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• September 2024 Meeting

  • When
    18 Sep 2024
  •  
    5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
  • Location
    Barber Park, 4049 S. Eckert Road, Boise, 83716

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  Speaker: Sophie Rutenbar, Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow

  Topic: Violence and Conflict in the Post-Post-Cold War Era: The Changing Role of United Nations Peace Operations

  
  

  Bio: Sophie Rutenbar is a Visiting Fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, which she joins as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. She also currently works as a Visiting Scholar with the Prevention and Peacebuilding Program of the New York University Center for International Cooperation. Prior to her fellowship, Rutenbar was the Mission Planning Officer for the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti for 3.5 years. Before that, she worked at U.N. Headquarters in New York for several years, including with the Policy Planning Team of the U.N. Department of Peace Operations. In that role, she worked extensively on U.N. peacekeeping and peace and security reform processes, including supporting the Action for Peacekeeping Initiative, Secretary-General’s Peace and Security Restructuring, and High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations.

  Before joining the U.N., Rutenbar worked for organizations in Sudan and South Sudan, including observing the 2011 referendum process on independence for southern Sudan with the Carter Center and working for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Sudan and South Sudan Transition and Conflict Mitigation Program. She also has experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Thailand.

  She was a 2005 Truman Scholar. Through the Marshall Scholarship, she received master’s degrees in Conflict, Security, and Development from the War Studies Department at King’s College London and in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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• October 2024 Meeting

  • When
    1 Oct 2024
  •  
    5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
  • Location
    The Riverside Hotel

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  Speaker: David Levine, Election Integrity and Management Consultant

  Topic: Election Integrity

  
  

  Bio: David Levine is an Election Integrity and Management Consultant, who works to ensure that eligible voters can vote, free and fair elections are perceived as legitimate, and election processes are properly administered and secured. He is also an election security adjunct professor at George Mason University, an advisory committee member for the Global Cyber Alliance's Cybersecurity Toolkit for Elections, an advisory council member for The Election Reformers Network, a member of the Election Verification Network, and a contributor to the Fulcrum. Previously, he worked as the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, where he assessed vulnerabilities in electoral infrastructure, administration, and policies. And before that he was the Ada County, Idaho Elections Director, managing the administration of all federal, state, county, and local district elections for 25% of the state’s population.

  David’s engagements and publications focus on election access, trust and security, and the nexus between external threats from malign actors and the challenges democracies face in conducting free and fair elections. His work has been published and quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg Technology, The Hill, Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, BBC, EU Observer, and elsewhere.

  David received a BA from Haverford College and a JD from the Case Western Reserve School of Law, where he discovered his passion for elections. Since then, he has administered elections, worked with advocacy groups to improve the election process, and observed elections in the United States and many other countries. 

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