Aila Matanock, assistant professor of political science at University of California-Berkeley, will speak about her 2017 book, Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation (Cambridge). It won the 2018 Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize and was a runner up for the 2018 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize. In Electing Peace, Matanock presents a theory that explains the causes and consequences of civil conflict settlements that enable the combatant sides to participate as political parties in post-conflict elections. Matanock finds that these provisions are associated with an increase in the chance that peace will endure, potentially contributing to a global decline in civil conflict. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/matanocka

Meir Elran is senior research fellow and head of the Homeland Security Program and co-head of the Society-Military Program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. Brig. Gen. (ret.) Elran served in the Israel Defense Forces as a career officer for 24 years in senior command and staff positions, primarily in the Military Intelligence Directorate. His last post was deputy director of Military Intelligence (1987-1989). Elran's lecture will strive to explain why Israel, the strongest power in the Middle East, is facing difficulties in managing the continuous conflicts with much weaker adversaries such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/elranm

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. He is the author of six books including Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss Jr. Book Award; The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), which made the New York Times bestseller list; and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (2011). In this event, based on his new book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, Mearsheimer will explain why liberal hegemony, the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Cold War ended, was doomed to fail. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/mearsheimerj

Annette Becker is a professor at University of Paris-Nanterre and honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is deputy director of the International Research Center of the Historial de la Grande Guerre [Museum of the Great War]. She has published widely on World War I, its commemoration, return of the soldiers, humanitarian aspect and trauma, and now focuses on the cultural aspects of the wars and links between the two World Wars. She will discuss her latest book Messagers du désastre, Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski et les génocides (Fayard, 2018), a history of the concept of genocide: the perpetrators, the victims, and the "messengers" who try to warn, to see, to speak. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/beckera

Carol Graham is the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, College Park Professor at University of Maryland, and senior scientist at Gallup. Her most recent books include Happiness for All? Unequal Lives and Hopes in Pursuit of the American Dream (Princeton, 2017), The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being (Brookings, 2011), and Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford, 2009). At this event, Graham will discuss how well-being metrics can be used to identify and monitor trends in life satisfaction and hope, and in desperation and misery. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/grahamc

D.J. Patil is perhaps the most influential data scientist in the world. Having been appointed by President Obama as the very first U.S. chief data scientist, he was tasked with making the largest organization in history -- the U.S. federal government -- a data-driven enterprise. He helped establish new health care programs including the Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot, new criminal justice reforms including the Data-Driven Justice and Police Data Initiatives that cover more than 94 million Americans, and led the policy efforts related to national data. In the private sector, he led the product teams at RelateIQ which was acquired by Salesforce, was founding board member for Crisis Text Line which works to use new technologies to provide on demand mental and crisis support, and was a member of the venture firm Greylock Partners.  Read more and register

Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Earlier this summer she was named a Progress Medal Laureate by the Society for Progress. Her research focuses on democratic theory, equality in political philosophy and American law, racial integration, the ethical limits of markets, theories of value and rational choice (alternatives to consequentialism and economic theories of rational choice), the philosophies of John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. Anderson is currently working on the history of egalitarianism, with a special focus on the social epistemology of moral learning, taking the history of abolitionism as a central case study. Read more and register

Join the Center for Slavic and East European Studies for a lecture by political scientist Olena Nikolayenko (Fordham University) about her most recent book Youth Movements and Elections in Eastern Europe. Her book looks at and compares non-violent youth movements that emerged in the early 2000s against authoritarian governments in Serbia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine. Nikolayenko argues that the movements' tactics and state countermoves explain, in no small degree, divergent social movement outcomes. Her argument is based on data gathered from interviews participants, public opinion polls, government publications, NGO reports, and newspaper articles.

Wang Zheng presents the hidden history of the socialist state feminists who maneuvered behind the scenes in the Chinese Communist Party to promote women's liberation. Her research focuses on the tenacious struggles of these CCP women who joined the revolution in the early 1920s and 1930s and became part of the state power holders after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Investigating their visions, strategies, triumphs and failures, the lecture engenders the high politics of the CCP and raises fundamental questions about male dominance in movements that aim to pursue social justice. This event is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center and the Institute for Chinese Studies.