Institute of World Politics.

Rotamaster Witold Pilecki, a Polish intelligence operator who volunteered for Auschwitz, is presented by non-Polish authors as an ordinary man who was capable of a heroic deed in times of war. Mrs. Maria Juczewska examines the validity of that narration in view of evidence provided by scholarly research, archival material, and accounts of his close and kin.

About the Speaker: Ms. Maria Juczewska is the Associate Director of the Kościuszko Chair of Polish Studies​ at The Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC.

About the Lecture: This lecture is a part of the 12th Annual Kościuszko Chair Conference that was held on November 23, 2019, at The Institute of World Politics.

The Polish population suffered huge losses during WWII. Millions of soldiers and civilians were wounded and killed. Those who survived developed various ways to cope with the extreme situation they had to face during the war. These methods proved to be very useful in the first years after Soviet liberation in 1945, in the era of mass migrations and resettlements, but also in the times of Stalinist lawlessness and repression. These times will be presented on the basis of information contained in the diaries sent to three competitions for settlers in western Poland. The vast majority of these materials have not been published so far.

About the Speaker: Dr. Jakub Isański is a Professor of Sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań​, Poland​.

Title: The town of Pinsk, the gubernya of Minsk: On the Eve of the Great War​

About the Lecture: This lecture is a part of the 12th Annual Kościuszko Chair Conference that was held on November 23, 2019, at The Institute of World Politics.

Dr. Chodakiewicz discussed the political, economic, social, and cultural situation in Pinsk and its environs.

About the Speaker: Dr. Marek Chodakiewicz is a Professor of History at The Institute of World Politics and the Kościuszko Chair of Polish Studies​​.

About the Lecture: This lecture is a part of the 12th Annual Kościuszko Chair Conference that was held on November 23, 2019, at The Institute of World Politics.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Herbert Hoover’s visit to Poland as head of the American Relief Administration: he went in Woodrow Wilson’s stead. The significance of the relief is still little-known in the Polish public consciousness, even among historians. It may have been one of the finest episodes in U.S.-Polish relations and is worthy of more recognition. ​​

About the Speaker: Mr. Nicholas Siekierski is a Ph.D. candidate at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland​.

About the Event: Our distinguished panelists will discuss the political stability and peace prospects, economic, social cohesion, and the way forward in Sudan in the post-revolution era now under a civilian government and the ongoing peace negotiations between the transitional government and the oppositions groups.

About the Speakers:

Niemat Ahmadi: A native of Kebkabiya, North Darfur region of Sudan, Ms. Ahmadi is the Founder and President of the DC-based Darfur Women Action Group DWAG, the organization that focuses on the empowerment of the Darfur genocide affected communities and the historically marginalized Sudanese to bring them to the center to participate in decisions making and to effectively contribute to shaping the future of Sudan. Previously, Ms. Ahmadi worked with NGO’s in various fields of emergency and development in Sudan, including Oxfam Great Britain, Intermediate Technology Development Group ( Practical Action) and the United Nation’s World Food Program. Ms. Ahmadi was recognized by President George W. Bush as one of 8 global human rights fighter of the year 2008.

Ms. Ahmadi is a veteran human rights advocate and seasonal strategic planning and management professionals. Ms. Ahmadi previously worked as the Director of Global Partnerships for United to End Genocide and the Save Darfur Coalition. She served as an advisor at the 7th round of Inter-Sudanese Darfur peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2006.

Hashem Mekki: Hashem Mekki, MA, has taught Arabic Language, Culture & Middle East Media at IWP since 2012. He is the owner of Bridge Language Solutions, providing an array of language translation, interpretation and teaching services to the Washington DC metropolitan area, and the founder of Kele Global, a nonprofit organization that promotes education, health, and economic empowerment in Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan. He also teaches Arabic language to federal employees & professionals at the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Department of Energy. Mr. Mekki volunteers with the IWP Center for Human Rights and International Affairs by providing Arabic translations & strategic cultural perspectives on North Africa and the Middle East. Mr. Mekki previously worked with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and served on the board of Voices of Sudan, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. He holds bachelor degrees in both Political Science and International Studies from the City College of New York, and a Master of Arts in Strategic Studies and International Politics from IWP.

About the Lecture: Technologist Eric Fulton will discuss “How Nation States Attack High Value Assets,” with an emphasis on Chinese action. He will draw from his extensive experience in technology, hacking, and internet related issues, including his work in China.

About the Speaker: Mr. Eric Fulton is a business owner and technologist. His first job was hacking international corporations, helping them identify and secure their information systems. During that time, Eric presented independent research at universities, the prestigious Black Hat Conference, and the world’s largest hacker conference, DEFCON. Eric went on to start a local Internet Service Provider in Montana with the goal of helping solve the problem of rural broadband. Taking the skills, he learned in Montana, Eric then built a successful global banking network with a strong presence in Asia. With over 10 years of experience advocating for privacy and Internet freedom, Eric continues his mission of contributing to a secure, free, open Internet, working as the Identity Evangelist for Keybase, a company dedicated to solving identity and encrypted communication.

About the Lecture: In current political conversations and reporting, the word “ideology” seems to have a plethora of meanings, often not clearly related to one another and sometimes clearly inconsistent with each other. The word is commonly used to mean a kind of voting behavior (an “ideological vote” versus a “party vote”), a kind of political thought characterized by a call to revolutionary action, or a political (or non-political) “belief system” held by a group of people or perhaps by just one individual. And this shortlist does not include its common usage as a synonym for “philosophy,” “theory,” “doctrine,” “policy,” and other forms of thought. Several of these usages of the word “ideology” are so well established that they can no longer be criticized as mistaken; but using the term in light of this jumble of definitions leads to misunderstanding and confusion.

This lecture attempts to pick apart the threads in this tangle and to identify the main strands of meaning that the term has acquired in its relatively short history. Two main lines of contemporary meaning stand out: ideology as a type of social consciousness, a notion particularly favored by Western Marxists and Marxist-influenced theorists, and ideology as a form of radical political doctrine often characterized as apocalyptic, millenarian, and nihilistic. We will briefly trace the former tradition from its French Enlightenment roots to its contemporary political usage and then will outline some of the conceptual approaches to radical ideology that exemplify the latter tradition.

About the Speaker: Bill Miller is a Professor of Politics at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. He received his J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. As an attorney, he has been in private practice in Pennsylvania, has taught law at Widener University’s School of Law, served on the legal staff of the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate, and most recently has worked on litigation teams at several Washington, D.C. law firms. He is the author of A Primer on American Courts.

Since 1986, Professor Miller has been on the faculty of Marymount University after teaching political theory and other politics courses at several colleges and universities. Though teaching a wide variety of politics and law-related courses at Marymount, his primary focus has been on political theory and political ideology, which he approaches from a classical perspective influenced by Gerhart Niemeyer, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss.

About the Book: Generally, there are two major approaches in research on Katyn: the perspective of the victims and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the perpetrators‘ perspective. In his Encounter with Katyn Wolsza has touched upon another dimension of this atrocity, which has not been addressed in the work done so far. He describes the stories of over 60 representatives of various social groups who visited the Katyn site in 1943. The postwar Communist regime in Poland consistently plugged the Katyn Lie and conducted a campaign of repression and reprisals against witnesses of the Soviet crime. They were accused of collaboration with the Germans, forced to cancel testimonies about the real perpetrators, put under surveillance, and imprisoned. Some of them had to leave the country. Wolsza’s book portrays the Katyn Massacre not only as the extermination of Polish elites by a totalitarian regime, but also as a symbol of the struggle for universal values such as memory, truth, and justice. This corresponds to the wider perspective of the struggle of an enslaved society fighting for its freedom and independence.

About the Speaker: Dr. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz holds The Kosciuszko Chair in Polish Studies at The Institute of World Politics, where he also serves as a Professor of History and teaches courses on Geography and Strategy, Contemporary Politics and Diplomacy, Russian Politics and Foreign Policy, and Mass Murder Prevention in Failed and Failing States. He is the author of Intermarium: The Land Between the Black and Baltic Seas and numerous other books and articles. Professor Chodakiewicz is the head of the Center for Intermarium Studies at The Institute of World Politics. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has previously taught at the University of Virginia and Loyola Marymount University.