(April 28th, 2016) The Boston Global Forum (BGF) will host a May 9th Conference titled “Building Ethics Norms for Cyberbehavior’’. This conference (time, place and speakers below) is in part a follow-up to the recent creation of the BGF’s “Ethics Code of Conduct for Cyber Peace and Security,’’ which has been informed by BGF online dialogues with cyberexperts from several countries.
It is part of The Boston Global Forum’s BGF-G7 Summit Initiative, in which the BGF has convened leading scholars and business, technology and government leaders to seek solutions to pressing global issues involving peace, security and development. This BGF group has been working with Japanese officials to draft proposals to present to the national leaders meeting at the G7 Summit on May 26-27 in Japan.
The BGF’s biggest priority leading up to the summit is developing what it calls “Strategies for Combating Cyberterrorism’’.
The May 9 event:
7pm, May 9th 2016 (Eastern Time)
8am, May 10th 2016 (Tokyo Time)
Venue Harvard University Faculty Club, 20 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MASSACHUSETTS, USA
Live-streamed at www.bostonglobalforum.org
The conference will be directly linked with participants in Tokyo, New York and Bonn.
For further information, including on attending the conference, please send queries to: [email protected].
The conference will be moderated by:
Gov. Michael Dukakis, Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum
Distinguished Speakers:
Tomomi Inada, Chairman of Policy Research Council; Liberal Democratic Party; Member of Japanese House of Representatives
Professor Joseph S. Nye Jr., Member of Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum; Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
Professor Thomas E. Patterson, Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Member of Editorial Board, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School
Professor Jose Barroso, Former President of EU, Former Prime Minister of Portugal
President VairaVike-Freiberga, Former President of Latvia, President of Club de Madrid, The BGF-G7 Summit Initiative Committee
Professor Koichi Hamada , Special Adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
Professor John Savage, An Wang Professor of Computer Science, Brown University
Professor EisukeSakakibara (Mr. Yen), Former Japanese Vice Minister of Finance
Nguyen Anh Tuan, Co-Founder, CEO, Boston Global Forum; Chair, International Advisory Committee, UNESCO-UCLA Global Citizenship Education Program
Professor Derek Reveron, Professor of National Security Affairs and the EMC Informationist Chair, US Naval War College
Professor Stephen M. Walt, Belfer Professor of International Affairs, International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University.
Professor NazliChoucri, Professor of Political Science, MIT; Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD)
The most promising ideas from these dialogues and May 9th Conference will be summarized and then reported to the national leaders meeting in Japan. The Boston Global Forum will also cooperate with the Japanese government in organizing an online dialogue on “The Role of Japan in Peace, Security and Development in the World Today.”
About Boston Global Forum
Boston Global Forum ( BostonGlobalForum.org ) was founded nearly three years ago by former Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who is now a Distinguished Professor at Harvard University; Prof. John Quelch, the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; Prof. Thomas Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Nguyen Anh Tuan, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of the Boston Global Forum, and the Founder and Chairman of VietNamNet Media Company and VietNet, the first Internet Service Provider in Vietnam.
Distinguished Speakers
Governor Michael Dukakis
Michael Stanley Dukakis was born in Brookline, Massachusetts to Greek immigrant parents. He attended Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School and served in the United States Army from 1955-1957, sixteen months of which was with the support group to the U.S. delegation to the Military Armistice Commission in Korea.
He served eight years as a member of the Massachusetts legislature and was elected governor of Massachusetts three times. He was the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1988.
Since 1991 he has been a distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, and since 1996 visiting professor of public policy during the winter quarter at UCLA in Los Angeles. He is chairman of Boston Global Forum.
He is married to the former Kitty Dickson. They have three children—John, Andrea and Kara—and eight grandchildren.
Professor Jose Barroso: Former President of EU
Jose Manuel Durao Barroso was President of the European Commission from 2004-14. He was previously Prime Minister of Portugal from 2002-04.
During his decade as President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel oversaw the fight against ebola; the political handling of climate change issues; the crises in the Ukraine and with the Eurozone as well as the EU’s 2012 triumph as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. His voice is one of experience and breadth of knowledge, and his vision is informed, wide-ranging and steeped in kudos and a deep understanding of world affairs.
Jose Manuel left university and began a career in academia, employed in the Law department at the University of Lisbon, and in the Department of Political Science of the University of Geneva. He also worked as a visiting professor at the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service in Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In 1995 he was appointed head of the international relations department of Lusiada at Lisbon University.
Embarking on a political career, Jose was elected President of the PSD Party in Portugal in 1999 and was subsequently re-elected three further times.
During that period, he served as Vice President of the European People’s Party, and then took up a position as Portuguese State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, where he was a primary player in the peace accords for Angola in Bicesse in 1991. When he was Minister for Foreign Affairs, he launched the talks with the Indonesian Minister of Foreign Affairs, under the auspices of the Secretary General of the United Nations, that ultimately led to the independence of East Timor.
Under Jose’s leadership, the PSD won the general election in 2002 and he was appointed Prime Minister of Portugal in April of that year. He remained in office until July 2004 when he was nominated by the European Council and elected by the European Parliament to the position of President of the European Commission.
Jose has been awarded many honorary degrees and has received over 60 decorations, prizes and honours. He has written and published widely on political science, international relations and the European Union.
Former President Vaira Vike-Freiberga: President of the Club of Madrid
Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga has been the President of the World Leadership Aliance Club of Madrid since 2014 and is former President of Latvia (1999-2007). She was instrumental in achieving membership in the European Union and NATO for her country, and was Special Envoy on UN reform among her international activities. Since 2007, she is an oft invited speaker on social issues, moral values, and democracy. She was Vice-chair of the Reflection group on the long term future of Europe, and chaired the High-level group on freedom and pluralism of media in the EU.
Having left Latvia as a child refugee to Germany in 1945, then French Morocco and Canada, she earned a Ph.D. in psychology (1965) at McGill University. After a distinguished career as Professor at the University of Montreal, she returned to her native country in 1998 to head the Latvian Institute.A year later she was elected President by the Latvian Parliament and re-elected in 2003.
She is member of four Academies, and Board member or patron of 30 international organizations, including the Board of Thinkers of the Boston Global Forum. She has received many highest Orders of Merit, as well as medals and awards, for distinguished work in the humanities and social sciences. She has published 14 books and authored over 200 articles, book chapters, reports, and audiovisual materials.
ProfessorJoseph S. Nye
Joseph S. Nye Jr., is an American political scientist and former Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard Univesity.He currently holds the position of University Distinguished Service Professor.
He received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a PhD in political science from Harvard.
He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. Besides, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, The British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.
The 2011 TRIP survey of over 1700 international relations scholars ranks Joe Nye as the sixth most influential scholar in the field of international relations in the past twenty years. In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers
He pioneered the theory of soft power, which is appeared in his book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics(2004). He also published other books: Understanding International Conflict (5th edition, 2004); and The Power Game: A Washington Novel (2004),The Powers to Lead (2008) and The Future of Power (2011).
Professor Thomas E. Patterson
Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press of Harvard Kennedy School and has served as the Acting Director of Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy since July 1, 2015. His book, The Vanishing Voter, looks at the causes and consequences of electoral participation. His earlier book on the media’s political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century.
He also is author of Mass Media Election and two general American government texts: The American Democracy and We the People. His articles have appeared in Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and other academic journals, as well as in the popular press. His research has been funded by the Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie, and National Science foundation.
Patterson received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1971.
Professor Koichi Hamada
Koichi Hamada (浜田 宏一Hamada Kōichi, born 8 January 1936 in Tokyo[1]) is the Tuntex Professor Emeritus of Economics at Yale University, where he specializes in the Japanese economy and international economics. Hamada also serves as economic adviser to Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and at one time was a contender to head the WTO.
He passed the National Law Bar Examination (Shihoshiken) of Japan in 1957, L.L.B. in 1958 from the University of Tokyo, his B.A. and M.A. in Economics at the University of Tokyo, 1960 and 1962 respectively, his M.A.and Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1964 and 1965 respectively.
His fields of interest are: Labor economics, Macroeconomics, Applied Econometrics, School choice, The Black-White wealth gap, Wage determination, Economic links among relatives, Immigration, Changes in labor force quality. And his specialized fields of interest are Game Theoretic Approach to International Policy Coordination, Microfoundation of International Capital Movements, A Positive Analysis of the Emergence of International Economic Order, Effects of a Free Trade Area and Law and Economics in Japan.
Professor Derek Reveron.
Derek Reveron is a Professor of National Security Affairs and the EMC Informationist Chair at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
He is also a faculty affiliate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University where he co-teaches a course on contemporary national security challenges at the Kennedy School.
He specializes in strategy development, non-state security challenges, and U.S. defense policy.
He has authored or edited nine books. The latest are China and Cybersecurity ( co-edited by Oxford University Press, 2015), US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy (co-authored by Georgetown University Press, 2015), and Cyberspace and National Security (edited by Georgetown University Press, 2012).
Professor Savage is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Professor Savage earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1965 specializing in coding and information theory. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1965 and the faculty of the Division of Engineering at Brown in 1967. In 1979 he co-founded the Department of Computer Science and served as its second chair from 1985 to 1991. By the early 1970s his research interests changed to theoretical computer science. His current research interests are cybersecurity technology and policy, reliable computation with unreliable components, computational nanotechnology, efficient cache management on multicore chips, and I/O complexity. He is a Fellow of AAAS and ACM, a Life Fellow of IEEE, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is a recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Research Award. He served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. State Department during the 2009-2010 academic year. He is a Professorial Fellow of the EastWest Institute.
His professional service has included service on the editorial board of the Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences and as a member of the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 1991-2002.
Professor Nazli Choucri
Nazli Choucri is Professor of Political Science. Her work is in the area of international relations, most notably on sources and consequences of international conflict and violence. Professor Choucri is the architect and Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD), a multi-lingual web-based knowledge networking system focusing on the multi-dimensionality of sustainability. As Principal Investigator of an MIT-Harvard multi-year project on Explorations in Cyber International Relations, she directed a multi-disciplinary and multi-method research initiative. She is Editor of the MIT Press Series on Global Environmental Accord and, formerly, General Editor of the International Political Science Review. She also previously served as the Associate Director of MIT’s Technology and Development Program.
The author of eleven books and over 120 articles, Dr. Choucri is a member of the European Academy of Sciences. She has been involved in research or advisory work for national and international agencies, and for a number of countries, notably Algeria, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Pakistan, Qatar, Sudan, Switzerland, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. She served two terms as President of the Scientific Advisory Committee of UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformation (MOST) Program.
Tsutomu Himeno, Japanese Consul-General in Boston
Mr. Himeno served at the Embassies of Japan in the United Kingdom, Washington, D.C. and Singapore, at the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva, and, immediately prior to his appointment in Boston, as Deputy Permanent Representative and Minister of the Permanent Delegation of Japan to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
Professor Sakakibara (Mr. Yen)
Dr. Sakakibara is a Professor of Aoyama-Gakuin University in Tokyo from 2010. Professor Sakakibara worked for the Ministry of Finance for more than 20 years, most notably as Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs. He has broad and valuable experience in Government, especially in the area of international finance. He has shown superior ability in policy making and in consensus building among the international community, earning the sobriquet ‘Mr. Yen’ because of his influence over the currency markets.
He is renowned as a key advisor to The Democratic Party of Japan and very influential to Japanese government as a thought leader in Japan. Professor Sakakibara frequently appears on Japanese TV programs and he has also been quoted by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Nikkei, USA Today, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek, Forbes, BBC, CNBC as well as other leading media in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. He is also served as a President of Institute for Indian Economic Studies.
Prof. Sakakibara received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. His expertise and ability as an economist in the area of international finance was enhanced through his experience as an economist in the IMF. He has served as Associate Professor of Economics, Institute for Policy Science, at Saitama University and Visiting Associate Professor of Economics, Economics Department, at Harvard University. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Taylor’s Award from the University of Michigan and the Bintang Mahaputra Utama from the Government of The Republic of Indonesia.
Professor Stephan Walt
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He has been a Resident Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as Co-Editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.
Professor Walt is the author of The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007).
Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan
Nguyen Anh Tuan was the Founder and Chairman of the VietNamNet Media Group and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of VietNamNet Online Newspaper. Tuan was also the Founder and CEO of the VASC Software and Media Company and VietNet, the first Internet service provider in Vietnam.
In 1996,the Government of Vietnam named Tuan among the Top 10 Most Outstanding Young Talentsin the country.
Under Tuan’s leadership, VietNamNet raised significant political topics for reform in Vietnam. He pioneered an interactive live format called the VietNamNet Online Roundtable that allowed online viewers to participate in interviews of leading political, social and cultural figures as well as foreign dignitaries. In 2009, Tuan conceived a global initiative called the World Compassion and Reconciliation Day on September 9th of each year.
In 2007, as a Shorenstein Center’s Fellow, Tuan researched key trends in the development of electronic media in Vietnam.
In 2011, Tuan was a part of the Pacific Leadership Fellows Program at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California in San Diego. That year, he was also a speaker at the prestigious annual Club de Madrid Conference on the subject of Democracy and Digital Technology.
From February 2011 to July 2014 Tuan was an Associate of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Tuan is currently a Visiting Scholar of College of Communication , Boston University in academic year 2014 – 2015.
In April 2012, Tuan founded the Tran Nhan Tong Academy.
In December 2012, Tuan co-founded the Boston Global Forum with the Honorable Michael Dukakis who was Massachusetts Governor and U.S. Presidential candidate, and currently serving as member of its Chief Executive Board and Editor-in-Chief .
Also in 2012, together with Ambassador Swanee Hunt, Tuan established the Charles Ansbacher Music Club to bring classical music to people who live in remote and distant locations.
Tuan has been a member of Harvard Business School Global Advisory Board since 2008. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Free for All Concert Fund in Boston, and since July 2015 as Chair of International Advisory Committee of UCLA – UNESCO Chair on Global Citizenship Education.
(March 10th, 2016) – Professor. Ezra Vogel, , the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard, a world-renown expert on East Asia and a member of The Boston Global Forum (BGF), will speak on Cyber-Security at a talk at 2:30 pm on March 10th at Harvard University.
His talk and listeners’ responses to it will be live-streamed at www.bostonglobalforum.org.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbD6F2o1P4&feature=youtu.be
The talk is one in the series of online dialogues leading up to the G7 Summit in Japan on May 26-27 as part of the BGF-G7 Summit Initiative
Discussants are encouraged to send questions to [email protected]. Members of the Boston Global Forum’s Special Editorial Board will gather your insights and send them to the speaker.
About Prof. Ezra Vogel
Ezra F. Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 1950 and serving two years in the U.S. Army, he studied sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, receiving his Ph.D. in 1958. He then went to Japan for two years to study the Japanese language and conduct research interviews with middle-class families. In 1960-1961 he was assistant professor at Yale Universityand from 1961-1964 a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, studying Chinese language and history. He remained at Harvard, becoming lecturer in 1964 and, in 1967, professor. He retired from teaching on June 30, 2000.
Vogel succeeded John Fairbank to become the second Director (1972-1977) of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center and Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977-1980). He was Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs (1980-1987) and, since 1987, Honorary Director. He was Chairman of the undergraduate concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1991. He was Director
of the Fairbank Center (1995-1999) and the first Director of the Asia Center (1997-1999). Vogel was Chairman of the Harvard Committee to Welcome President Jiang Zemin (1998). He has also served as Co-director of the Asia Foundation Task Force on East Asian Policy Recommendations for the New Administration (2001).
Drawing on his original field work in Japan, he wrote Japan’s New Middle Class (1963). A book based on several years of interviewing and reading materials from China, Canton Under Communism (1969), won the Harvard University Press faculty book of the year award. The Japanese edition of his book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979) is the all-time best-seller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author. In Comeback (1988), he suggested things America might do to respond to the Japanese challenge. He spent eight months in 1987, at the invitation of the Guangdong Provincial Government, studying the economic and social progress of the province since it took the lead in pioneering economic reform in 1978. The results are reported in One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (1989). His Reischauer Lectures were published in The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (1991). His most recent publication is Is Japan Still Number One? (2000). He has visited East Asia every summer since 1958 and has spent a total of over six years in Asia.
Vogel has received honorary degrees from Kwansei Gakuin (Japan), the Monterrey Institute, the Universities of Maryland, Massachusetts (Lowell), Wittenberg, Bowling Green, Albion, Ohio Wesleyan, Chinese University (Hong Kong) and Yamaguchi University (Japan). He received The Japan Foundation Prize in 1996 and the Japan Society Prize in 1998. He has lectured frequently in Asia, in both Chinese and Japanese.
From fall 1993 to fall 1995, Vogel took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to serve as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. He directed the American Assembly on China in November 1996 and the Joint Chinese-American Assembly between China and the United States in 1998.
Member of Boston Global Forum’s Board of Thinkers; Co-founder, member of GC Development Council & Global Citizenship Educators at Global Citizenship Education Network
Nazli Choucri is Professor of Political Science of MIT. Her work is in the area of international relations, most notably on sources and consequences of international conflict and violence. Professor Choucri is the architect and Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD), a multi-lingual web-based knowledge networking system focusing on the multi-dimensionality of sustainability. As Principal Investigator of an MIT-Harvard multi-year project on Explorations in Cyber International Relations, she directed a multi-disciplinary and multi-method research initiative. She is Editor of the MIT Press Series on Global Environmental Accord and, formerly, General Editor of the International Political Science Review. She also previously served as the Associate Director of MIT’s Technology and Development Program.
The author of eleven books and over 120 articles, Dr. Choucri is a member of the European Academy of Sciences. She has been involved in research or advisory work for national and international agencies, and for a number of countries, notably Algeria, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Pakistan, Qatar, Sudan, Switzerland, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. She served two terms as President of the Scientific Advisory Committee of UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformation (MOST) Program.
(Feb. 29th, 2016) – Dr. Carlos Alberto Torres, a member of The Boston Global Forum (BGF), will speak on “Global Citizenship Education to Improve Cyber-Security’’ at a talk at 5:30 pm on March 4th at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The talk is one in the series of online dialogues leading up to the G7 Summit in Japan on May 26-27 as part of the BGF-G7 Summit Initiative. Professor Torres’s talk is a collaboration of the BGF and the Global Learning and Global Citizenship program at UCLA, which is affiliated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Discussants are encouraged to send questions to [email protected]. Members of the Boston Global Forum’s Special Editorial Board will gather your insights and send them to the speaker.
About Dr. Carlos Alberto Torres
Doctor Carlos Alberto Torres, Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education, UNESCO Chair in Global Learning and Global Citizenship Eduction, and former Director of the UCLA-Latin American Center, he is a political sociologist of education who did his undergraduate work in sociology in Argentina (B.A. honors and teaching credential in Sociology, Universidad del Salvador), his graduate work in Mexico (M.A. in Political Science, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, FLACSO) and the United States (M.A. and Ph.D. in International Development Education, Stanford University), and post-doctoral studies in educational foundations in Canada (University of Alberta).
He is also the Founding Director of the Paulo Freire Institute in SaÞo Paulo, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and UCLA. Dr. Torres has been a Visiting Professor in universities in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He has lectured throughout Latin America and the United States, and in universities in England, Japan, Italy, Spain, Tanzania, Finland, Mozambique, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Costa Rica, Portugal, Taiwan, Korea, Sweden and South Africa. He has received two Fulbright fellowships. Elected President, World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) 2013-2016.
(7th March 2016) Boston Global Forum (BGF) friends will want to hear and see this learned and passionate presentation by Prof. Carlos Alberto Torres on the potential of global education and citizenship programs to promote world peace. At the end of his more formal remarks, he responds to questions about his ideas.
His presentation was another in the series of online dialogues produced by the BGF as part of its BGF-G7 Summit Initiative.
Professor Torres, a BGF member, is Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education and the UNESCO Chair of Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The BGF has strongly collaborated with the UCLA program because of its potential to help create a global environment that encourages mutual understanding of national and other differences and similarities by people around the world, and thus cooperation and peace.
Dr. Torres discussed how promoting a sense of global citizenship (which he emphasized does not mean abandoning national citizenship) — to be spawned by emphasizing multicultural/multinational education — can help address such problems as:
Growing socio-economic inequality.
Property
Rapacious individualism eroding concern for the public good.
Rigid teacher-based, instead of student-based, education.
A “predatory’’ attitude toward the earth’s resources instead of acceptance of the need for sustainable use of what Professor Torres calls the “global commons.’’
He discussed how engendering a sense of global citizenship (and what he called “hospitality’’ ) through education can fight terrorism by encouraging mutual respect and understanding among different cultures and nations, thus facilitating conflict resolution and reducing “extreme nationalism,’’ and the bigotry and aggression that can accompany it.
He added that cyber-security (a major issue for the BGF-G7 Summit Initiative) can be strengthened by education programs to foster honorable behavior and respect for the truth on the Internet.
At the same time, he observed that there are limits to how much the Internet, which is vulnerable to many bad actions, can be used to develop and maintain healthy relationships. People, including students and their teachers, need to have frequent in-person encounters, too, if they are to better understand, and empathize with, each other.
He advised G7 leaders to promote global citizenship education out of enlightened self-interest. Professor Torres noted that “people (voters) want peace and the protection of the planet’’ and that they will support leaders who encourage these things through such programs such as the Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education Program at UCLA.
He warned at the end of his remarks that the world faces a “race between chaos and education.’’
Medical Doctor holding a world globe in her hands as medical network concept
U.S. healthcare providers lag way behind other industries in protecting their digitized data about patients. Thus the number of cyber-attacks is only expected to accelerate.
See more
The number of healthcare-data attacks over the past five years has increased 125 percent as the industry has become an easy target
Personal health information is 50 times more valuable on the black market than financial information, according to the survey. Foreign powers, especially China, have been hard at work stealing the personal health records of many Americans, most notably of government employees who might be vulnerable to being blackmailed into giving foreign governments U.S. secrets.
U.S. healthcare providers spend on average less than 6 percent of their information- technology budget expenditures on security, according to a survey from HIMSS Analytics, the research arm of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, and security firm Symantec.
The federal government spends 16 percent of its IT budget on security, while financial institutions spend 12-15 percent.
(7th March 2016) Robert Whitcomb, Chairman of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relation, Managing Editor of the Boston Global Forum commented on the join military maneuvers of US, Japan and India
In a sign of slowly growing cooperation to counter aggressive Chinese expansionism in the East and South China seas, the U.S., India and Japan said they will conduct joint naval exercises in the northern Philippine Sea. No time was announced, presumably for security reasons.
The Boston Global Forum has recommended that a Pacific Security Alliance be established to counter Chinese imperialism. The alliance would include the U.S., Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam and perhaps eventually Indonesia. It is a part of the “Framework for Peace and Security in the Pacific’’ that the Boston Global Forum proposed in December 2014 .
The Wall Street Journal noted that the Philippine Sea maneuvers would be part of an annual event between the U.S. and Indian navies that, since 2014, has expanded to include Japan, signaling closer cooperation among the three powers, which share fears about China’s military and territorial ambitions in an area with major international trading routes. See more
“The U.S. has in recent months ratcheted up its warnings over what it calls China’s growing ‘militarization’ of the South China Sea, where Beijing is embroiled in territorial disputes with a number of countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines. U.S. warships and aircraft have undertaken a series of operations in the region to challenge Beijing’s moves and U.S. officials are seeking to stitch Asian military powers into closer collaboration,’’ the newspaper noted.
U.S. officials have been pushing India to more energetically join its security operations in what the Pentagon calls “the Indo-Asia-Pacific’’ region. The Indians have been leery of antagonizing the Chinese, in large part because of fears that China might stage attacks along the long Indian-Chinese border. But increasing concerns that Chinese installation of military bases on islands and reefs in the South China Sea might imperil freedom of trade has gotten New Delhi’s attention.
U.S. military officials are also pressing Australia to take a more muscular role in the region in collaboration with Japan, India and the U.S.
India and the U.S. presented a “joint strategic vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean region” in January 2015 to protect “freedom of navigation and over flight throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea”. India launched a trilateral dialogue on the subject with Japan and Australia last year.
(7th March 2016) After a month of discussions, the Boston Global Forum’s cyber-security group has produced these early ideas as a basis for possible future recommendations to G7 Summit leaders.
Encouraging private-sector enterprises to create market-based incentives to share information among themselves on cyber-threats and responses.
Setting up government clearing houses for data on cyber-attacks and best practices to thwart them.
Boosting coordination of Computer Emergency Readiness Teams to facilitate handling cyber-incidents at the international level.
Establishing norms of cyber-behavior at both government and nongovernmental levels.
Improving training and discipline of people working on secured networks. This is called “cyber-hygiene.’’ The weakest link in almost all computer networks is not technology but
Modernizing regulations domestically and internationally to strengthen cyber-security and remove barriers to cooperation. This would include more global sharing of information among regulators and streamlining prosecution of cyber-crimes.
Clarifying the pros and cons of encryption.
As part of its cyber-security initiative, the Boston Global Forum is forming a group that it calls “Hackers for Peace and Security,’’ to work with “white hat hackers’’ (honest and civic-minded software experts) to thwart “black hat hackers’’ and turn the latter into white hats.
(7th March 2016) The Boston Global Forum, as part of its BGF-G7 Summit Initiative, urges the national leaders at the G7 Summit in Japan May 26-27 to discuss these crucial topics:
The need for stronger action to fight cyber-terrorism and other cyber-pathologies through global cooperation, including through the adoption of such programs as the BGF’s Ethics Code of Conduct for Cyber Peace and Security.
The need to eliminate ISIS and similar terrorist groups, in part through such programs as the Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education program based at the University of California at Los Angeles and of which the BGF is a member.
The urgent need to stop China’s reef and island seizures and militarization in the South China Sea. The BGF has recommended creating a Pacific Security Alliance of the U.S., Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia to thwart Chinese hegemony in that sea. That hegemony could imperil freedom of navigation in a region with very important global trade routes. Of course, Japan and the U.S. are G7 members.
The BGF realizes that there are many other important threats, such as Russia’s aggressive expansionism, global warming, new disease pandemics, the refugee crisis spawned by wars in the Mideast and a potential new global recession. However, the BGF considers that the three issues bulleted above can be successfully and promptly addressed with enough will and ingenuity on the part of G7 member nations.
Derek Reveron is a Professor of National Security Affairs and the 
