Looking back at the “Civil War and Intervention: U.S. Foreign Policy in International Perspective” Conference

Welcoming historians, political scientists, and policy practitioners to Austin, the conference spanned two full days of substantive intellectual debate over the United States’ long history of intervening in the civil wars of foreign countries. The conference featured three keynote speakers, Dean James Steinberg from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Professor Fredrik Logevall from Harvard University, and Emma Sky, who is Director of the International Leadership Center at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Panelists presented in-progress works on a wide range of topics, including U.S. humanitarian interventions in the Russian Civil War, U.S.-Chinese competition in civil wars in developing countries, and U.S. support for civil wars in Central America in the 1980s. Dr. Emily Whalen, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center, developed the idea for the conference in 2020. She and Fredrik Logevall are co-editing a volume of the conference papers.