Event Moderation

The West’s Relations With Ukraine and Russia After the War

Monday, May 23, 2022

Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has been condemned by the West and met with a strong collective response. The European Union and the United States have imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia, individual NATO countries have supplied Ukraine with weapons, and Western private companies have rapidly decoupled from the Russian market. As the conflict enters a new phase, Ukrainian negotiators and Western partners are now deliberating how to provide Ukraine with security guarantees as part of a possible negotiated settlement. This panel of distinguished experts, moderated by Alexander Cooley, will examine the likely issues and challenges that the EU, NATO, and the international community will confront in dealing with Ukraine and Russia following the war and assess what role they can play in any postwar security settlement.

Impeachment from the Ukrainian Perspective

Thursday, January 23, 2020

As the United States enters the next phase of the impeachment process, join a panel of experts moderated by Alexander Cooley as they consider what this means for Ukraine, Ukraine’s relations with Russia, and Russia and Ukraine’s relations with the U.S. moving forward.

Revealing the Offshore World

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

According to the Tax Justice Network, between $21 and $32 trillion in hidden assets are held in offshore tax havens. The increasing outflow of money into the offshore world starves developing countries of government revenues, enables kleptocrats to hide their illicitly-acquired wealth, and allows global multinational companies to lawfully avoid paying hundreds of billions in taxes. Alexander Cooley moderates this panel of four leading scholars to discuss their path-breaking research on important aspects of the offshore world and financial system. Beyond sharing their latest research findings on global tax havens, the global citizenship market, wealth asset management, and the informal economy, our panelists will discuss the research and investigative techniques that they have pioneered to reveal important dimensions of the offshore world.

The New Tools for Power Politics: Implications for Europe

Monday, February 17, 2020

Over the last few years, it has become apparent that competition for political power takes place in an ever widening array of arenas, with significant innovation in the tools being used to wield influence over others. Global interdependencies, once assumed to promote cooperation, can now be wielded as a weapons: economic sanctions, tariffs and investment screening can target vulnerable individuals and dependent states, while disinformation campaigns and social media operations can intervene at a relatively low cost in national elections and referenda. These developments suggest that the very repertoires of power politics are changing, with resulting judgments about what constitutes appropriate responses to actions by other states less sure than in the past. These developments provide an important, and often overlooked, context for assessing debates about the strategic direction of NATO and the EU.

New Directions in Anti-Kleptocracy: Challenges of Investigating and Researching Oligarchs

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Thins panel brings together tjree leading professionals from the areas of law enforcement, journalism and civil society, each experienced in investigating the activities of oligarchs who have been implicated in grand corruption networks. Moderated by Alexander Cooley, the panelists will discuss some of the breakthroughs and innovative techniques that they have developed in their anti-corruption work over the last decade.

Will We Ever Understand Each Other? Area Studies and Western Policy Toward Russia

Saturday, July 14, 2018

To celebrate the release of an oral history project about the Harriman Institute's role in regional studies, academia, and its influence on shaping U.S. foreign policy toward the post-Soviet region, the Harriman Institute and Columbia Global Centers Paris put on a panel discussion moderated by Alexander Cooley about deteriorating Russian-Western relations, and the role of area studies in forming Western policy toward Russia.