Upcoming Strauss Center Events - April May

"Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare"


A Book Talk with Seth Jones and an Expert Panel Discussion on “Gray Zone” Conflict. In addition to hearing from the book author, Seth Jones, we will have an expert panel speaking about Russia, China, and Iran’s activity in the “gray zone” as well as their use of irregular warfare/proxy warfare.

2) From Paper to Practice: Implementing Civil Service Reform in Africa

April 25, 2022 | 12:15 - 1:15 pm | Zoom Webinar

On Monday, April 25, the Strauss Center is pleased to virtually welcome Martin Williams, Associate Professor in Public Management at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, on a talk on “From Paper to Practice: Implementing Civil Service Reform in Africa.” This is part of our Brumley Speaker Series.

Williams will speak about an upcoming book he’s working on. Improving the performance of the core civil service is one of the most important tasks facing government, but is also notoriously challenging. Based on studying 30 years of reforms across 6 countries in Africa, Williams’ book shows that these reforms have largely failed to achieve their goals because they have approached organizational change mainly as a matter of changing formal structures and processes through one-off projects. The book proposes a new approach in which reform is viewed not as a short period of rewriting rules but as catalyzing an ongoing process of continuous organizational change, and discusses strategies for reformers to achieve this in practice.

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3) U.S. Science in the Era of U.S.-China Tensions

May 3, 2022 | 12:15 - 1:15 pm | Zoom Webinar

On Tuesday, May 3, the Strauss Center and Asia Policy Program are pleased to virtually welcome Molly Roberts, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California San Diego, for a talk on “U.S. Science in the Era of U.S./China Tensions.” This is part of our Brumley Speaker Series.

Roberts will speak about her upcoming joint paper “The Impact of U.S.-China Tensions on U.S. Science,” published in collaboration with Ruixue Jia, Ye Wang, and Eddie Yang. The paper studies how recent investigations of foreign influence in research have affected productivity of U.S. scientists working in the life sciences. Using data from PubMed and Dimensions between 2010-2020, Roberts and her co-authors compared publications of scientists who collaborated exclusively with Chinese scientists with those working with scientists from other countries outside of China and the United States. The authors identified a decline in both the productivity and quality of publications by U.S. scientists whose work involved collaboration with scientists in China. In her talk with the Strauss Center, Roberts will discuss their research and its implications in the era of tensions between the United States and China.