Monterey Institute President Sunder Ramaswamy gives an Institute update to MIIS faculty, staff, and students.

Continuing their commitment to tell the stories of the marginalized people in Gujarat, Prof. Pushpa Iyer and her students made two presentations this month. The first was at a conference at the Henry Institute in Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Three students and Prof. Iyer presented at the panel which was titled “Religion, Riots and Rules: Power Politics in Gujarat”

The second presentation was for the members of the Indian American Muslim Council. The webinar was attended by over 50 members all over the US and was titled Gandhi’s Gujarat or Modi’s Gujarat?: Reflections from the Field. Four students and Prof. Iyer presented at this webinar.

Also in March, Prof. Iyer and a student spoke on Gujarat in a KPFA radio show. (Segment begins at minute 38.)

During finals week at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, students are busy preparing for exams, projects, and starting their careers after graduating on May 18. The combination of stress and excitement surrounding the end of the academic year leaves students looking for opportunities to unwind and relax.

The Office of Student Services and the Animal Friends Rescue Project (AFRP) in Pacific Grove recently collaborated to bring foster dogs to the Monterey Institute campus for that very purpose. On Thursday, May 9th, Student Services hosted the on-campus “Puppy” Room, taking part in a national trend happening at schools across the country. The AFRP brought nine dogs to campus for a two-hour period to help students relax and de-stress.

Animal therapy is a growing trend at many academic institutions as studies have shown the positive benefits to interacting with four-legged friends range from stress relief to improved concentration. Megan Joyce, Assistant Director for Student Life Activities, organized the event and said, “We had a great response from students for the event; it gave people an opportunity to do something fun and get away from finals stress for a few moments.”

The volunteers from the AFRP, including MIIS student Kayla Gilchrest, commented that this is their most successful event to date! Over 150 students came to the Holland Center to play, hug, and visit with the dogs. Student response to the dogs was positive with comments ranging from a relieved “thank you,” to “this is great!”

The “Puppy” Room was the finale to a week of stress reduction events organized for students by Student Services and the Student Council that included free massages, coffee in the library, and a stretching and relaxation workshop.

At the upcoming (May 27) Stockholm Seminar on Japan, GSIPM professor Tsuneo Akaha will speak on “Russia’s Pivot to East Asia.”

The Proefessional Risk Managers’ International Association (PRMIA) has named GSIPM professor Sandra Dow as a Subject Matter Expert for advisory groups on Enterprise Risk Management and Reputational Risk.

If you missed the presentation on Information Security by Middlebury colleagues Ian Burke and Chris Norris, you can view it here.

Stephen Stec, adjunct professor in GSIPM, was selected to participate in the Workshop on ‘Rights in Environmental Governance: Explaining their Emergence, Examining their Effectiveness’ held at Yale University on April 26th and 27th, 2013, by the Governance, Environment & Markets Initiative at Yale (GEM), the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy (YCELP), and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).  Stephen is working on a Guide to the UNEP Bali Guidelines on Rio Principle 10 and one of the outcomes of the workshop was an agreement to link his work as an input to the work of John Knox, UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and the Environment, who will submit a report to the UN in 2015.

In addition, for those interested in Rio Principle 10 issues, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe has recently announced the online posting of the text-only final version of “The Aarhus Convention: An Implementation Guide” (2d ed.).  The print version will include a Foreword by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.  Stephen Stecis the only co-author of both the first and second editions.  The first edition of the Guide, published in 2000, has been cited as authority in the courts of a number of Aarhus Convention states parties, and by the European Court of Justice.  The Guide is available online.

Project Manager Masako Toki reports that ” This year’s Critical Issues Forum (CIF), one of the flagship nonproliferation education projects at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), marked a significant milestone. For the first time in the sixteen-year history of the project, it engaged Japanese high schools from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities devastated by atomic weapons in 1945.”

The forum took place on April 19th and 20th at Santa Catalina High School in Monterey. Students from eight US high schools in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, one Russian high school from the closed nuclear city of Novouralsk, and three Japanese schools from Hiroshima and Nagasaki shared their research on this year’s topic, “Toward a World without Nuclear Weapons: Progress, Prospects, and Challenges.”

For an extensive report and many more photos of this event, see the CNS web site.

If you haven’t seen CNS director William Potter lately, it’s because he has been spending most of his time in the air pursuing a prodigious agenda of meetings, conferences and speaking engagements:

1. Hosted a meeting of the Program on Strategic Stability Evaluation (POSSE) at MIIS on April 1-2, 2013.  POSSE members are young scholars and government officials from China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States.  The project is supported by Carnegie Corporation of NY and is co-organized by CNS and Georgia Tech.
2. Co-chaired and spoke as a discussant at three panels at the International Studies Association Convention in San Francisco on April 3-5, 2013, including a panel featuring former CNS Diplomat-in-Residence and current Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano and MacArthur Foundation President Robert Gallucci.
3. Moderated a panel on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty at the North American meeting of the International Network of Emerging Nuclear Specialists, Washington, DC (April 7, 2013).
4. Speaker at Round Table on International Treaties and Instruments at the International Nonproliferation Conference organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, April 8-9, 2013.
5. Co-organizer and co-chair of the CNS-Harvard Belfer Center Workshop on “Stopping the Next Black Market in Nuclear Technology,” Washington, DC (April 10-11, 2013)
6. Speaker on “The Prospects for a Conference on the Middle East WMD-Free Zone” at the P-5 Public Event On the Way to the 2015 NPT Review Conference, hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and the PIR Center, Geneva (April 19, 2013).
7. Invited participant at the Geneva Center for Security Policy Retreat on “Nuclear Weapons: State of Play?” in Glion, Switzerland (April 20-21, 2013).
8. Member of the Kyrgyz Delegation to the 2013 NPT Preparatory Committee Meeting in Geneva, April 22-May 3, 2013.
9. Co-organizer and Moderator of the Disarmament Dialogue II: Prospects for the Open-Ended Working Group on Disarmament,” Geneva, April 27, 2013.