“In our [2017 Policy Studies Journal] paper, we mostly looked at overall gun control policies and access to mental health rather than specific policies,” Smith said, explaining that most states which implement gun control laws do so more with more than one, making it difficult to assess which laws have caused what specific effect. Despite this challenge, Smith and his team still found a definite pattern in terms of how gun control laws impacted suicide rates.

“What we do find in our research is that states with more gun control laws have fewer gun deaths (including those who die by suicide from guns) and for non-suicides (homicides and accidental discharge together), a combination of more access to mental health services and an overall stricter climate for gun control laws correlates with a particularly lower rate of gun deaths,” Smith said. Specifically, the team found that more access to mental health care did not correlate with lower rates of suicide by gun; stricter gun control laws, however, had that desired impact.

“This relationship is perhaps due to the fact that many mental health treatments take time to have an effect, while the effect of removing a gun (or preventing one from having it in the first place) is immediate,” Smith said, adding that more access to mental health care is still good for other reasons. “It is also very difficult under existing law to remove a gun due to mental illness, but having stricter gun control laws generally can either prevent (assault weapons ban) or delay (through background checks) when one has access to a gun.”

“They are increasingly using AI tools to build their codes for cyberattacks,” said William Akoto, assistant professor of international politics at Fordham, adding that every new AI feature added to platforms like ChatGPT makes hackers’ work easier and leaves corporations and government agencies vulnerable. “It’s lowering the bar on these attacks.”

President Joe Biden said the “warp speed” at which this technology is advancing prompted him Monday to sign an executive order using the Defense Production Act to steer how companies develop AI so they can make a profit without risking public safety.

Akoto, who studies the international dynamics of cyberattacks, said the executive order is a step in the right direction.

“Presently, the U.S. lags behind global counterparts such as the E.U., U.K., and China in establishing definitive guidelines for AI’s evolution and application,” he said. “So this directive is a much-needed measure in bridging that gap. It is comprehensive, clarifying the U.S. government’s perspective on AI’s potential to drive economic growth and enhance national security.”

The president’s wide-ranging order in part requires AI developers to share safety test results with the government and to follow safety standards that will be created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Biden said this is the first step in government regulation of the AI industry in the U.S, a field he said  needs to be governed because of its enormous potential for both promising and dangerous ramifications.

But despite its noble intentions, Akoto said, “The practical implementation of these measures will present significant challenges, both for federal oversight bodies and the technology sector. A critical issue is the misalignment between the economic and market forces currently influencing AI technology firms and the Biden administration’s aspirations for cautious, well-evaluated, and transparent AI development. Without realigning these incentives with the administration’s objectives, tangible, positive outcomes from this executive order will remain elusive.”

Ultimately, the effectiveness of this initiative will hinge on how robust enforcement will be to ensure AI technology companies’ compliance, Akoto said.

For Priya Ravindran, who met her Ukrainian husband at Fordham and later adopted his country as her own, reporting on the war and sharing her young family’s story is an act of resistance.

When Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, Priya Ravindran was living in Kyiv with her Ukrainian husband and their 2-year-old son, Neil. The couple met in 2010 as graduate students at Fordham and were married in Kyiv four years later.

“We led fairly normal lives. We worked, traveled within Ukraine and internationally, went out on the weekends, went out to eat, met with friends,” said Ravindran, who was an editor at the Ukrainian state-run news station UATV English before going on maternity leave in 2019. “It wasn’t until February 24 that our lives changed forever.”

Two days later, amid reports of military and civilian casualties near Kyiv, they fled, joining more than 12 million people who would leave their homes following the Russian invasion.

‘Trying to Play My Part’

As they drove away, “Alex asked me in the car, ‘Do you realize you are now officially a mother fleeing war with an almost-3-year-old?’” Ravindran wrote on February 26.

“We always knew this was a possibility. Even before I got pregnant, I asked Alex many times, ‘What if we have a child and full-out war breaks out?’ … Like with everything in life, you try to put those thoughts at the back of your mind, but here we are.”

They headed west with a friend and his mom, driving through numerous Ukrainian military checkpoints. “We are surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains, vast snow-covered fields, and heaps and heaps of trees with just the perfect amount of snow,” she wrote. “Seeing the pristine beauty of nature, I almost think to myself, ‘This is all a dream, right? It has to be.’ But no, this isn’t a dream. … Ukraine is still fighting for its existence.”

On February 28, they arrived at their destination: a friend’s home in Ivano-Frankivsk.

“I have a lot of guilt that I’m not doing enough, not helping enough,” Ravindran wrote that day. “But I’m trying to play my part in letting people know what’s happening, as best as I can, in the best way I know how: through my love of writing.”

Since late February, Ravindran has been posting daily accounts of the war. In each post on her public Facebook page, she typically mixes news and analysis with a firsthand account by another writer as well as personal stories of her family’s experiences and emotions. (To protect her husband’s identity, she uses the pseudonym Alex to refer to him.)

Her posts have reached a broad audience. On March 3, one day before Neil’s third birthday, she was interviewed by Indian TV journalist Barkha Dutt, “whose reporting in the 1990s on the India-Pakistan war convinced me as a 12-year-old to be a journalist,” Ravindran wrote.

From Mumbai to Kyiv via Rose Hill

Born in Mumbai, Ravindran was 17 years old when she moved from India to the U.S. to attend college. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism and international relations at the State University of New York at Oswego, she enrolled at Fordham to pursue a master’s degree in political science.

The day before her classes started in fall 2010, she left her walk-up apartment on Arthur Avenue to buy groceries. “When I returned, I was holding the door to the building open with one leg while pushing all my bags in,” she said. “At the same time, Alex exited his apartment on the first floor, stopped, and asked me if I needed help. I told him I could manage, but he insisted, so he carried all my bags upstairs and started to run away. I screamed ‘Priya!’ after him, and he said, ‘Alex!’”

Alex had arrived at Fordham on a Fulbright Fellowship, and he was enrolled in Fordham’s International Political Economy and Development program. The two saw each other in class the next day, Ravindran said, but it wasn’t until the end of the semester that she learned that they share a love of trance music. “I invited him and his roommates to a concert by a famous German duo,” she said. “He asked me out the next day, and the rest is history, as they say.” They were married in Kyiv on June 26, 2014.

A Rousing Song for the Motherland

In her daily posts on Facebook, Ravindran has covered numerous aspects of the war. In early July, she published transcripts of phone conversations intercepted by the Ukrainian Security Service in which Russian soldiers discuss the killing of civilians. In mid-May, she shared the results of a Kyiv School of Economics study indicating that, as of May 10, the war had caused an estimated $600 billion in economic losses in the country. And in June, she covered a nightly address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he said that at least 828 children had been affected by the war—446 injured, 243 killed, and 139 missing.

“We talk about war and its impact in numbers, and as jarring as they may be,” Ravindran wrote, “they don’t always convey the full story. … They don’t tell us about the trauma parents and their children are dealing with. We remember so many wars in numbers, but we forget about the stories.”

Amid the fear and anxiety of the war, and the near-constant threat of air raids, she has found moments to celebrate: the “happiness on Neil’s face” when he gets a couple of “siren-free” hours to play in a local park, for example, and the “immense joy” of seeing the Ukrainian rap and folk band Kalush Orchestra win the annual Eurovision Song Contest in mid-May.

“It doesn’t mean anything for the war,” she wrote at the time, “but it was a small relief for the psyche.” She noted that the band’s lead singer, Oleh Psiuk, wrote the winning song, “Stefania,” as an ode to his own mother. But since the Russian invasion, the song has taken on new meaning.

“People have been using the song to symbolize Ukraine—the yearning of children who have been separated from their mothers because they are serving in the military; the emotions of sons who are missing their mothers who crossed the border to bring their other siblings to safety; the pain of children who have lost their mothers to the war,” Ravindran wrote.

And with lyrics like, “I’ll always find my way home, even if all roads are destroyed,” she added: “Some are reminded of the motherland itself.”

Read Priya Ravindran’s Ukraine war journal on Facebook at @pravindran1.

“As McSilver seeks to broaden the conversation about such important issues as inequality, social and racial justice, having such a renowned scholar such as Dr. Greer at McSilver is an exciting opportunity to enhance the dialogue regarding the root causes of poverty and to explore policy solutions, both locally and nationally,” said Michael A. Lindsey, Ph.D., director of the institute.

The institute cited Greer’s research “concerning the impact of racial identity as it pertains to policy choices and preferences for black populations” as one of the reasons for awarding her the fellowship. For her part, Greer said she looks forward to participating in “a holistic conversation about poverty, policy, and politics” with Lindsey and his team.

“I am beyond excited to join the McSilver Institute,” said Greer.

“I am humbled to be a part of this conversation as Michael and the McSilver Institute move forward with even more important and necessary projects in this current political climate.”

In his first book, Assistant Professor of History Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D., traces the history of the postcolonialist elites who upended the exploitive system of Western corporate control of petroleum in favor of sovereign control over resources.

Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization, (Cambridge University Press, 2017), tells the story of how a generation of leaders took control of their most precious natural resource and used their newfound power to usher in a new era of international economics.

The anticolonial elites Dietrich refers to were mainly Western-educated lawyers and economists who found a community of sorts in the nascent United Nations and in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, where they would

gather “to talk about their problems and find solutions,” says Dietrich. There, they would “share information and create proposals and strategies as part of a long-term structural undertaking in the international community.”

The result was not just, in Dietrich’s words, “the most concentrated nonviolent transfer of global wealth in human history” but a profound transformation of the global order. Oil Revolution provides a penetrating analysis of this little-understood but crucial period in geopolitical history—one whose repercussions continue to this day, he says.

The politics of the Mideast are difficult to understand without, for example, an accounting of the Arab oil embargo of 1967—a critical episode that Dietrich analyzes in his book. In one sense, the embargo was a tactical failure: it did not succeed in forcing a change in American support for Israel, and there is evidence that some of the nations were surreptitiously violating the embargo. In another sense, however, it paved the way for the success of the 1973 embargo, which radically changed the contours of power in the international order.

What lessons specifically can be drawn from Oil Revolution? Dietrich says that, as a historian, he is hesitant to draw clear-cut lessons from the past to the future. “But one aspect of this story that is important to understand is the ability of these anticolonial elites to work together and to form a coherent strategy” from the concert of ideas, he says. “Ideas about sovereignty and national control over one’s destiny extend into the economic realm, nowhere more importantly than in the oil industry.”
–Michael Lindgren