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Diving deep into disagreements on the Israeli-Hamas war at Harvard Kennedy School

In a semester-long series, HKS Professor Tarek Masoud interviewed Middle East scholars and policymakers—from a Trump administration strategist to Palestinian intellectuals—on their vastly different views on the war.




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Six disparate expert voices at the Kennedy School on the Israel-Hamas war

Excerpts from remarks of participants in the Middle East Dialogues series led by HKS Professor Tarek Masoud throughout the 2024 spring semester.




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The Day-After Peace in Gaza Will be Fragile. Here’s How to Make it Work.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing increased pressure to agree to a hostage and cease-fire deal, including from close allies like President Biden, Benny Gantz and Yoav Gallant. But key to any long-term cease-fire is the question of who will police the Gaza Strip the next day. In some ways, it is easier to imagine a “day after the day after.” It entails a reformed, legitimate Palestinian Authority that takes control of both the West Bank and Gaza and engages in serious negotiations for a two-state solution. But how to get there? How will the transition between a cease-fire and the establishment of a revitalized Palestinian Authority be managed in Gaza?




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Kuwait’s Suspended Parliament: Where Does the Public Stand?

MEI Fellow Yuree Noh assesses public opinion in Kuwait following the suspension of its parliament.




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Tunisia Abandons Two-State Solution; Courts Iran, China, and Russia

The war in Gaza has accelerated a major shift in Tunisia’s foreign policy. One of the first Arab countries to advocate for a two-state solution, Tunisia has now abandoned it. That shift has left Tunisia more isolated geopolitically, prompting it to now court Iran, China, and Russia.




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From the Frontlines to the Future: Assessing Emerging Technology in Russia's Invasion Strategy and NATO's Next Moves

This piece is a series in the Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy (DETS) Program’s analysis on the war in Ukraine, including a corresponding policy brief on Ukraine’s Battlefield Technologies and Lessons for the U.S. published in July 2023. 




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AI Could Improve Your Life by Removing Bottlenecks Between What You Want and What You Get

Artificial intelligence is poised to remove human limitations inherent in many systems, including information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.

 




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AI Needs to Be Both Trusted and Trustworthy

Sensors, actuators, and IoT devices will enable AI to interact with the physical plane on a massive scale. The question is, how does one build trust in its actions?




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CFPB’s Proposed Data Rules Would Improve Security, Privacy and Competition

The collection and sale of consumer data is too lucrative for companies to say no to participating in the data broker economy. New rules proposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may help eliminate the incentive for companies to buy and sell consumer data.




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Unraveling the Political Dynamics Shaping the U.S. Strategy for Technology Leadership

Although there is broad agreement between the two major parties on the desirability of technology leadership, significant sources of tension—and confusion—persist. By examining the political dynamics that led to the enactment of the CHIPS and Science Act, Constanza M. Vidal Bustamante and Douglass Vijay Calidas probe these tensions and seek to assess their likely impact on the federal technology strategy in the coming years.




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How Technoscientific Knowledge Advances: A Bell-Labs-Inspired Architecture

Authors Narayanamurti and Tsao propose a new architecture for how technoscientific knowledge advances, which maps to the actual operational practice of research and development nurtured at the iconic Bell Labs.




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Let’s Not Make the Same Mistakes with AI That We Made with Social Media

Social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade holds a lot of lessons that apply directly to AI companies and technologies.




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Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened

The xz Utils backdoor incident reveals that the security of the global internet depends on countless obscure pieces of software written and maintained by even more obscure unpaid, distractible, and sometimes vulnerable volunteers. It’s an untenable situation, and one that is being exploited by malicious actors. Yet precious little is being done to remedy it.




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LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity

The comingling of data and commands means that large language models are vulnerable to manipulation by prompt injection.




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Seeing Like a Data Structure

Our data-centric way of seeing the world isn't serving us well. Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier argue that we need new socio-technical systems that leave room for the inherent messiness of reality.




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Lattice-Based Cryptosystems and Quantum Cryptanalysis

Quantum computers are probably coming—and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms.




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How AI Will Change Democracy

Artificial intelligence is coming for our democratic politics, from how politicians campaign to how the legal system functions.




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AI Will Increase the Quantity — and Quality — of Phishing Scams

Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligence (AI)-automated phishing, which is comparable to the success rates of non-AI-phishing messages created by human experts. Companies need to: 1) understand the asymmetrical capabilities of AI-enhanced phishing, 2) determine the company or division’s phishing threat severity level, and 3) confirm their current phishing awareness routines.




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The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt

In an era in which internet companies dominate both public and private life, both power and culture are increasingly corporate, write Kim Córdova and Bruce Schneier.












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Trump wins US presidential election