Ten years after the Iraq War and five years after the global financial crisis, the state of the international order is decidedly mixed. The international system faces a new and increasingly complex set of challenges. While the past decade has seen some successes in international cooperation – most notably the response to the financial crisis – core questions remain about whether the established and emerging powers will be able to sustain the peace, foster a system for shared prosperity and make progress on democracy, justice and human security. Brookings scholars Ted Piccone, Bruce Jones, Robert Kagan, Thomas Wright, and Jeremy Shapiro discuss.

On February 19, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion evaluating the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework.

Conor Friedersdorf and Benjamin Wittes debate the ethics of drone warfare at the University of Richmond in November 2013.

A discussion at the Berkman Center: In the wake of the disclosures about government surveillance and the rise of corporate-run applications and protocols, is the idea of an “unowned” Internet still a credible one? The Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain moderates a panel, incluing Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School), Ebele Okobi (Yahoo!), Bruce Schneier (CO3 Systames), and Benjamin Wittes (Brookings Institution) to explore surveillance, and the potential for reforms in policy, technology, and corporate and consumer behavior.

DNI General Counsel Robert Litt talks about implementation of President Obama's NSA reforms, privacy rights for foreigners in espionage, spying on foreign heads of state, and amnesty for Edward Snowden.

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The Brookings Intelligence Project hosted Foreign Service Officer Yaniv Barzilai on January 23, 2014 to discuss his new book, 102 Days of War---How Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban Survived 2001. Bruce Riedel moderated the discussion.

President Obama delivered a major address this morning---and released an accompanying policy directive---in response to the recommendations of his surveillance review group. He announced limited reforms to the NSA's surveillance activities, defended the larger role and activities of the intelligence community, and suggested that limited privacy protections extend to non-Americans. Lawfare convened a roundtable discussion by phone to discuss the president's highly-anticipated speech; the discussion featured Benjamin Wittes, Robert Chesney, and Carrie Cordero of Georgetown University Law School. Lawfare's managing editor, Wells Bennett, moderated the conversation.

Are there parallels between insurgencies and illness? Or between healthy bodies and healthy nations? Innovative new thinking argues that indeed there are. As understanding in various related disciplines grows, targeted responses are often able to alleviate at least some of the problems.

On December 19, two Yale University professors, Stanley McChrystal (retired General, U.S. Army) and Kristina Talbert-Slagle, an associate research scientist at Yale Global Health Leadership Institute, presented their model of counterinsurgency warfare that likens that mission to the way in which the human body fights infectious disease. The presentation was not intended to produce specific recommendations for any particular ongoing or prospective operation abroad, but it did have interesting and potentially significant implications for the future of counterinsurgency warfare and for how the U.S. government prepares for such possible future missions.