What Ties a Nation Together?

Each year the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics hosts its Civil Discourse Series, which brings together panelists with different perspectives for a conversation on a timely public issue. This year we ask: What ties a nation together? We’ll explore creeds, cultures, institutions, and practices that create—or strain—social cohesion. Rather than a debate on border policy, we’re interested in the deeper question of what citizens must share, if anything, to form a common democratic civic life. 

Our goal is to offer students and the wider community a live example of thoughtful disagreement—how strong differences can be aired and examined respectfully and substantively. 

This year's event will feature as panelists Dr. Desireé Melonas, Dr. Harris Mylonas, General Lori J. Robinson, USAF, Ret., and Dr. Christine Rosen moderated by Professor Nien-hê Hsieh, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.

Please Note: Registration is required for attendance. If you are an HUID holder, please bring your HUID to show to security. If you are a non-HUID holder, please be prepared to verify your registration at the door.

This event will also be available via livestream on our YouTube channel. 

About the panelists

• Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, and technology and human behavior. She is also a monthly columnist for Commentary magazine, one of the cohosts of The Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and senior editor at The New Atlantis. She was previously a distinguished visiting scholar at the Library of Congress.
   
  Rosen is the author or coauthor of many books and book chapters. Her books include The Extinction of Experience (W. W. Norton, 2024); My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood (PublicAffairs, 2005), which was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Washington Post; and Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford University Press, 2004). Her opinion pieces, articles, and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, National Affairs, National Review, the New Atlantis, the New Republic, the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Politico, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New England Journal of Medicine, among other outlets. 

  Rosen has a PhD in history, with a major in American intellectual history, from Emory University, and a BA in history from the University of South Florida. She also holds a third-degree black belt in aikido and is a martial arts instructor. She lives with her family in Washington, D.C.

• Harris Mylonas is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and editor-in-chief of Nationalities Papers. His work contributes to our understanding of states’ management of diversity that may originate from national minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees. Mylonas has penned the award-winning The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities and, most recently, co-authored Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (with Maya Tudor). He has co-edited Enemies Within: The Global Politics of Fifth Columns (with Scott Radnitz) and The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics (with Alexandra Délano Alonso). Beyond academic publishing, Mylonas made the award-winning documentary film Searching for Andreas: Political Leadership in Times of Crisis, and also co-produces the podcast, American Constitutive Stories, in collaboration with Andrew Thompson. Mylonas’s perspectives into nationalism and geopolitics have been published in The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, CNN.com, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times and other media outlets. He has also appeared on BBC, CNN, Voice of America, and CBC Radio, among other outlets in the U.S. and abroad. Mylonas completed his PhD in political science at Yale University in 2008 and was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2008-09 and 2011-12). He also served as Associate Dean for Research at the Elliott School of International Affairs (2017-18).
• Desireé Melonas is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Black Study and Political Science at UC Riverside. Her research focuses on the rhythmic and inductive aspects of racialized place, black feminist new materialisms, and the politics of radical care. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, National Review of Black Politics, Meridians, Theory and Event, and Women’s Studies Quarterly: WSQ. In addition, she is a co-principal investigator on a National Academies of the Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Gulf Research Program Grant to co-develop environmental justice-focused curricular interventions throughout schools in and around Africatown, Alabama. Finally, Desireé is a 2020-2021 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow and an aspiring doula.
• General Lori J. Robinson retired from the Air Force in July 2018 following a 37 year military career, including Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and US Northern Command (NORTHCOM). In those positions she commanded 1,600 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and civilians from the United States and Canada. 
   
  Prior to her command of NORAD and US NORTHCOM, she was the Commander, United States Air Forces Pacific, responsible for 45,000 Airmen to deliver combat air power throughout the Pacific Theater. She exerted direct global influence representing the Chief of Staff of the Air Force in meetings with heads of state, political and military leaders throughout the Pacific. 
   
  General Robinson served in many other senior leadership positions including: Director of Joint Capabilities Development (J-8) reporting to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Director of Air Force Legislative Liaison on Capitol Hill reporting directly to the Secretary of the Air Force, responsible for budget issues and coordination with political leadership in the House and Senate. Earlier in her career she commanded the Air Force’s only Airborne Warning and Control Wing (AWACS) including command of combat units engaged in the Middle East. 
   
  General Robinson has earned two Masters degrees. She is currently serving as a non-resident senior fellow in the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. She was also named as Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016, and Time’s Firsts Women Leaders in 2017. General Robinson continues to serve as a role model and mentor to career-minded men and women who seek to balance the demands of career with personal and family responsibilities. She is married to Major General (Ret) David A. Robinson. 

• Nien-hê Hsieh (moderator) is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration in the General Management Unit at Harvard Business School. His research and teaching aims at helping business leaders and organizations determine and deliver on their responsibilities. He also studies what democratic values require for economic policies and institutions. Professor Hsieh teaches Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA) to first-year MBA students and Executive Education participants, and serves as Course Head for LCA. At Harvard University, he serves on the faculty committees for the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and on the Scholars at Risk Program.

  Professor Hsieh’s research centers on the question of whether and how managers, organizations, and economic institutions ought to be guided not only by considerations of efficiency, but also by values such as freedom and fairness and respect for basic rights and democracy. He has pursued this question in a variety of contexts, including the employment relationship, the operation of multinational enterprises in developing economies, and the ownership of productive property. Professor Hsieh also studies foundational aspects of this question, examining principles for rational decision making when choices involve multiple values that appear incomparable.
  
  Professor Hsieh's work has been published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Economics and Philosophy, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Social Theory and Practice, Utilitas, and various other journals. He is a past president of the Society for Business Ethics.

  Professor Hsieh holds a B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College, an M.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He joined the faculty from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics and served as co-director of the Wharton Ethics Program. Before joining the faculty at Wharton in 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School, and he has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the Research School for Social Sciences at the Australian National University.