2012-2013 Season

June 2013 - Special Luncheon "Update on Syria, the Arab Spring and Palestinian Issues"

Ambassador Rolf Willy Hansen, Norway’s Ambassador to Syria, former Norwegian Consul General in Minneapolis and CFR member, has had a distinguished career as a Norwegian diplomat. His assignments include service as Consul General in Hong Kong, three years with the Norwegian Embassy in Paris, two years as Second Secretary at the Norwegian Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, numerous diplomatic positions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including press and cultural assignments, advisor on security and military issues, and Regional Advisor on Middle East Affairs. In addition, Ambassador Hansen represented Norway in Namibia during that country's transition to independence in 1989-1990 and established the Norwegian Embassy in Windhoek. From 2005 to 2008, Ambassador Hansen served as Norwegian Consul General to the Upper Midwest, based in Minneapolis, and was an active member of the St. Paul-Minneapolis CFR. Since 2008, he has been Norway's Ambassador to Syria, in which role he serves as the principal western interlocutor with the political leadership of Hamas. In addition, he is now Policy Director in charge of aid coordination to the Palestinians, as Norway currently leads the group of international donors to the Palestinian Authority.

June 2013 - Special Luncheon "The Eurasian Cauldron"

Wayne Merry, Senior Fellow for Europe & Eurasia at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. He is widely published and a frequent speaker on topics relating to Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Balkans, European security and trans-Atlantic relations. In twenty-six years in the United States Foreign Service, he worked as a diplomat and political analyst in Moscow, East Berlin, Athens, New York and Tunis, and served in the State, Defense and Treasury Departments as well as on Capitol Hill and with the U.S. Marine Corps. He studied at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), Princeton University’s Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and the U.S. Army Russian Institute.

May 2013 “Time To Play Chess Not Checkers With Iran.”

Barbara Slavin, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center and also Washington correspondent for Al-Monitor.com, a new website devoted to news from and about the Middle East. The author of a 2007 book, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the US and the Twisted Path to Confrontation, she is a regular commentator on U.S. foreign policy and Iran on NPR, PBS and C-SPAN. A career journalist, Slavin previously served as assistant managing editor for world and national security of The Washington Times, senior diplomatic reporter for USA TODAY, Cairo correspondent for The Economist and as an editor at The New York Times Week in Review.

Slavin has covered such key foreign policy issues as the U.S.-led war on terrorism in Iraq, policy toward "rogue" states, the Iran-Iraq war, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She has traveled to Iran eight times and was the first U.S. newspaper reporter to interview Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She also served as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she wrote Bitter Friends, and as a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where she researched and wrote the report Mullahs, Money and Militias: How Iran Exerts Its Influence in the Middle East.

April 2013 “The CIA’s Secret Weapons.”

John Hollister Hedley joined the CIA as an analyst of Soviet foreign policy over 40 years ago and ‘retired’ as Chairman of their Publications Review Board, which passes judgment prior to publication on writing about intelligence by persons who have secrecy obligations with CIA. His varied career included editing the President’s Daily Brief, the nation’s most sensitive current intelligence publication, produced specifically for the President and read only by the few national security team-members he designates. He also served as Deputy Director for Public Relations and as the CIA’s Chief of Employee Communications. A member of the Senior Intelligence Service, John was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal for “especially commendable services” in communication, and the Career Intelligence Medal for Special Achievement. Since ‘retiring’ he has often been on contract with CIA to teach young officers the art of writing about world crises in 24 words or less, and to help with the agency’s Officers in Residence program.

March 2013 "Mideast Conflicts: Historical and Geographical Contexts."

Francis R. Nicosia, Professor of History and Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University. Frank is currently writing a history of Nazi Germany's policy in the Middle East before and during World War II. Frank’s most recent publication was Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge UP, 2008), and he has many peer-reviewed articles in English and German in scholarly journals and collections include six essays in The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook. He has received many grants and fellowships for his research in Germany, Israel, England, and the USA, including two Senior Fulbright Research Awards in Berlin (1992/3, and 2006/7), and a Charles Revson Foundation Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He has been a visiting professor at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism of the Technical University in Berlin, and at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Before receiving his PhD in history from McGill University in Montreal in 1978, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in a small desert village in Libya, and then taught English and history at a high school in a small town in southern Germany for two years.

February 2013 "Understanding the Crisis in Mali: History, Geography and Policy Options."

William G. Moseley, Professor of Geography & African Studies, Macalester College, St. Paul. He has worked and conducted research in Mali over the past 25 years. More broadly, Professor Moseley works in West Africa and Southern Africa on issues related to food security, tropical agriculture, and environment and development policy. He is the author of four books and over sixty peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, with research funded by the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Program. Before becoming an academic, he worked on development issues in Africa for organizations such as the U.S. Peace Corps, Save the Children (UK), USAID and the World Bank Environment Department. He has published editorials in major news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education and Minneapolis StarTribune.

January 2013 "Immigration Reform 2013: Why, When, How & What it will mean for MN and the U.S."

John Keller, Executive Director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) in St. Paul. He graduated Cum Laude, from Hamline School of Law, and worked for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) as a staff attorney from 1998 through 2003, specializing in naturalization, deportation defense and family reunification. In 2005, he became ILCM’s Executive Director. Keller has also served as an Adjunct Professor at University of Minnesota Immigration Clinic. He worked to help create the state’s Working Group on Ethnic Heritage and New Americans in 2007 and has forged coalitions for immigration reform and defense that include labor, business, faith, civic and other partners. John is a frequent speaker on all immigration law and policy issues. As a result of ILCM’s work after the immigration raid in Worthington, Minnesota, John was named the “Minnesota Lawyer” Attorney of the Year in 2007, and ILCM received the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits 2007 Advocacy Award. In 2011, he was given the Minnesota Hispanic Bar Association’s Access to Justice Award.

December 2012 – Special Luncheon “National Security and Economic Threats to India and the Surrounding Region.”

General Shankar Roychowdhury (Ret’d), was born in 1937 in Calcutta, India. He entered the National Defence Academy in 1953, and was commissioned in 1957 as a 2nd Lt. in the Armoured Corps in 20 Lancers. Gen. Roychowdhury held various command and staff appointments in the Indian Army, and saw active service in Kashmir and Bangladesh. He was promoted to General and appointed Chief of Staff of the Indian Army in 1994. He retired in 1997, and moved back to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta).

Gen. Roychowdhury was a syndicated columnist at Kargil during the Indo–Pak border war in 1999. He is also the author of two books: Officially at Peace and Kargil 1999. His political career began in 1999 when he was elected unopposed as a consensus candidate from West Bengal to the Rajya Sabha (The Council of States [Senate]) of the Indian Parliament, where he represented his district until 2005.

December 2012 "Time to Start Thinking: America and the Specter of Decline.”

Edward Luce, Washington commentator for the UK-based Financial Times (FT). He is the author of Time to Start Thinking, a 2012 book arguing that unless America gets serious about dealing with its many challenges, it faces a long-term decline in global competitiveness similar to the decline of the British Empire that began a century ago. Luce covered the 2012 US presidential election and is now commenting on the so-called "fiscal cliff". He was the Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times from 2006 to 2011, and earlier its South Asia Bureau Chief, based in New Delhi. His 2006 book, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India, was a long-running best-seller in India. Luce joined the FT in 1995 as its Philippines correspondent and later served as its capital markets editor. In 2000, he was the chief speechwriter for Lawrence H. Summers, then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Luce earned a degree in politics, philosophy and economics from New College at the University of Oxford, and a postgraduate degree in newspaper journalism at City University in London.

November 2012 - Special Program "Today: Can the Cameron Government Stay the Course?"

Dr. Willie Henderson who is a former Director of the Alworth Institute for International Studies, University of Minnesota - Duluth and holds the honorary title of International Associate of the Alworth Institute. During an active academic career he worked at the University of Birmingham (UK), where he is an Emeritus Professor. He has a number of monographs and other publications and has lived in Botswana, Ghana and Zimbabwe. In retirement he has monitored the progress of Coalition politics in the UK. He also spends time between the UK, Poland, Italy and, when the opportunity arises, the United States.

November 2012 “Press Freedom 2.0: Opportunities and Threats Around the World."

Jane E. Kirtley is the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. She is an affiliated faculty member at the University of Minnesota Law School, and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School in 2004 and for the Notre Dame London Law Programme in 2012. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1999, Professor Kirtley was Executive Director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for 14 years, practiced law in New York and Washington, D.C., and was a reporter for newspapers in Indiana and Tennessee. She speaks frequently in the USA and abroad, most recently in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Rwanda and Thailand. She has written many articles on media law, freedom of information, and ethics for scholarly journals and the popular press, and in late 2010, her Media Law handbook was published by the U.S. Department of State.

Her honors include the Peter S. Popovich Award for Freedom of Information; the Edith Wortman First Amendment Matrix Foundation Award; the National FOI Hall of Fame; the National Scholastic Press Association’s Pioneer Award; and the John Peter Zenger Award for Freedom of the Press and the People’s Right to Know.

Prof. Kirtley’s J.D. is from Vanderbilt University Law School, and her bachelor’s and master’s of journalism degrees are from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is a member of the New York, District of Columbia, and Virginia state bars, and is admitted to practice in several federal circuits, as well as in the Supreme Court of the United States.

October 2012 - Special Program “World Views of the United States”

Andrew Nagorski, vice president and director of public policy at the EastWest Institute, New York. Prior to joining EWI in August 2008, he had a long career as an award-winning foreign correspondent and senior editor for Newsweek, reporting from Hong Kong, Moscow, Warsaw, Rome, Washington, Bonn and Berlin. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, of Polish parents, Nagorski grew up in the United States and abroad after his father joined the U.S. Foreign Service. A 1969 graduate of Amherst College, he taught high school social studies in Wayland, Massachusetts, for three years before embarking on his journalistic career.

Nagorski has written for numerous publications, and he is the author of five books. His latest book is Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (Simon & Schuster, 2012), which has received rave reviews in The Economist, Newsweek, The Weekly Standard, and on National Public Radio and the PBS Newshour, among others.

October 2012 "China's Faltering Economy, Historic Political Transition, and New Strategic Arc."

Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China (2001), and Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World (2006), is a columnist at Forbes.com and blogs at World Affairs Journal. He lived and worked in China and Hong Kong for almost two decades, most recently in Shanghai, as Counsel to the Paul Weiss law firm, and earlier in Hong Kong as Partner at Baker & McKenzie.

His writings on China have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and Barron's. He has spoken at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale, and other universities, and at The Brookings Institution, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, RAND, the American Enterprise Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and other institutions. He has given briefings at the National Intelligence Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Pentagon. He has also appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, CNBC, MSNBC, PBS, the BBC, and Bloomberg Television, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and he is a frequent co-host and guest on The John Batchelor Show.

September 2012 "Foreign Policy in the Next Presidential Administration"

Eric P. Schwartz, who became Dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs in October 2011, after a 25 year career in senior public service positions in government, at the UN and in the philanthropic and non-governmental communities. Previously, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, working with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton he served as the State Department’s principal humanitarian official, managing budgets, policy and programs for U.S. refugee admissions and U.S. international assistance worldwide. From 2006 to 2009, Eric directed the Connect U.S. Fund, a multi-foundation – NGO collaborative seeking to promote responsible U.S. engagement overseas. From 2005 to 2007, he served as UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan’s Deputy Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, and prior to that, in 2003 and 2004, as the second-ranking official at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. From 1993 to 2001, Eric served at the National Security Council at the White House, ultimately as Senior Director and Special Assistant to the President for Multilateral and Humanitarian Affairs.

Eric holds a law degree from New York University School of Law, a Master of Public Affairs degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the State University of New York at Binghamton.