Insights

Writing. Convening. Teaching. Training. Modeling. Experimenting. Engaging. Across time zones and international boundaries, members of our community are at work. Our “Insights” gallery is a multimedia guide to intellectual life at the Davis Center.

Bringing educational backgrounds from anthropology and literature to political science and public relations, the REECA class of 2027 has come to campus.

Dr. Steven Solnick will begin in his new role next month, bringing 35+ years of leadership experience in education and philanthropy and building on a decades-long connection to Harvard and the Davis Center.

Since 2018, our alumna Alisa Sopova and photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind have been documenting ordinary Ukrainian lives transformed — but not defined — by the violence of Russia’s invasion. Now all the work from their visual storytelling project, “5K From the Frontline,” has a new home online.

Far from being the sudden product of a late-life religious crisis, Tolstoy’s theory of radical nonviolence stemmed from views that had remained remarkably consistent since the 1860s, writes our 2025 Kathryn W. Davis Prize winner Anya Tseitlin.

For over 30 years, U.S. and Russian scientists collaborated in the Bering Strait to study and protect wildlife, habitats, and food sources. With Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this stopped. A new report from Harvard's Belfer Center shows the dramatic consequences of the hiatus and shares suggestions for restarting cooperation in some form.

According to recent polls, 80% of Russians believe Moscow should mend fences with the U.S., even though 66% also believe that relations with the West will always be based on mistrust, writes Davis Center associate Simon Saradzhyan.

“I wanted to analyze how this pursuit to eliminate Ukrainians as a nation shaped the way Ukrainians remember themselves,” Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed of Harvard's Slavic Department says of her new book about contested memory.

Davis Center associate Andrei Yakovlev and his co-authors argue that — through militarization, purges, and ideological control — Putin's government is constructing a dictatorship that is self-referential and resistant to external influence or internal reform.

With sweeping changes made to toponyms from 1991 to 2015, diplomats were “working in a country in which we did not know where things were,” retired U.S. Ambassador Allan Mustard writes for our Central Asia program.