Reflections & Public Posts

Ardhitya Eduard Yeremia Lalisang

Department of International Relations and Asia Research Center, Universitas Indonesia

The urgency of the global pursuit of clean energy is beyond dispute. Yet what receives far less  attention is how violently unequal the process of producing clean energy actually is, and how  unevenly that inequality distributes across the globe. The supply chains that feed the green  transition depend on the extraction of critical minerals sourced overwhelmingly from the Global  South. At the commodity frontiers where these minerals

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Jose Fernando Gómez Rojas

Executive Director

Regional Centre for Responsible Business and Entrepreneurship

Based on the applied research we conduct at CREER, our proposal is founded on understanding the dilemmas related to various notions of justice within the framework of business activities in general. In particular, we aim to design methodologies and collaborative understanding frameworks for the identification of negative human rights impacts and the assignment of roles and responsibilities in a concerted manner, focused

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Samuel George

Documentary Filmmaker

Bertelsmann Foundation

I was honored to participate in the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver workshop Navigating the Complexities of the Clean Energy Era.  

As a documentary filmmaker with a series of pieces on critical mineral supply chains, I sincerely appreciated that my work was taken seriously in this academic community, and it was a pleasure to share what I had learned about

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Jessica DiCarlo

University of Utah

Participating in the workshop Navigating the Complexities of the Clear Energy Era offered a much-needed opportunity to reflect on the ethical, political, and spatial dimensions of multiple facets of the global low-carbon transition. Through conversations with scholars and practitioners working in different regions, on different minerals and in various supply chain stages, we covered a wide range of issues, from governance to extractive industries themselves to community-level implications. One aspect of my contribution

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Deborah Avant, Devin Finn, Linda Mendez-Barrientos, and Tricia Olsen

At our workshop “Navigating the Complexities of the Clean Energy Era,” we convened a conversation examining the risks, opportunities, tradeoffs, and tensions shaping the global energy transition. This gathering was part of a broader initiative, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, aimed at fostering more ethical and reflective approaches to research engagement. Central to this effort was the creation of a space where researchers could grapple

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Sef Ashiagbor

National Democratic Institute

The clean energy transition involves a complex web of ethical dilemmas for individuals; research institutions; associations; corporations; government institutions; international platforms; and intergenerational considerations. Based on existing principles and protocols on human rights, the environment and transparency and accountability in government, guidelines for addressing some of these ethical dilemmas are clearer than others. In addition, for many of these

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The clean energy transition is not optional. It is a moral imperative to combat climate change and protect the planet for future generations. Yet this transformation is far more than a technical challenge. It is a deeply political and ethical question about how we share costs and benefits in a world marked by inequality. 

Phasing out fossil fuels is essential,

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Liesbet Hooghe

European University Institute and UNC-Chapel Hill

August 4, 2025

Introduction[1]

The illiberal turn in the world is undeniable (Applebaum 2025; Enyedi et al. 2025; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). The Variety of Democracy’s 2025 lists the following facts:

• The level of democracy for the average world citizen in 2025 is back to 1985.
• Nearly 3 out of 4 persons in the

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Daniele Caramani

Ernst B. Haas Chair in European Governance and Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre

European University Institute

European University Institute, Florence, 9–10 June 2025
Session 1: The Global Assault on the Liberal World Order

Question 1: Is the decline of the liberal order an inevitable consequence of its own contradictions?

In the institutional systems of nation-states, the liberal political order is founded on the principle of limiting all forms of power and their diffusion of

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Hilary Appel

Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Claremont McKenna College (CMC)

August 15, 2025[1]

Since the end of the Cold War, former communist, East European states were given the opportunity to become full members of a Western-led liberal international order (Ikenberry, 2018). A broad set of countries could pursue the goals of stability, peace, and economic growth by establishing or joining multilateral treaties and liberal organizations, with the benefit

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Elisabeth Leake

The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

“Small” states historically have been central to upholding and legitimizing the liberal international order – often in the face of opposition of the world’s great powers. But they also reveal a longstanding paradox in this international order – no state engaged this order can be defined as wholly “liberal.”

Interrogating Terms
In our current moment – and with the

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Introduction

In his seminal book on varieties of international political orders, John Ikenberry construed that after 1945 a constitutional international order (hereafter: CIO) had been established, an order where “international institutions bind powerful and weaker states together, creating a difficult-to-change institutional framework within which their relations are carried out, and thereby establishing some limits on the arbitrary and indiscriminate exercise

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Rachel A. Epstein

Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

How to help students formulate possible policy responses to undermine Fidesz’s authoritarian  grip on power in Hungary (with lessons for other authoritarian contexts).

In offering the course to 24 graduate students at Korbel, I had two main partners: József Péter Martin, executive director of Transparency International, Hungary, and Dóra Piroska, professor at

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Dr. Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira

Associate Professor of Sociology

Ohio State

This reflection is relevant to people engaging with government officials, policymakers, practitioners, educators, and those who experienced atrocities.

• How to advocate for policy recommendations that, at face value, cause discomfort.

Dr. Nyseth Nzitatira (aka Hollie Nyseth Brehm) obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2014.

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Jesse Driscoll

Introductory Note: Jesse Driscoll is an associate professor of political science at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He is an area specialist in Central Asia, the Causcasus, and the Russian-speaking world. In 2022, he took a year's leave from UCSD to serve in the Plans division of the Joint Staff (J5, Europe/NATO/Russia Division). The following narrative includes

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Dipali Mukhopadhyay

The challenges:

• Present recommendations on the U.S. role in Afghanistan along with empirically informed enumeration of various potential decisions and outcomes
• Bring a different range of voices and perspectives into the U.S. foreign policy debate on Afghanistan
• Grapple with what to do with knowledge production that is unused in policy creation

The background and policy

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Charli Carpenter

The challenges:

• Balancing the desire to collaborate with / provide analytical support to a government agency on a matter of crucial national and human security importance, with the need to maintain institutional and analytical autonomy in our own academic-practitioner interactions.
• Managing expectations by practitioners / policymakers about what type of analysis could be reasonably and ethically produced

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Daniel Brunstetter

The challenges:

• Moving beyond academic critique and arm’s length critiques of defense policy from a “just war” perspective to discussions within military circles based on a more interdisciplinary perspective
• Engaging with future peace and security policymakers to update the “moral vocabulary” around the use of force to take into account the new dilemmas of force short of

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Sarah Parkinson

The challenges:

• How to decide when to remove oneself from a research project due to ethical concerns
• How to informally report on policy processes and retain policy relevance even while disengaging from a specific project

The background and policy setting:

Parkinson earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2013.

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John R. Emery

The challenges:

• Determining in which stages of development or deployment of technology to engage with machine learning, using a just war logic
• Choosing to closely engage with a military project as a critical scholar, given that the use of the project may result in the loss of human life

The background and policy setting:

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Elisabeth King

The Challenge:

Responding to requests for substantive revisions to consultancy work that go against one’s findings, analysis, or professional opinion

The Background and Policy Setting:

King is a political scientist committed to conducting policy-relevant research related to war, peace, development, and education. Over the past 15 years, alongside her university-based work, she has partnered with a

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Virginia Haufler

The challenges:

• How to collaborate with business representatives in ways that generate fruitful conversations while maintaining your own integrity and reputation
• How to recommend partnerships with business to solve global problems without damaging the partners' reputation and legitimacy or providing business with a shield against legitimate criticism

Background:

Virginia Haufler is a scholar whose

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Miles Kahler

The challenge:

• Navigating whether and how to engage with authoritarian regimes in academic spaces
• Lending support to voices situated in authoritarian regimes, without jeopardizing their work and safety

The background and policy setting:

Miles Kahler is a distinguished professor at American University in the fields of international politics and international political economy and Senior

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Jacqueline Best

The challenges:

• Identifying and understanding the limits and failures of policy expertise, as well as the role and nature of policy ignorance when engaging with policymakers, while acknowledging that policymakers who work in the field of economics are often under a great deal of pressure to get things right
• Approaching issues as a political economist and a

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Nadia Brown

The challenges:

• How to show the value of diversity and intersectionality for policymaking in an era of heightened polarization.
• How to effectively contribute to the policy arena as a black feminist when your expertise is in question from the gate given who you are.
• How to push against situations where your identity brings diversity, but

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The challenges:

• Navigating positionality in academic work and community engagement on racial profiling by police
• Improving the ethical issues surrounding expert witnesses, public speaking, and training

The background and policy setting:

This reflection was completed by a professor who studies the economics of stratification, considering such topics as equitable growth, gender, and macroeconomic tools.

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Tanisha M. Fazal

The challenges:

• How to fund policy relevant research without compromising ethics.
• The complexities of managing government funding.
• The dilemmas of private foundation funding.
• The positionality of funding dilemmas.

The background and policy setting:

All scholars need funding for research. Sometimes we need to pay for field research, sometimes for surveys. Sometimes – indeed, often

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Shareen Hertel

The challenge:

• Providing policy advice on corporate engagement to one’s university from a human rights perspective, while being far removed from corporate decision-making.
• Providing advice to the university as a professor but in a context that operates according to different norms from her teaching and research responsibilities.

The background and policy setting:

Hertel became

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Catherine Herrold

Background and Policy Setting

Catherine Herrold studies how local civic actors—including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), grassroots groups, and philanthropic foundations—promote economic development and democratic political reform. Her first book project examined how leaders of Egyptian NGOs and foundations understood the concept of “democracy” and promoted it in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. In 2020,

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Martha Finnemore

The challenge: How to advise on complex phenomena (creating cybersecurity norms) when the narrative surrounding them is oversimplified.

• In particular, it is difficult to explain to policymakers the intersubjectivity of norms and their sociological basis in a way that is immediately policy relevant.
• The “problem” in question often involves many dimensions not related to norms

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James Goldgeier

• How to present novel, controversial ideas without damaging one’s credibility in the policy circles in which one travels
• How to present views that may be considered extreme, with the goal of reframing the policy space on a particular issue

James Goldgeier has worked for many years on

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