About the topic: This talk will present findings from a new survey of public attitudes about peace walls in Northern Ireland. In 1969, an Army Major who oversaw the construction of Northern Ireland’s first peace wall said: “This is a temporary measure…we do not want to see another Berlin wall situation in Western Europe…it will be gone by Christmas.” In 2013, the wall still remains and almost 100 additional walls and barriers now complement the original. A draft government report, leaked in January 2013, suggests that these peace walls should be brought down by 2022. Understanding public attitudes towards such a potential move is critical for both policy-makers and practitioners on the ground, and may help shape the formulation and implementation of future peace walls policies.

About the Speaker: Dr. Cathy Gormley-Heenan is the Director of the Institute for Research in Social Sciences at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. As a senior lecturer in public policy and politics, her research interests include the framing and reframing of policy issues, the politics of divided societies, state crime, and British and Irish politics. She is the author of Political Leadership and the Northern Ireland Peace Process, as well as a co-author of the edited volumes Teaching Politics and International Relations, and The Anglo-Irish Agreement, Rethinking Its Legacy. She serves on the editorial board of the journals Politics and State Crime and is a member of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council's Peer Review College. She also serves on the national executive committee of the UK's Political Studies Association (PSA). 

David Skarbek is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London and an Associate Member of the Extra-Legal Governance Institute at the University of Oxford. He serves on the editorial board of Global Crime. His research examines how people define and enforce property rights and engage in trade in the absence of strong, effective governments.

There are three major components of Cyber security from China’s perspective: Internet information management, Civilian cyber security, and Cyber warfare.

The Chinese government worries that misinformation, dissent opinions and dissemination of rumors could cause social instability, and thus overthrow the regime. As a result, the government has taken many approaches to manage the information in cyberspace. Can the Chinese government fully control the information flow? If not, why?

China has 500 million netizens, more than any other country in the world. How do the government and companies deal with privacy and cyber crime?

Cyber attack from China is widely reported in US media. How do Chinese view US cyber warfare capability? Can "Pearl Harbor" happen in cyberspace?

A better understanding of these questions could be helpful for shaping US cyber policies on China.

Ting Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research concerns on space debris problems, ASAT weapons, and cybersecurity in China. Before coming to CISAC in 2011, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University. He received a PhD at the Beihang University in China. His PhD dissertation was titled "Orbital Debris Evolution and Threat to Spacecraft." He also holds a B.A. in aerospace engineering from Beihang University and has worked at the Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering. He was a visiting scholar at the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2003, where he began to be interested in security issues.

Following the highly successful conference "Violence, Drugs and Governance: Mexican Security in Comparative Perspective", the Program on Poverty and Governance is partnering with the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to host a new conference on violence, crime and citizen insecurity in Latin America. The greater objectives of this two day conference are to:

• Deepen the critical analysis of insecurity in Latin America through an interdisciplinary dialogue and the creation of methodological tools
• Create an interdisciplinary network of academics focused on the study and comprehension of insecurity in the Western Hemisphere
• Share the findings and recommendations from this network with key actors and decision makers of the region

• Develop a program of annual Forum-Conferences on citizen security in Latin America, with a high degree of academic analysis, and open to dialogue with government officials and authorities

• Launch a new collaborative database for crime and violence research among the networks of scholars

Presenters will speak on four thematic areas:

1. Citizen Insecurity Tipping Points
2. Costs and Impacts of Insecurity
3. Drug Trafficking and Drug Regimes
4. Interventions and Best Practices to Decrease Violence

The conference will be held at ITAM's Santa Teresa campus in Mexico City on March 11-12.

Anuncio del evento en español via ITAM: haz click aquí.