Michael Vinay Bhatia ’99 died yesterday in Afghanistan, where he was working as a social scientist in consultation with the US Defense Department. In addition to graduating magna cum laude in international relations from Brown University, Michael was a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute from July 2006 to June 2007. Of his work in Afghanistan, Michael wrote in November: “The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population's concerns, views, criticisms and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan.”

Read More | posted 5.8.08

Foreign Policy magazine has named former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso one of this year’s top 100 public intellectuals. The work of Cardoso, a Brown professor at large based at Watson, was the centerpiece of a recent two-day conference at the Institute. Video of his talk at the conference is available, as well as a recent interview on Open Source.

Read More | posted 5.5.08

Watson Assistant Professor Simone Pulver has been selected as a Fulbright Scholar grantee to India. With support from the six-month grant, she will study the environmental practices of Indian enterprises, while based in New Delhi at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Read More | posted 4.30.08

This weekend, C-SPAN’s Book TV channel will feature former US Sen. Lincoln Chafee ’75 and his recent book launch event at Brown for Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President (St. Martin's Press, April 2008). The candid political memoir, which Chafee wrote as a distinguished visiting fellow at Watson, “offers a behind-the-scenes look at the first six years of the Bush administration from the vantage point of one of the few Republican moderates in the Senate,” according to the publisher.

Read More | posted 4.30.08

Discussing the future of world energy supplies at the Watson Institute, Professor Michael Klare painted an apocalyptic picture of global energy supplies, resource shortage, and conflict, based upon his forthcoming book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Macmillan, April 2008). In Klare’s view, there are three driving forces in this new energy crisis: a huge increase in energy consumption caused by the rise of developing economies; a drop in supplies of traditional energy sources, such as oil; and the tendency of states to securitize and militarize their interests in scarce natural resources.

Read More | posted 4.29.08