US Foreign Policy and the 2024 Elections
Location: Amherst, MA, Hampshire College, FPH Building, Main Lecture Hall
Date & Time: Friday March 29th, 5.30pm
This event is open to the public
Speakers: Spencer Ackerman, Amel Ahmad, Van Jackson, and Omar Dahi
Description: From the War on Terror to the militarization of the Pacific, and from imperial competition with China to US support for Israeli atrocities in Palestine, the US quest for primacy has devastating consequences globally, and a corrosive impact domestically. Join us for a free flowing conversation about the consequences of endless wars and militarism, rethinking US foreign policy and the implications for the upcoming 2024 elections.
This event is sponsored by the Hampshire College Learning Collaboratives and Security in Context, a research initiative on peace, conflict, and international affairs. For more information contact Omar Dahi: odahi@hampshire.edu.
Bios:
Spencer Ackerman, the foreign policy columnist for The Nation magazine, is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning reporter. Focusing on the War on Terror, Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and numerous U.S. bases, ships and submarines as a senior correspondent for outlets like Wired, The Guardian and the Daily Beast. His 2021 book, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, was named a book of the year by the New York Times Critics, the Washington Post and the PBS NewsHour, and won a 2022 American Book Award. Ackerman writes the popular FOREVER WARS newsletter on Ghost (foreverwars.ghost.io) and recently released the spy thriller graphic novel WALLER VS WILDSTORM for DC Comics.
Amel Ahmad is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her main areas of specialization are democratic studies, with a special interest in elections, voting systems, legislative politics, party development, and voting rights. She is author of “Democracy and the Politics of Electoral System Choice: Engineering Electoral Dominance” (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Her new book entitled When Democracy Divides: The Regime Question in European and American Political Development, examines the impact of regime contention on political development in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Van Jackson is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, host of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast, and author of The Un-Diplomatic Newsletter. Van’s research broadly concerns East Asian and Pacific security, critical analysis of defense issues, and the intersection of working-class interests with foreign policy. He is the author of scores of journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports, as well as four books, including Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace, with Yale University Press (2023) and Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking, with Cambridge University Press (2023). His fifth book, forthcoming with Yale University Press, is The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (with Michael Brenes). Van is a senior researcher at Security in Context and co-director of the Multipolarity, Great Power Competition and the Global South research track.
Omar Dahi is a professor of economics at Hampshire College and director of the Security in Context research network.
