At QF, Georgetown Professor Proposes Innovative Climate Change Solution at CIRS Talk

The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) will be hosting award-winning climate change author, GU-Q Professor Anatol Lieven, for a virtual public lecture titled “A New Political Strategy for the Struggle to Limit Climate Change” on January 18, at 4:00PM (Doha time).

In a lecture based on his latest book, “Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case,” a 2020 Financial Times Book of the Year in the environment category, Dr. Lieven will set out a new political strategy to mobilise support for the effort to limit climate change.  

The event is part of the CIRS Environmental Studies Initiative focusing on human-induced climate change which features GU-Q faculty members with core expertise on the environment working with a global network of scholars to produce new research findings, reports, journal articles, and public events.

The dean of GU-Q, Dr. Ahmad Dallal, said: “This event builds on our previous initiatives at CIRS that address important questions related to environmental issues, and underscores GU-Q's renewed commitment to engagement with the public on our environmental research efforts, because we are all stakeholders in the effort to work towards an ecologically sustainable future.”

At the lecture, the author will be refocusing the debate about climate change on the national rather than the global level. As Dr. Lieven notes, “While international agreements and movements are valuable, in the end their purpose is to get states to act, because (as the pandemic response demonstrated) only states can take the measures and mobilise the resources required. For this to happen, states and their populations have to be convinced that climate change is not just a threat to humanity in general, but a danger to the vital interests and the long term survival of their own nations.”

Registration for the online event is available at https://www.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/ClimateChange

At GU-Q, Dr. Lieven teaches classes on international relations, foreign policy, and nationalism. Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case is published by Penguin in the U.K. and Oxford University Press in the U.S. Dr. Lieven was previously a correspondent in South Asia and the former USSR, and an expert at think tanks in Washington, DC, and has taken part in numerous panels to discuss climate change and its impact on world politics. He has also published on the subject in journals and newspapers including The Observer (U.K.) and The National Interest (U.S.). He is the author of numerous other books, including America Right and Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism.