deepmaharjan

The world continues to blame COVID, and the poorest countries’ lack access to adequate vaccine supplies and the logistics to deliver them. The “Global South” has been calling for global health equity while the “Global North” has emphasized the need for global health security. International organizations remain deeply engaged in the current pandemic response even as the World Health Organization also looks to the future. WHO member states have begun negotiating a possible pandemic treaty so the world is better prepared for the next pandemic. Its prospects are uncertain.

Ambassador John E. Lange (Ret.) is Senior Fellow for Global Health Diplomacy at the United Nations Foundation, where he focuses on issues related to global health security and the work of the World Health Organization. He has held leadership positions in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and the Measles & Rubella Initiative. Earlier, he spent four years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation engaging in high-level global health advocacy with African governments.

Lange had a distinguished 28-year career in the Foreign Service at the U.S. Department of State, where he was a pioneer in the field of global health diplomacy and a leader in pandemic preparedness and response. He was the State Department’s Special
Representative on Avian and Pandemic Influenza from 2006-2009. He also served tours of duty as Deputy Inspector General; Deputy U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at the inception of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief; and U.S. Ambassador to Botswana and Special Representative to the Southern African Development Community (1999-2002), where HIV/AIDS was his signature issue.

Lange led the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as Chargé d’Affaires at the time of the August 7, 1998, Al-Qaeda bombing, for which he received the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award. Earlier, he had tours of duty at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva and the American Embassies in Lomé, Togo; Paris, France; and Mexico City, Mexico.

He has an M.S. degree from the National War College and J.D. and B.A. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The number of severe and sometimes catastrophic disruptive events has been rapidly increasing. Extreme weather events including floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters have become both more frequent and more severe, whilst events such as the COVID-19 pandemic represent a global threat to public health with huge economic effects that recovery packages tried to address.

These disruptive events, alone and in combination, have dramatic consequences on nature, human life, and the economy, calling for urgent action to mitigate their causes and adapt to their impacts.

Dr Banet’s talk is based on a new book for which she is lead co-editor: Resilience in Energy Infrastructure and Natural Resources Law.

Catherine Banet (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Scandinavian Institute of Maritime Law, Head of the Department of Energy and Resources Law, University of Oslo, Norway. Her research focuses on renewable energy, support schemes and alternative financing models, energy market design, energy infrastructures regulation, climate change mitigation measures including carbon capture and storage (CCS), offshore wind and hydrogen regulation. She has background from private law practice (Norway, France), the European Commission (DG ENV), U.S. diplomatic mission and academia. She is member of the Advisory Academic Group to the International Bar Association, Section for Energy, Environment and Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law (SEERIL), and Academic Fellow at the Center on Regulation in Europe (CERRE). She is the Chair of the Board of the Norwegian Energy Law Association

As US and world attention are riveted on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the effects of global warming in the Arctic with respect to US relations with Russia and China based on the need for sustainable economic development and increasing environmental protection have not disappeared. They remain existential problems for the planet. What do the rising temperatures in the Arctic region mean in terms of their outsized significance and in particular their causal effects on rising sea levels and extreme weather events globally? How has the Ukraine war affected cooperation in the Arctic Council and will the Arctic become yet another area where confrontation not cooperation prevail?

Ambassador Yalowitz was a career Foreign Service Officer from 1966-2001 and served twice as U.S. ambassador: to the Republic of Belarus from 1994-1997; and to Georgia from 1998-2001. Other overseas assignments included Moscow (twice) including in 1991 at the time of the breakup of the USSR, The Hague and the US Mission to NATO in Brussels. In 1984, Ambassador Yalowitz received a State Department superior honor award for crisis management in the shootdown of KAL-007. He was chosen for the Ambassador Robert Frasure award for peacemaking and conflict prevention in 2000 for his work to prevent the spillover of the Chechen war into Georgia. In 2009, he was invited to join the American Academy of Diplomacy whose members are former senior US Ambassadors and high-level government officials and in 2011 he was elected to membership in the Council on Foreign Relations.

Following his retirement in 2001 from the Department of State, Ambassador Yalowitz began teaching graduate courses at Georgetown University dealing with Russia’s conflicts with its South Caucasus neighbors. From 2003-12 he directed the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. During that time, he co-taught courses with faculty members on authoritarianism and democracy in the former USSR and the politics of language in the South Caucasus countries. He then returned to teaching at Georgetown where he was asked to serve as the Director of the Conflict Resolution MA Program from June 30, 2015 to July 1, 2018. Subsequently, he remained an adjunct professor at Georgetown, was the Cyrus Vance Visiting Scholar at Mount Holyoke College in the Spring Term of 2019, and most recently started teaching at Virginia Tech as an adjunct.

His opeds or articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The National Interest, The American Interest, The Hill, Politico, Newsweek, and Moscow Times amongst others and he is frequently interviewed and quoted. Ambassador Yalowitz is from Chicago (DOB May 28, 1941), graduated from the University of Wisconsin and has an MA, MPhil and Russian Institute Certificate from Columbia University. He speaks Russian.

Once the US completed the withdrawal of all American military forces and civilian personnel from Afghanistan on August 30,2022, the Taliban not only managed to forge a strategic partnership with the large and influential Haqqani network but was confronted by other challengers in this complex Afghan mosaic. All are Islamic terrorist groups operating within the “new” Afghanistan.

Who are these groups? Where are they based? Which are the most important? Do they have ties to the global Al’Qaida and ISIS Central organizations – and if so which ones do? How do they interact with the Taliban and each other? What are the differences, similarities and the alliances forged between them now that the US is gone? How do operate? What are their short and long term goals and their operational capabilities and, as a consequence, what kind of threats do they and will they likely present to the US? Will the US be able to track their activities without having “boots on the ground?”

This is the second webinar in our Afghanistan in the Aftermath series which we will be holding throughout February and part of March 2022 on Wednesdays from 12:30-1:45.

Dr. Nakhleh spoke most recently to the Santa Fe World Affairs Forum on Terrorism and the Middle East September 2016. It is a pleasure to welcome him back.

Dr. Emile Nakhleh, is a retired CIA Senior Intelligence Service Officer and founding director of CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program Office. He currently serves as Research Professor and Director of the Global and National Security Policy Institute (GNSPI) at the University of New Mexico. He is a National Intelligence Council/IC Associate and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Since retiring from the US Government in 2006, he has consulted on national security issues, particularly Islamic radicalization, terrorism, and the Arab states of the Middle East. He has published frequently on the “Arab Spring” in the Financial Times and Cipher Brief.

He holds a Ph.D. from the American University, Washington, D.C., in International Relations, an M.A. from Georgetown University in Political Science, and a B.A. from Saint John’s University, Minnesota, in Political Science. He is the author of numerous academic books and scholarly articles. He is currently President of the World Affairs Council – Albuquerque. He and his wife, Ilonka Lessnau Nakhleh, live in Albuquerque, NM.