The Department of Political Science and Human Security Lab hosted Retired Navy Captain Benjamin Clancy this past week for a major foreign policy talk, a class visit and a sit-down with Human Security Lab’s undergraduate research group.
Captain Clancy graduated from University of Massachusetts Department of Political Science and went on to earn degrees in law from Memphis State University, the Naval Justice School and the Army JAG Corps School before serving a distinguished career in the US Navy JAG Corps, with active duty deployments on the USS Constellation and at Combined Forces Command in Afghanistan. He subsequently served as a Staff Judge Advocate to the Director of Naval Intelligence, as as Deputy Director of the Administrative Law Division of the Office of the Judge Advocate General, and taught as a Military Professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.
On his visit to UMass, Captain Clancy gave a talk on “Militaries, Foreign Policy and the Rule of Law” that drew over forty students and faculty, gave a guest lecture on in Professor Charli Carpenter’s “Rules of War” class, and met with the undergraduate research team at Human Security Lab, where he learned about and gave feedback on the lab’s projects on the effectiveness of the cluster munitions treaty and US servicemembers attitudes toward the duty to disobey.
In his remarks to the students in the audience, Captain Clancy emphasized the potential of careers in the military and the military’s role in promoting and upholding international law, as well as the value of the rule of law in US soft and hard power abroad.