Lab Director Charli Carpenter joins Harvard University as International Security Fellow

Professor Charli Carpenter joined Harvard's Kennedy School this fall as a Senior International Security Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where she will spend a semester completing work in progress on the laws of war and the nuclear ban treaty, building on work begun this summer with support from Doctoral Researcher Catie Fowler and conducted with undergraduate researchers Jacqueline Shortsleeve, Leoni Foster, Helen Eshetu and Isha Mahajan. This project tests the impact of the new nuclear ban treaty on public opinion around nuclear weapons.

In addition, Carpenter will continue outreach, stakeholder engagement and fundraising for Human Security Lab. Carpenter hopes to secure external funding to expand Human Security Lab programming to involve events, speaker series', funding for student working groups, and develop a grants program for faculty and graduate student research at the intersection of inequality, conflict resolution and humanitarian law.

In addition, she intends to create some partnerships with the Belfer Center for joint events on the role of the United Nations in Afghanistan, building on the successful academic-stakeholder partnership spearheaded by Human Security Lab this August on the potential for a UN peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. That project involved four meetings of scholarly experts on international conflict management, civil war and UN peacekeeping, two meetings with stakeholders, practitioners and policy analysts, a public-facing webinar that drew audience members from all over the world, and a briefing note. Carpenter plans to follow up these efforts with a second webinar co-hosted with the Belfer Center on “The Future of the UN in Afghanistan.”

While maintaining her post at Belfer on sabbatical this fall, Professor Carpenter looks forward to staying involved with the Political Science and Legal Studies community through the Conflict, Violence and Security workshop, Human Security Lab speaker series, and continuing to serve the university community with public-facing op-eds for World Politics Review.