Newsroom
Burkle Center Senior Fellow Gen. Wesley K. Clark (ret.) appointed to the President's Commission on White House Fellowships
President Obama appoints 28-member commission to recommend candidates for the White House Fellowship, Americas most prestigious program for leadership and public service.
Posted: 6/17/2009
Burkle Faculty Fellow Amy Zegart quoted in the NY Times on turf battles among spy chiefs
NYT's reporter Mark Mazzetti covers a recent dispute between Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Posted: 6/8/2009
How Obama Should Address Islamists and Jihadists
Bestselling author, columnist, and UC Riverside faculty member Reza Aslan has advice for the Obama administration on defeating transnational Muslim utopian radicals, or jihadists. Start, he says, by getting used to the idea of Islamists in politics.
Posted: 6/5/2009
Bagram: Is it Obama's New Guantanamo?
Burkle Center Director Kal Raustiala is quoted in a recent MSNBC article by Tom Curry on a ruling by Judge Bates which forces President Obama to confront the issue of the Afghan prison. Raustiala's reaction is that Judge Bates is trying to take away the incentive to bring outsiders (those captured outside Afghanistan) to Bagram. He wants to avoid the problem posed by Guantanamo that the government is incentivized to move individuals there to avoid habeas and other rights.
Posted: 6/3/2009
Testing Torture
Reporter Carey Shenkman's 3-part segment on torture featuring former U.S. Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander and former U.S. Army interrogator Eric Maddox. Alexander and Maddox came to UCLA to speak at the Burkle Center on April 24, 2009.
Posted: 5/26/2009
The New Guantanamo
Kal Raustiala is Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, where he teaches in the Program on Global Studies. In this op-ed recently published by The Huffington Post, he discusses the future of Guantanamo and the new Guantanamo - Bagram Air Base.
Posted: 5/26/2009
Congress' Poor Oversight of Intelligence Is Longstanding Problem
Amy Zegart is an associate professor of public policy at the School of Public Affairs, a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This op-ed, addressing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's charge that the CIA and the Bush Administration misled Congress in its briefings about interrogations of terrorist suspects, was published recently by NationalJournal.com.
Posted: 5/22/2009
Three Stops and a Chart
Read about the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture with Anderson Cooper as featured in the Jewish Journal.
Posted: 5/20/2009
Anderson Cooper Delivers Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA
The lecture series, established at UCLA in 2002, features scholars, journalists and policymakers who have contributed original analyses or constructive approaches to problems of international concern. Cooper spoke to a crowd of 900 on Sunday.
Posted: 5/18/2009
Cooper Honors Daniel Pearl
Though he never met Pearl, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said, he keeps a picture of him and another fallen journalist on his bulletin board at work as a source of inspiration. The Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture is cosponsored by the Burkle Center.
Posted: 5/18/2009
Ex-Interrogators Say Human Connection, Not Torture, Yields Results
In the national debate on whether the tactic of torture is warranted for the sake of national security, the experiences of the two former interrogators underscore the argument that torture is not an effective tool for unsealing secrets and getting at the truth.
Posted: 4/30/2009
Burkle Senior Fellow Kantathi Suphamonkhon: Can Thailand Avoid the Abyss?
Burkle Center Senior Fellow and 39th Foreign Minister of Thailand, Dr. Kantathi Suphamongkhon, explains in a widely circulated op-ed how his country can "reset" its politics.
Posted: 4/24/2009
Wangari Maathai Calls for Debt Forgiveness
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan founder of the global Green Belt Movement, told a Burkle Center audience that Africans "are literally slaves" to Western nations that profit from excessive interest payments on aid. Event coverage and video are available from Zocalo Public Square.
Posted: 4/21/2009
International Community Coming to Realize 'the Responsibility to Protect'
Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia and author of a landmark report on stopping genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity, said Tuesday at UCLA that the international community is coming to realize that "the sin is not intervention, the sin is indifference."
Posted: 4/15/2009
The Agonizing History of the CIA's Intelligence Failures
In a lecture addressed to an audience of nearly 200 in Dodd Hall on March 2nd, Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times and author of "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Anchor Books), discussed his deeply researched book, which won the 2007 National Book Award for nonfiction. The event was organized by the Burkle Center for International Relations.
Posted: 3/9/2009
VP of Colombia to lecture at UCLA
Francisco Santos Calderon to discuss his movement to increase awareness about cocaine on Wednesday, February 25, 2009.
Posted: 2/25/2009
VP of Colombia to discuss environmental, social damage caused by cocaine trade
Vice President Francisco Santos Caldern of Colombia will speak about "The Shared Responsibility Initiative: Cocaine's Ecocide in Colombia," an international campaign led by his office to create awareness about the major environmental and social damages resulting from coca cultivation, cocaine production and the international drug trade.
Posted: 2/20/2009
Conference on Two Systems, One World: US-China Relations under the Obama Administration
A conference on January 30, analyzing the most pressing challenges facing the Obama administration as it formulates its China policy -- from politics and security to energy, the environment, and the economy.
Posted: 2/17/2009
What Drives America's Wars And Are They Effective?
Sociology Professor Michael Mann and Gen. Wesley K. Clark (ret.), a senior fellow at the Burkle Center, engaged in a lively and insightful discussion on the topic of Perpetual War at a Feb. 9 event co-sponsored by the Burkle Center and the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History.
Posted: 2/17/2009
Nuclear Terrorism: Real or the Stuff of 9/11 Nightmares?
In a Feb. 4 talk cosponsored by the Burkle Center, RAND Corporation senior advisor Brian Michael Jenkins delivers a sober analysis of the evidence, and fears, that drive the debate about nuclear terrorism.
Posted: 2/13/2009
