By: Imogen Francis/Staff Writer
The Dorothea Green Lecture Series: State of the World 2019 took place in the Graham Center Ballrooms on Thursday, Jan. 10 and Friday, Jan. 11. The discussions focused on global relations and U.S. foreign policy while touching on North Korea, Russia, Cuba, and immigration.
The event consisted of multiple panels of experts from different concentrations such as economics, trade and foreign policy.
The panels were bipartisan, which in today’s political climate is interesting, according to Matt Kaminski, global editor at Politico. He was the Friday morning session moderator.
“The special thing about the State of the World Green School event is that every panelist is up there not for political reasons or personal bias reasons, but because of achievements in their lives that have made them research experts,” said Katerina Geisler, a sophomore studying international relations, political science and economics. “They are able to respectfully debate about different issues that we don’t necessarily talk about as much in school.”
Members of the audience ask questions to panelists at the end of the session’s discussion.
The first session on Friday began with a conversation on hot spots around the globe. With an audience of over 100 people, topics such as Trump, Brexit and future world wars were discussed and debated.
Immigration was also a critical issue throughout the event. A panel of four speakers—Elisa Massimino, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government; Anne C. Richard, a professor at Georgetown University; Peter Skerry, a professor of political science at Boston College; and Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera, former Costa Rican president and professor at the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center at FIU—talked about immigration in the U.S. and throughout Europe.
Mirela Turkic, a senior in international relations, said the grade of experts they brought in was high and that they had a good grasp on the material.
The immigration panel addressed the recent Oval Office speech by President Donald Trump about the wall on the southern border.
One audience member asked whether a border wall would be effective. Guillermo made it clear that if immigrants want to migrate into the U.S., a wall is not going to stop them.
Panelists discuss issues and concerns related to immigration within the U.S. and globally.
Speaking on U.S. and Saudi Arabia relations, a following panel discussed the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Many of us knew Jamal Khashoggi.” said Michele Dunne, the director of Middle East Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She went on to express the shock she had felt following his brutal murder.
As the audience grew, a new panel of experts turned to the topic of threats to democracy.
Moderator Charles Davidson, publisher at The American Interest, lead the conversation on authoritarianism, corruption, ultra-nationalism and disinformation.
The panel included Martin Palouš, a former member of parliament in the Czech Republic and the director of the Vaclav Havel Program for Human Rights and diplomacy at the University; Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, of Georgetown University; Will Inboden, of the University of Texas-Austin; and Daniel Twining, head of the International Republican Institute.
Left to right: Daniel Twining, Martin Palouš, Will Inboden, Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, Charles Davidson
The last panel of the series covered the issue of Putin’s Russia, with panelists from Russia, Georgia and Lithuania. This was the most geographically diverse group.
The panelists gave their first-hand experience of living in countries directly impacted by Putin.
Nino Evgenidze, of the Economic Policy Research Center, lives in Georgia, a country which Russia controls 20 percent of. She shared that 40 miles away from her house, in territory that Russia controls, people are being kidnapped and killed every day.
The lecture series finished off with a thank you to the University students that attended the panels and to the many panelists that shared their views and information regarding the state of the world.
The Dorothea Green Lecture Series will return in January 2020.
Photos by Anna Radinsky/PantherNOW
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