Camden Conference in the World (August 2026)

One of the pleasures of running a conference with decades of alumni is watching where our speakers turn up next. We keep an eye on past Camden Conference speakers and panelists to see what they’re writing, saying, and working on — and this month’s roundup touches on Iran, India, the Arctic, and conflict minerals at the UN. If you spot a former speaker in the news, we’d love to hear about it for a future edition — drop us a line.

The on-again-off-again war with Iran, which began just days after the February 2027 Camden Conference ended, has provided a continuous diet of red meat for several Conference alumni including The New Yorker‘s Robin Wright. In a July article titled “Donald Trump’s Ad-Lib Strategy on Iran,” she cites Richard Haass, a senior official in both Bush Administrations and the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote in his Substack column that Trump has tried three strategies so far: regime change, relentless bombardment, and then diplomacy, and has “come up short each and every time.” Wright notes that so far the cost to American taxpayers and consumers “already far exceeds a hundred and thirty billion dollars, per the Times,” while the rest of the world “is paying an additional, incalculably high price.” Not just in dollars: “The diminishment of American credibility, another cost,” she writes, “will probably be with us for decades to come.”

Another CC27 speaker, Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution, spoke on July 20 with NPR’s Ailsa Chang about the U.S. war with Iran. Maloney said she doesn’t foresee a military solution to the conflict and expects that “at some point we’re going to see a resurgence of diplomatic activity.” The U.S. is being pressured by its allies in the region, said Maloney, after Iran “sought not to try to deter the United States through punishing American forces, but rather by punishing America’s partners and allies in the region,” and they are telling the U.S., “Enough is enough. We need to be able to get back to business as usual.” Maloney also thinks there will be recurrent outbreaks of violence in the region “for some time to come,” which may hasten the development of alternative shipping arrangements that bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Ashutosh Varshney, speakers at the 2024 Conference, India, were both in the news recently. Prof. Varshney, writing in the online Indian news service The Print, questioned India’s voting rights rule that “only those who can prove their citizenship will be allowed to vote.” Varshney asks what documentary evidence could prove Indian citizenship: a low percentage of Indians hold passports, and many older Indians born at home have no birth certificates. Varshney argues that “the idea of documentary adequacy promotes exclusionary citizenship and enforces contraction of rights. It is also aimed at tilting electoral scales in favour of the party ruling in Delhi and in 21 states of India.”

Professor Mehta, writing in The Indian Express, praised a recent protest movement led by young Indians that led to the resignation of a minister and the Modi government’s withdrawal of proposed legislation. The issue was the leak of a national education exam, not for the first time, and the protest movement was given its name — the Cockroach Janta Party — by what Mehta calls “an ill-considered word, ‘cockroach,’ used by a Chief Justice of India.” Mehta says the movement “outwitted the government on Instagram” and “lifted, at least for the moment, the pall of fear that diminished us. It has brought the scandal that is Indian higher education onto the political agenda.”

Sara Olsvig, a speaker at the 2021 Conference, The Geopolitics of the Arctic, and outgoing chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, spoke to Inuit from across the Arctic who came together in July in Iqaluit, the capital of Canada’s largest and most northern territory, Nunavut, for the 15th Inuit Circumpolar Council General Assembly — the first gathering of this magnitude in nearly a decade. As the CBC edition of PressReader.com notes, the ICC represents roughly 180,000 Inuit across a vast area that includes Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Chukotka, Russia. The ICC works to promote and protect the rights of Inuit, something that came to the fore over the past couple of years in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland. “Across the board for Inuit this is a moment in time that is different. It’s turbulent,” said Olsvig. The tone heading into the general assembly feels more urgent, said Olsvig, in part because of the changing world order. “This is a significant time where our voice and our continued push and call for the full respect and implementation of our rights will be very, very important.”

Ambassador Stavros Lambrinidis, keynote speaker at the 2022 Conference, Europe: Challenged at Home and Abroad, issued a statement to the UN Security Council open debate on natural resource governance. “The illicit exploitation of natural resources continues to fuel armed conflicts, weaken state institutions, and undermine sustainable development, particularly in conflict-affected regions,” said Amb. Lambrinidis, Head of the Delegation of the European Union to the United Nations. “The European Union is strongly committed to preventing international trade in conflict minerals from intensifying or perpetuating conflicts and associated human rights abuses,” he continued. “Critical raw materials, including those considered to be conflict minerals, are crucial factors of sustainable development. They should be drivers of prosperity and not sources of conflicts, human rights violations and abuses.”