​Reading, for people around the world, has been one of the primary ways to better understand the vast, complex, and uneven global landscape of immigration. Yet, immigration is not simply an abstract subject of study, not simply headlines flashing on our smartphone screens about distant events, not simply a topic for (often heated) policy debates. When it is, empathy and our ability to understand and appreciate the ways in which we are all interconnected are lost or diminished. Immigration, we cannot forget, is peoples’ lives. And the experiences of refugees, immigrants, asylees—their journeys, fears, and hopes—are as varied and complicated as the individuals living them. Books like The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen and We the Interwoven: An Anthology of Bicultural Iowa, Vols. I, II, and III, edited by Andrea Wilson, are important and necessary counterweights. In them, refugee and immigrant writers bind us together through the power of storytelling and the sharing of personal experiences. They imbue personality, nuance, and contradiction—humanity—to that vast, complex, and uneven subject. Through their words, we see each other with our many similarities and differences, anew. Empathy deepens and understanding grows. Perhaps, too, a call to action—for us, the impetus to welcome and support new neighbors to Iowa. In this session, the panel will discuss what it has been like for them to write and share their migration stories, why they chose to do so, and maybe offer some insights about the craft of writing personal narratives. They will reveal what it has been like to receive readers’ feedback. And they will share their views on what the publication of refugee and immigrant firsthand accounts, theirs and others, offer readers and society and why such voices are so very important today.

Antonia Rivera was born in Distrito Federal, Mexico. At age six, she crossed the border and spent her youth in California. Eventually, she received temporary protection and a work permit through DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). She writes about migration and what it means to be part of the 1.5 generation. She now lives in Des Moines, Iowa and works at Grassroots Law Project.

​

Eyad Said was born in Damascus, Syria. He lives with his family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He earned a master’s degree in banking and finance from the University of Damascus, Syria, before getting a PhD in mathematics from Louisiana State University. A husband and father of two, he is an assistant professor of mathematics at Mount Mercy University.

​

​Stratis Giannakouros is the Director of the UI Office of Sustainability. He comes to the UI from Arizona State University, where he served as project manager and program manager for the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. Prior to that, he was the assistant director at the Center for Sustainable Communities at Luther College and sustainability outreach coordinator at Colorado State University. Mr. Giannakouros has a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Loras College and a master’s degree in Environmental Politics and Policy from Colorado State University.

Heather Brandon-Smith is Legislative Director for Militarism and Human Rights at the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) in  Washington, DC. She leads FCNL’s work to repeal outdated war authorization, promote respect for human rights and international law, and reduce U.S. armed interventions around the world. Prior to joining FCNL, she served as the Advocacy Counsel for National Security at Human Rights First, where she worked to advance U.S. national security policies that are consistent with human rights and the rule of law. Ms. Brandon-Smith is an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Her writing has appeared in The Hill, Lawfare, Just Security, and Intercross (the blog of the International Committee of the Red Cross). She holds an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in Politics and International Relations, an LL.B., and an LL.M. from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

​

For months, Russia has been amassing troops and weaponry along its border with Ukraine and, more recently, in Belarus to Ukraine’s north. It has accompanied the force build-up with maximalist demands for concessions that Western states cannot and would not agree to. Neither diplomacy nor preparations for expanded sanctions have led to a resolution. A Russian military incursion of some sort seems increasingly close at hand. Three specialists on international conflict and Russian foreign policy will address pressing questions about the situation, including what international and domestic factors could be motivating Russian actions, what tools might still be available to deter a Russian attack, and how a new conflict in Ukraine would alter the security situation in Europe and beyond

​Sara McLaughlin Mitchell is the F. Wendell Miller Professor in the University of Iowa Department of Political Science  She received her Ph.D. in Political Science at Michigan State University in 1997. She is Co-Director of the Issue Correlates of War Project (http://www.paulhensel.org/icow.html) and an Associate Editor of Foreign Policy Analysis and Research & Politics.  She is coauthor of Domestic Law Goes Global: Legal Traditions and International Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Guide to the Scientific Study of International Processes (Wiley-Blackwell 2012), The Triumph of Democracy and the Eclipse of the West (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), and Conflict, War, and Peace: An Introduction to Scientific Research (CQ Press/Sage 2013), she has edited several special journal issues, and she has published more than thirty journal articles and book chapters.  She is the recipient of several major research awards from the National Science Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development, as well as numerous research grants from the University of Iowa and Florida State University.  Her areas of expertise include international conflict, democratic peace, international organizations, diversionary theory, international courts, conflict management, territorial, maritime, and river issues, and time series analysis.
Professor Mitchell is co-founder of the Journeys in World Politics workshop, a mentoring workshop for junior women studying international relations (http://www.saramitchell.org/journeys.html). Mitchell serves on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals including American Political Science Review, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Interactions, and Political Analysis.  She received the Faculty Scholar Award (2007-2010) and the Collegiate Scholar Award (2011) from the University of Iowa. 

​Paul van Hooft is a Senior Strategic Analyst at HCSS and the Co-Chair of The Initiative on the Future of Transatlantic Relations. He was a postdoctoral fellow from 2018 to 2020 at the Security Studies Program (SSP) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including as a 2018-2019 Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow. His work focuses on: the origins and logic of American grand strategy; European grand strategy and security; nuclear strategy; Indo-Pacific security, transatlantic relations; alliances; and extended deterrence. Paul attained his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Amsterdam (UVA) and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) from 2016 to 2018. Paul received the 2016 prize from the Dutch and Flemish political science associations for his dissertation on the impact of experiences with war on postwar grand strategy.

For the last three years, the energy world has been fixated on the fits and starts of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, as changes in  EU regulations and regulatory competencies, as well as pressure from key stakeholders, have kept the project under a big question mark. A July 2021 agreement between the US and Germany seemed to give a green light to the project. In my presentation, I will discuss the following issues:

1. What makes Nord Stream so complex from a regulatory and governance perspective, and how is this related to the specific materiality characteristics of natural gas as related to other fossil fuels? 
2. What is the Russian context of the project, and how do Russian governance issues affect it? 
3. Up to which point do the July 2021 agreements really mean the pipeline will be put in use? 
4. What perspectives and challenges does the new “status quo” open for Ukraine? 

Margarita M. Balmaceda is a political scientist working at the intersection of international relations, the political economy of authoritarianism and democracy, and technology, with a special expertise in energy politics (oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, renewables), and commodities -- especially steel and the metallurgical sector-- in Ukraine, the former USSR, and the EU. She has a PhD  in Politics from Princeton University and is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. Concurrently, she heads the Study Group on “Energy materiality: Infrastructure, Spatiality and Power” at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg (Germany) and is an Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard.  Capitalizing on her Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian and German skills, in addition to her native Spanish, she has conducted extensive field research in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungary, Germany and Finland. Her new book, Russian Energy Chains: the Remaking of  Technopolitics from Siberia to  Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia University Press, 2021) analyzes how differences in the material characteristics of different types of energy can affect how different types of energy may be “used” as sources of  foreign and domestic power. She is currently developing a project on metallurgy, conflict and political development and struggling through courses at the World Steel Association’s Steel University. ​

​The double crisis, political and sanitary, that Myanmar is currently undergoing, sheds new light on the political and social transformations that have affected the country over the last ten years. Whilst the February 1st military coup literally kidnapped the hopes of a whole generation of citizens thirsting for democracy, it also revealed a failed transition, where the ghosts of decolonization continue to haunt any effort at nation building. Based on fieldwork among “ordinary citizens” in Myanmar as well as discourses in social and news media, Dr. Boutry will discuss diverse notions such as "legitimacy", “clientelism” or "federalism", and how their different understandings may reveal the underlying causes of the current crisis. Finally, although the current period is definitely a dark episode, he will explore some possible positive outcomes. 

Dr. Maxime Boutry obtained a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology in 2007 and has been living in Myanmar since then. His scholarly interests revolve around forms of continuity in the sociocultural changes affecting Burmese society through the study of “frontiers” (borderlands, transition spaces, interstices). Maxime is an associate researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CASE - CNRS) and the laboratory on “Local heritage, environment and globalization” (PALOC – IRD/MNHN). He also works for several NGOs particularly in the field of land tenure security. His publications include “The backdoors of resistance. Identities in the Malay Peninsula’s maritime borderlands”, in A. Horstmann, M. Saxer and A. Rippa (eds), Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands (2018), and “How far from national identity? Dealing with the concealed diversity of Myanmar”, in Robinne, F. and Egreteau, R. (Eds.), Metamorphosis: Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar (2015).

​For nearly 75 years, the United States has championed a world order based on multilateral cooperation and the rule of law. While U.S. policies have never matched U.S. rhetoric over that time period, it would be fair to say that the United States has been a leader in promoting and supporting a rule-based international order. Professor Carlson will examine the Trump Administration’s actions and rhetoric with respect to the international rule of law and consider whether the Trump administration’s behavior reflects a sharp change from the past or merely a more honest and straightforward presentation of a longstanding “American First” approach.

​Jeff Biggers is the American Book Award–winning author of several works of history, memoir, journalism, and theater, including The United States of Appalachia, praised by the Citizen Times as a “masterpiece of popular history”; State Out of the Union, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top Ten Social Science book in 2012; and Reckoning at Eagle Creek, winner of the Delta Prize for Literature and David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting.