June 29: America's Public Forum on Social Trust, National Cohesion, and American Resilience

On June 29, 2023 at 6 p.m. ET, the Braver Angels D.C. Project, in partnership with American Purpose, invite you to its latest America’s Public Forum, held in-person only at the Hamilton Restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C.

Join us for the panel from 6 - 8 p.m. ET followed by a reception with hors d’oeuvres and refreshments. This event is free and open to all Braver Angels members and friends, and to interested members of the Washington D.C. policy community. All are welcome!

Panelists Michael J. Mazarr, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and Seth Kaplan, professional lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, are scholars of international relations and security studies with decades’ worth of experience advising agencies around the U.S. government and the international development community. Mazarr’s background covers U.S. defense policy and the norms and processes of the making of national security policy; Kaplan’s work has focused on the reconstruction of fragile states and fragile societies around the world, and analysis of social conditions and policy approaches for reversing social breakdown.

Their applied scholarship in defense policy and international development focuses on questions of stability, security, social cohesion, and social trust of immense relevance to the work of depolarization. In some key senses, their recent books—Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One ZIP Code at a Time and Mazarr’s The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness—can help practitioners of depolarization work consider the implications of their own practices for national security studies.

Luke Nathan Phillips of Braver Angels will chair a conversation with Mazarr and Kaplan on these questions and more, considering new ways to incorporate the best of national security scholarship into the internal understandings of depolarization work, and hear these scholars’ assessments of the present status and longterm implications of American divisions.