Larry Diamond is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and founding co-editor of Journal of Democracy. During early 2004, he served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq. He has edited 36 books on democracy, including  How People View Democracy, How East Asians View Democracy, Latin America's Struggle for Democracy, Political Change in China: Comparisons with Taiwan, and Assessing the Quality of Democracy. In this event, Diamond will review the trends in freedom and democracy over the last decade and explain why liberal democracy is now in danger in the one place where it was presumed to be stable: The West. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/diamondl

The public's ability to form attitudes and opinions that guide decisions to use military force is among the most important duties of citizens of democratic nations. Yet most voters have virtually no direct exposure to warfare. Americans receive essentially all of their information about war through the lens of the national media. Media norms and practices about the coverage of war have changed dramatically over the past century, ranging from the "yellow journalism" of the turn of the 20th century, through the "golden age" of television journalism of towering figures like Walter Cronkite, to the splintered and partisan media environment of the internet. In this conference we will explore the evolution of these media norms and practices as well as their impact on how the public thinks and feels about war. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/warandmedia

This year's Military Frontiers conference showcases the scholarship of 12 graduate students who study topics relating to the management of force and power in international affairs. The conference is interdisciplinary; the presenters represent a range of academic fields, and their research is based in a variety of methodologies. By bringing together up-and-coming scholars working on similar topics, the conference aims to promote communication and cooperation across academic disciplines. Gary Sheffield, professor of war studies at University of Wolverhamption, will give the keynote address on "How The West Won World War I." Read more and register at go.osu.edu/militaryfrontiers17

Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and was until 2004 the master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is also senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. He was also awarded the inaugural Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize in recognition of his work on welfare economics in February 2015. In this lecture, Sen will examine three reasons why inequality is socially unreasonable.  Read more and register

Julie Demuth is project scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Regional Climate Research, Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Laboratory. In this talk, she will discuss efforts to examine risk communication, assessment, and responses to extreme weather through different research methods, with different populations, and for different weather hazards. This event is part of the SENR Seminar Series and will also be available through Carmen Connect.

The Oxford English Dictionary has named "post-truth" the word of 2016. Post-truth is defined as, "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Our panel hopes to look at different historical contexts/cases where generally accepted "truths" were somehow rendered unimportant, whether deliberately or unintentionally, thereby providing historical context for our more recent "post-truth" moments. Panelists include John Brooke, Department of History (left); Greg Anderson, History;  Melissa Curley, Comparative Studies; and Bert Harrill,  History.  Read more

Karen Seto is professor of geography and urbanization science at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University. Her talk will draw on recent research that examines the implications of future urban expansion on global croplands and energy demand by buildings. Using both top-down and bottom-up approaches and scenarios, Seto finds that energy use for heating and cooling by mid-century will increase 5 to 40 percent over the 2010 estimate. The results also show that urban expansion will result in a 1.8 to 2.4 percent loss of global croplands by 2030, with substantial regional disparities. About 80 percent of global cropland loss from urban expansion will take place in Asia and Africa, where much of the cropland that will be lost is more than twice as productive as national averages. Read more