Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

09/03/2026

While the US-led invasion of Afghanistan sees its 25th anniversary on October 7, the stakes remain urgent for Afghan women and girls as they fight for education, safety, public voice, and basic human rights under Taliban rule. Join the Rule of Law Institute at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, Art Works Projects, and the Roberta Buffett Institute for The Sharp Edge of Peace: Global Struggle and Local Action for Women’s Rights in Afghanistan. This event includes the "Women Between Peace and War: Afghanistan" exhibit and an excerpt from "The Sharp Edge of Peace," a film by Roya Sadat that documents four women peace negotiators during the transition preceding the Taliban’s 2021 return to power.

📆 Friday, September 11 from 12:00–3:00 p.m.
📍Loyola University Chicago School of Law in Chicago
👥 Learn more and register:

The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan sees its 25th anniversary on 7 October 2026. August 15, 2021, marked five years since the Taliban’s return to power after the U.S. withdrawal. The stakes remain urgent. For Afghan women and girls, the consequences are not distant or abstract, but present in the

09/02/2026

China recently pledged to share data to help developing countries build their own AI systems. However, rules in place so that Chinese AI models cannot deviate from the Chinese Communist Party's official narratives mean that Chinese chatbots can evade answering sensitive questions and revise history even when queried using software to circumvent the country’s internet controls. How does training AI models on regionally-biased data influence how global challenges are interpreted and framed? The Roberta Buffett Institute’s Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group is studying exactly what sociopolitical values different countries embed in the LLMs (Large Language Models) they create and the data they provide to existing models. The group is undertaking the world’s first comprehensive and internationally comparative study investigating how LLMs from countries around the world respond to prompts about climate change, migration, and other hot-button topics.

💻 Learn about the Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group: https://buffett.northwestern.edu/research/global-working-groups/global-llm-values-benchmarking.html

08/31/2026

Cyberattacks on US water systems that officials suspect may be linked to Iran-backed hackers have been reported in at least a dozen states and over 100 municipalities across the country. How can AI help predict and protect against these cyberattacks? Northwestern Security & AI Lab (NSAIL), jointly housed in the Roberta Buffett Institute and McCormick School of Engineering, has created the Counterproliferation Triad (CoT), a framework that brings together people, processes, and technology to identify and mitigate AI-related proliferation risks. NSAIL, led by VS Subrahmanian, developed the framework in collaboration with Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program's Daniel Byman and the Netherlands Defence Academy's Roy Lindelauf and Herwin Meerveld.

Learn more about the Counterproliferation Triad and access the project's handbooks, executive course, and testbeds: https://sites.northwestern.edu/evcap/

08/27/2026

This week, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle lawsuits alleging that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children and teens. The settlement raises a bigger question: What responsibility do social media platforms have for the environments they create?

As our experts discussed at our Disinformation in a Post-Moderation World symposium, social media companies may not control speech — but they do control what gets amplified, monetized, and made visible.

08/27/2026

This month, heat index temperatures rose to 132 degrees Fahrenheit in an underground subway station in New York. July was the hottest month ever recorded in the US, and rising global temperatures are increasing pressure on cities around the world to address stifling heat on public transport. New York is exploring a new system, called a thermal energy network, to capture heat, push it deeper underground, and use the trapped heat to heat surrounding buildings in the winter. “Extracting the heat and moving it away is a rational approach,” said Alessandro Rotta Loria, Associate Professor at McCormick School of Engineering and a co-lead of the Roberta Buffett Institute's new Underground Climate Change Global Working Group. “You can deploy this universally, in New York City, London, Rome, wherever you are. The only issue is space restraints and the expertise and willingness to install it,” shared Loria. The working group, which will be formally announced soon, aims to bring together scholars, governments, utilities, and industry partners to develop solutions for the ways climate change and rising temperatures threaten the durability and safety of underground infrastructure in urban areas. Learn more about their work:

Jack Klein takes heat readings, gives fans to overheated passengers and lugs big jugs of water into the stations

08/26/2026

"I was really curious how communities [in Chennai] are organizing to address the fact that climate change is increasingly threatening urban communities and their food security,” said recent Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy graduate Anusha Kumar, who received an International Senior Thesis Research Grant from the Roberta Buffett Institute to travel to Chennai, India, to examine how community-led mutual aid networks help people access food and build resilience in the city. Her resulting thesis, “From Scarcity to Solidarity: Mutual Aid as a Pathway to Food Justice and Urban Resilience in Chennai, India" won the top overall poster award and first place in the social justice division at the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium. Since then, Kumar received a US Student Fulbright Award to teach English in Linz, Austria. Stay tuned for an upcoming Buffett Q&A featuring Kumar and her research trip to Chennai. Learn more about her accomplishments: https://sesp.northwestern.edu/news-events/sesp-news/2026/kumar-wins-fulbright-award.html

08/25/2026

Our 14 Elliott Scholars spent the summer contributing to community-led international development efforts around the world. After spending winter and spring taking courses on the foundations of international development and how to bring people into policy—taught by the World Bank's Vijayendra Rao and Northwestern University's Professor Diego Arispé Bazan—our Elliott Scholars embarked on an internship abroad through the Northwestern Global Learning Office's Global Engagement Studies Institute in the summer. With nonprofit organizations in Thailand, Vietnam, Morocco, Argentina, and Costa Rica, Elliott Scholars worked to advance community-driven change and apply what they learned in their coursework to make a difference in their host communities.

Northwestern University second- and third-year undergraduates: Interested in becoming an Elliott Scholar? Learn more and apply by November 1: https://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/undergraduate-opportunities/elliott-scholars-program/

08/21/2026

Through our spring-quarter course on defending global academic freedom, undergraduates designed advocacy campaigns for two Azerbaijani scholars and activists currently imprisoned abroad. Igbal Abilov and Bahruz Samadov were wrongfully convicted of treason for their academic work, peaceful criticism of government policies, and advocacy for minority rights and peace.

Taught by Roberta Buffett Institute staffers Samantha Nissen and Andreea Micu, the seminar was a collaboration with Scholars at Risk, a nonprofit working globally to protect scholars who are threatened, displaced, or imprisoned for their academic work. To engage the Northwestern University community in their advocacy campaigns, the class organized card-making events and painted the Rock on campus raise awareness about these imprisoned scholars the Scholars at Risk network. Read the UN's call for Abilov and Samadov's release: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/azerbaijan-un-experts-urge-release-researchers-igbal-abilov-and-bahruz

The Roberta Buffett Institute's Global Lab courses offer opportunities for hands-on learning through real-world projects or direct work with global leaders. This Global Lab course will be offered again in spring 2027. Students will have the opportunity to participate in a trek to Washington, DC, where they will practice advocacy on Capitol Hill, meet students from other Scholars at Risk seminars, and connect with organizations and policymakers working on issues related to academic freedom. Subscribe to our mailing list to stay updated on the Institute's programs: https://buffett.northwestern.edu/subscribe/index.html

08/21/2026

08/19/2026

Reducing poverty to 1% would require "just 14% of the wealth gained by global billionaires in 2025 alone," according to a new Brookings Institution commentary co-authored by Buffett Faculty Fellow Dean Karlan, Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Karlan and his co-authors explain that targeted cash transfers to poor households could nearly eradicate global poverty.

What type of cash transfer program could have the maximum impact? Karlan and former Buffett Faculty Fellow Christopher Udry, Robert E. and Emily King Professor of Economics at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, studied 115 cash transfer programs across the world to gain insights.

📖 Read the Brookings commentary: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/end-of-extreme-poverty-a-case-for-action-and-a-plan-to-start/
📑 Read the 115-program study: https://voxdev.org/topic/social-protection/what-broad-lessons-have-we-learned-115-studies-unconditional-cash-transfers

A meta-analysis of 115 studies shows that unconditional cash transfers have positive impacts on a range of key economic and social outcomes, including consumption, income, labour supply, and child health and education. Around 700 million people currently live in extreme poverty (World Bank 2024), an...