Iran and the West: A Dialogue of Ambassadors

Apr 11

Global Security Signature Lecture

CIGI Campus Auditorium, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6C2

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Amb. Pickering and Amb. Mousavian will address how to bring Iran in from the cold of its isolation; how to deal constructively and realistically with Iran’s evident determination to achieve a nuclear weapons capability; how to understand Iran’s internal divisions and what those divisions make possible, or impossible, in the West’s efforts to avoid a war with the Islamic Republic.

Moderators:

James Blight, the CIGI chair in foreign policy development at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and janet Lang, Research Professor at BSIA, award-winning authors, scholar, and experts in critical oral history. They are the authors of Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979-1988 (published by Rowman and Littlefield, June 2012) and The Armageddon Letters: Cuba/October/1962 (published by Rowman and Liittlefield, September 2012).

Speakers

Hossein Mousavian, Ambassador

Former Iranian ambassador to Germany, former chief Iranian nuclear negotiator. Amb. Mousavian is currently a visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Thomas R. Pickering, Ambassador

Former U.S. ambassador to nine countries (including Russia, India, Israel, Jordan, et al. and to the UN). Amb. Pickering retired at the end of the Clinton administration as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.