蜜桃传媒

Brett McGurk听

The White House鈥檚 former top Middle East negotiator who secured the historic 2025 ceasefire and hostage release between Israel and Hamas; Esteemed advisor to four consecutive U.S. Presidents.听

An instrumental figure in one of the most consequential peace negotiations of our time, Brett McGurk shares compelling insights drawn from his two decades serving as a top national security advisor under four presidents.

One of the longest-serving and most effective national security experts of his generation, McGurk has been deeply involved in Middle East military strategy, diplomacy and U.S. policy for more than two decades. He has served directly for the last four presidents, negotiated multiple hostage releases, built the international coalition that ultimately defeated ISIS, and engaged regularly and directly with leaders from across the Middle East and around the world.

McGurk offers insight into complex world problems, and how he built successful coalitions, advised four very different presidents, and acted as a steady and reliable leader to resolve seemingly insurmountable conflicts鈥攅arning strong bipartisan supportin our divisive times. He shares his perspective on the current state of world affairs, the personalities who shape today鈥檚 headlines and their impact on industries such as energy, global financial markets, and the U.S. economy.

McGurk鈥檚 experiences have led him to some of the world鈥檚 most volatile regions.Serving as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan under President Bush, McGurk helped develop 鈥淭he Surge,鈥� a fundamental and successful shift in Iraq war strategy. Under President Obama, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran, spearheading secret negotiations withIran that led to the release of six American citizens from the notorious Evin prison. McGurk led sensitive negotiations with Russia on the Syria crisis and shuttled between global capitals to build the largest international coalition in history as well as local armies on the ground to defeat ISIS, serving as Special Presidential Envoy to both President Obama and President Trump.

For the past four years, McGurk has served as the top Middle East advisor in the White House, handling all aspects of regional policy for President Biden, including the management of the crisis in the region following the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023. He was the lead negotiator on the Gaza ceasefire and hostage release talks, which culminated in an agreement and the beginning of a ceasefire and听hostage releases on January 19, 2025. In the final period of these talks, McGurk invitedthe incoming administration to participate in the talks, a historically unprecedented partnership.

President Bush described McGurk as part of a 鈥渂and of brothers鈥� inside the White House at a critical phase of the Iraq war. President Obama called him one of his鈥渃losest advisors鈥� on the Middle East. Condoleezza Rice referred to him as the鈥渃onsummate professional diplomat.鈥� The New York Times cited him as 鈥渁 doer鈥� in high-stakes negotiations.

McGurk has also been a senior foreign affairs analyst with N蜜桃传媒 News/MSN蜜桃传媒, and heis author of Command: Inside the Oval Office with Three Presidents, and the Wartime Decisions That Changed the World.

Anina Schwarzenbach听

Anina is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, University of Bern. Her research lies at the intersection of sociology, criminology, and political science.

Anina鈥檚 work combines tools from the computational social sciences with standard statistical analysis to study social norms, inequalities, and resilience. Her current projects examine the topics and sentiments associated with digital media discourse on contentious social issues and its impact on public opinion, the social networks and dynamics that have led to the emergence and evolution of extremist movements in contemporary societies, and the impact of generative AI on the resilience of democracies.

She is a former fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School and was a fellow with Harvard Kennedy School鈥檚 Cyber Project (2020-2022), a postdoctoral fellow with the Belfer Center鈥檚 International Security Program (2018-2020), and a member of the Belfer鈥檚 team that produced the National Cyber Power Index 2020 (downloaded more than 4,300 times). Anina previously held positions as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and as a graduate researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Foreign Criminal Law and Criminology in Germany (2013-2018). She is a recipient of grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the University of Bern, and the Fondazione Leonardo among others. She is also a Board Member of the Academy of Sociology and serves as one of the 200 elected members of the Global Young Academy. Anina is affiliated with the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Life Course Research and the Digital Society Initiative.

Bryn Rosenfeld

Bryn Rosenfeld听is an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University and a co-Principal Investigator of the Russian Election Study, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her research interests include comparative political behavior, with a focus on regime preferences and voter behavior in nondemocratic systems, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology.听

Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. It won the 2022 Best Book award from the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section, the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and an Honorable Mention for the APSA's William H. Riker award for best book in political economy. She is also the recipient of a Frances Rosenbluth best paper prize, as well as a Best Article Award honorable mention and Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation, both by the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section.听

Her articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Sociological Methods & Research, among other outlets.听

Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She is also a former editor of The Washington Post鈥檚 Monkey Cage blog and has worked for the U.S. State Department鈥檚 Office of Global Opinion Research, where she designed and analyzed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Erzen听脰ncel

Erzen 脰ncel received her B.A. degrees in International Relations & Political Science and History (Double Major) from Bo臒azi莽i University in 2003, and Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston University in 2015. Since 2010, she has been principal investigator and project manager of the World Bank funded Global Leadership Project (GLP), the first global scale dataset on the biographical information of roughly 40 thousands leaders from 145 nation-states. She lectured at University of Mississippi, Boston University, and Mef University.

Her areas of expertise include leadership, political institutions, ethnic representation, quotas and its effects on representation, and democratization. Currently, she is working on the second round of the GLP data collection, which will allow researchers to track change in leadership over time.

Jytte Klausen

Jytte Klausen is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University and an Affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Her background is in comparative historical research with a focus on Western Europe and North America. By the late 1990s, it became apparent that Europe saw itself confronted with a fresh and daunting challenge associated with rising numbers of immigrants. Muslim immigrants seemed to many Europeans to present particular problems of integration. Klausen began to think about the way in which European institutions were recalibrating postwar stabilization pacts that had been struck between religious institutions and secular civic and political movements, particularly those on the Left. An article published in 2005 in Perspectives on Politics, 鈥�,鈥� summarized her perspective.

Klausen's second single-authored book, (2005, 2007pb), was based on intensive interviews with Muslim politicians that she conducted in a number of European countries. (German and Turkish translations were published in 2006 and 2007. Rights have been granted to an Arabic translation.) In 2007, she received the Carnegie Scholars鈥� Award in support of her research on the integration of Muslim faith communities in Europe. In 2009, Klausen published her third single-authored book, . This was a study of the global protests against the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten following the publication of twelve satirical drawings portraying Muhammad. Shortly before publication, Yale University Press decided to remove all the illustrations used in the book that portrayed Muhammad. The censored illustrations ranged from Ottoman Golden Age manuscript pages depicting the Prophet, to illustrated editions of Dante鈥檚 Inferno, to the Danish cartoons. The resulting controversy put her book at the center of a maelstrom of controversy, during which colleagues were immensely supportive and earned her lasting gratitude.

At the same time, Klausen initiated a new research project focused on the study of transnational Jihadist terrorist organizations that operated 鈥� and still operate 鈥� in Western Europe and North America. This involved the creation of a new purpose-built database capable of supporting quantitative comparative analysis and network graphing by means of social network analysis techniques (SNA). The data derive from archival research using public sources, the approach of clio-metrics. What is now called the Western Extremism Project(WEP), originally the Western Jihadism Project (WJP) has become a comprehensive web-based data portal and archive designed for the study of Al Qaeda-inspired terrorist offenders from Western states. and domestic far-right extremists. From the start, the WEP has been based in a laboratory, staffed mainly by students, who collect and process data. At the same time, it supports an intensive educational program.

For more than a decade now, Klausen has been involved in the development of 2G computational social science methods for the analysis of networks and recruitment processes. She , her third from the Department of Justice. In 2021, Klausen finished working on a book that traces the history of global jihadist networks in Western democratic nations, called "Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History." She spent 2016-2017 as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington D.C. working on the manuscript. One product of her work is an article published in 2015 titled 鈥淭weeting the Jihad.鈥� The article has had more than 70,000 unique downloads and was listed as the fifth most impactful article in medicine, health, STEM and social science with a woman as the lead author over the last five years.

Kathleen Bailey

Kathleen Bailey's research interests lie in the area of ethnic and regional politics with a focus on the former Soviet space, especially Uzbekistan and Central Asia. She is the author of the forthcoming Clan and Politics in Uzbekistan. Professor Bailey teaches courses on Moslem regions, including Central Eurasia, the Middle Civilization and the Balkans. She is the Director of the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College, which offers an undergraduate Major and Minor in the field. Her current research focuses on leadership and regional elites in Central Asia.

Michael Serazio

Michael Serazio is a professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College. His research and teaching focuses on media production, advertising, popular culture, political communication, and new media.

听His latest book is The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it 'Real' in Media, Culture, and Politics(Stanford University Press, 2023). It tells the story of America's obsession with authenticity and reveals the backstage strategies and practices to fake that on behalf of products, platforms, and politicians. His previous book is The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture(New York University Press, 2019). A behind-the-scenes investigation of leading professionals across media and business, The Power of Sports provocatively analyzes how sports culture explains and reflects contemporary America 鈥� from journalism and advertising to politics and gender. His first book, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (New York University Press, 2013), charted the integration of brands into entertainment content, social patterns, and digital platforms. It received the Susanne K. Langer Award from the Media Ecology Association and the National Communication Association鈥檚 Visual Communication Book of the Year.

He has scholarly work appearing in the Journal of Communication; Media, Culture & Society; the Journal of Consumer Culture; Critical Studies in Media Communication; Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism; and Television & New Media, among other journals. His studies of campaign consultants have been honored with the Bruce Gronbeck Political Communication Research Award and the National Communication Association鈥檚 Top Article in Political Communication. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania鈥檚 Annenberg School for Communication, where he won the National Communication Association鈥檚 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. He also holds a B.A. in Communication from the University of San Francisco and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University.

Nicholas Hayes-Mota

Nicholas Hayes-Mota is a social ethicist and public theologian. Working within the Catholic tradition, his primary research explores the role of religion in democratic public life, the ethics of democratic citizenship, and the possibility of a "politics of the common good" in today's highly pluralistic and often contentious societies. This last topic is the subject of Prof. Hayes-Mota's doctoral dissertation and first book (now in preparation), which synthesizes insights from Catholic social thought and the community organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky to advance a new account of common good politics, one that takes the role of power, conflict, and self-interest seriously. Additional research interests include the theology and history of community organizing, Catholic social thought and practice, Latin American and U.S. Hispanic-Latine theology, contemporary virtue ethics (in particular, the virtue of prudence), democratic theory, and, most recently, AI ethics.

Prof. Hayes-Mota holds an AB, summa cum laude, from Harvard College (2008), an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School (2014), and a Ph.D. in theology from Boston College (2024), where he was awarded the Donald and H茅l猫ne White Prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. Before coming to Santa Clara in 2024, he was Assistant Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College. His scholarship and teaching is also informed by his 15 years of experience as a practitioner and teacher of community organizing. In that capacity, he was a key leader in the (GBIO) from 2013-2022 and a Research and Teaching Fellow in organizing at the Harvard Kennedy School from 2015-16; since 2013, he has remained an active organizing trainer and leadership coach with the global (LCN). From the organizing tradition and the Catholic social tradition, Prof Hayes-Mota draws a deep commitment to cultivating the moral and political agency of others, and fostering a healthier civic life within the U.S. and beyond it.

Paul Romer

Paul Romer鈥攖he Seidner University Professor in the Seidner Department of Finance and founding director of the Center for the Economics of Ideas at the Carroll School of Management鈥攊s one of the most influential economists of the 21st century. In four decades as a professional economist, he has addressed a range of abstract and practical questions, typically by re-examining an existing concern from a novel perspective.听听

Romer鈥檚 Ph.D. thesis revisited questions that had been left unresolved by prior work on the determinants of long-run growth. The most important of these was a lack of attention to the difference between two types of economic goods: objects and ideas. Attention to objects leads inevitably to the diminishing returns that Thomas Malthus emphasized. Because ideas are intrinsically associated with increasing returns, they provide a coherent explanation for the persistent, accelerating pattern of human progress. The resulting analysis also reveals the centrality of scale economies in generating gains from trade and facilitating monopolies.听

In 2018 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. His Nobel lecture elaborates on the implications of ideas for "The Possibility of Progress."

Owing to his interest in not just the abstract process of innovation but also the practical details, in 2001, Romer started an educational technology company, Aplia, which showed how online exercises could reinforce classroom education. He sold the company to Cengage Learning in 2007.

In 1993, he co-authored (with George Akerlof) a paper that used the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to highlight the harm that careless financial deregulation could cause. The paper met with considerable skepticism at the time, but since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, its message has become part of the 鈥渁ccepted wisdom." The paper is also seen as one of the founding contributions to the area known as Forensic Finance.

After 2007, Romer focused on successful urbanization as a key driver of rapid catch-up growth for poor countries. The importance of this process is particularly clear in China鈥檚 rapid growth during the 1990s. On the basis of the successful urban centers of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, he encouraged policy makers to consider the possibility of starting entirely new "Charter Cities." He became the founding director of New York University鈥檚 Marron Institute for Urban Management and subsequently chief economist at the World Bank. His approach to urban design and form is reflected in his exploration of Black Rock City, which comes into existence each year with a population of 70,000 at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada.

Recently, Romer has revisited the policy challenges created by the novel characteristics of ideas as economic goods. The issue that emerged in the 1990s was the tendency for markets in software and digital services to evolve toward monopoly control, a question he examined in part as a consultant for the US Department of Justice on its antitrust case against Microsoft. Romer has also emphasized the problems created by web business models based on targeted digital advertising, and the threat posed by digital messages of unknown provenance. The initial focus of the new Center for the Economics of Ideas that he is launching at Boston College will be to offer practical solutions that address the need for 鈥淒igital Authenticity.鈥� With the tools that the Center will develop, authors and publishers will be able to certify to any reader the integrity of the files they distribute.

Peter Krause

Peter Krause鈥檚 research and teaching focus on international security, Middle East politics, terrorism and political violence, nationalism, and rebels and revolution. He is the author of Rebel Power: Why National Movements Compete, Fight, and Win (Cornell University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Stories From the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Columbia University Press, 2020). He has published articles on the causes and effectiveness of terrorism and political violence, why states negotiate with ethno-political organizations, the strategies of counter-secession, social movements and territorial control in Israel, U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war, the politics of division within the Palestinian national movement, the war of ideas in the Middle East, a reassessment of U.S. operations at Tora Bora in 2001, and field research amidst COVID-19.

Krause has conducted extensive fieldwork throughout the Middle East. He currently teaches courses on Middle East politics, terrorism and political violence, research methods, and international relations. He is a faculty associate in the International Studies Program and the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College, as well as a research affiliate with the MIT Security Studies Program.

Krause was formerly a Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs of the Harvard Kennedy School, the Crown Center for Middle East Studies of Brandeis University, LUISS University, and Uppsala University.

Philip Gordon

Philip H. Gordon is an American diplomat and international relations scholar. From March 21, 2022 to January 20, 2025 he served as Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. Earlier in his career, he was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2009鈥�2011) and Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region (2013鈥�2015) during the Obama administration.

Robert Talisse

Robert B. Talisse is and Professor of Political Science at in Nashville, Tennessee. A native of New Jersey, Talisse earned his PhD in Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate School in 2001. His research focuses on democracy. Specifically, Talisse writes about how a democratic political order can assist and complicate our efforts to acquire knowledge, share ideas, understand what is of value, and address our disagreements. He engages questions about public discourse, popular political ignorance, partisan polarization, and the ethics of citizenship.

Talisse has lectured throughout the world. He is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books.

Spencer Boyer

Spencer P. Boyer is a Partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, a founding member of DGA Group, and is based in Washington, D.C. He leads the firm鈥檚 National Security, Defense, and Aerospace practice, informed by more than 25 years of experience in the public, private and non-profit sectors in the United States and Europe.

Prior to joining DGA-ASG, Mr. Boyer served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy, where he was responsible for managing the day-to-day defense relationship between the United States and NATO, the EU and more than 40 European countries. He also served in both terms of the Obama administration. He was the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Europe in the National Intelligence Council, the center for long-range strategic thinking within the U.S. Intelligence Community. As NIO, he served as the senior analyst and subject matter expert on Europe for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and as the primary bridge between the intelligence and policy communities on European affairs. Before this, he served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.

Since 2013, Mr. Boyer has been an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and has held senior roles with other academic institutions and think tanks, including Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Brookings Institution and Dartmouth College. He began his career with the global law firm Jones Day and served with international courts and tribunals in The Hague, Zurich and Paris.

Mr. Boyer earned his B.A. in English literature from Wesleyan University, M.A. in French studies from New York University鈥檚 Institute of French Studies and J.D. from NYU School of Law.听