Experts in the News | Miller Center

Democracy Initiative to launch two new labs

Melody Barnes, co-director of the Democracy Initiative, said the lab selection committee reviewed a number of outstanding proposals from interdisciplinary teams featuring faculty from numerous UVA schools and academic departments before selecting Sechser and Vaidhyanathan’s projects. “Ultimately, we selected two new labs well-aligned with the Democracy Initiative’s mission – rigorous scholarship and research, enhanced opportunities for students to explore the practice of democracy in and beyond the classroom, and a commitment to engage policymakers, practitioners and the public,” Barnes said.

Melody Barnes

Democracy Initiative to launch two new labs

Sechser said the Democratic Statecraft lab will enlist nine faculty members from the departments of history, politics and psychology, as well as the Batten School and the School of Law. “At the end of World War II, the United States began constructing a world order based on the core principles of democratic governance, the rule of law and free trade,” said Sechser, who also holds appointments as a Batten School professor and senior fellow at the Miller Center, and whose research interests include coercive diplomacy, emerging technologies, nuclear security and political violence. “But those core principles are increasingly under threat today."

Todd Sechser

The Suez Crisis and the fog of diplomacy

In Suez Deconstructed, Philip Zelikow, a historian at the University of Virginia and former counselor of the Department of State, argues that students of strategy have as much to learn from Suez as its much-studied cousins. In making this case, Zelikow is joined by Ernest May, who was a venerated Harvard historian, and the Harvard Suez Team, a group of six scholars recruited to conduct research for the project. The authors began their work in the 1990s, but were interrupted, among other things, by Zelikow’s service in government and May’s death in 2009. Zelikow has returned to finish the book at an auspicious moment for examining the kind of war that Suez represents — a multi-power crisis, in which states of every size and strength play major roles.

Philip Zelikow

New Directions in Arms Control

The question of extending New START, however, is far more complex and must be assessed in light of fundamental changes in the geostrategic environment since the treaty was negotiated a decade ago.

Eric Edelman

Chris Lu on current state of 2020 Democratic field

"We're about two miles into the marathon right now," says Miller Center Practitioner Senior Fellow Chris Lu, "and the toughest part of the race is still ahead."

Chris Lu

Charlottesville wasn't about Robert E. Lee, Mr. President. It was about racism

Trump's decision to double-down on his "very fine people" comments, more than a year and a half after the deadly Unite the Right rally, was particularly shocking -- because of everything that has happened since. Investigations have made clear that the rallygoers engaged in coordinated acts of political violence, including the torchlight rally on August 11, 2017, in which they chanted "Jews will not replace us" before attacking anti-racist demonstrators on the grounds of the University of Virginia. And subsequent massacres in the United States and abroad have shown how deadly their ideology continues to be.

Nicole Hemmer