About the event: With the wider Russian war on Ukraine in its third year and greater uncertainty as a new U.S. administration prepares to take power in January 2025, this event brings together experts from across Stanford to discuss how states around the world view the conflict and its potential resolution. Some states have aligned with Ukraine, the United States and the European Union, viewing Russia’s aggression as a gross violation of international law. Others, such as North Korea, Iran and China, have supported Russia economically and militarily. Some emerging powers, such as Brazil and India, have advocated for a peaceful and negotiated end to the conflict. And many developing states, which have complicated cross-cutting relations with Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the European Union and China, have chosen to remain unaligned, even if they recognize the war is a violation of the UN Charter. Erin Baggot Carter, Sumit Ganguly, and Harold Trinkunas will compare the full range of policy responses from across the globe. Scott Sagan, co-director of the Center of International Security and Cooperation, will moderate the discussion.

About the speakers:

Erin Baggott Carter is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She is also an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California, a faculty affiliate at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute, and a nonresident scholar at the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego. She has previously held fellowships at the CDDRL and Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University.

Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics, propaganda, and foreign policy. Her first book, Propaganda in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), uses an original dataset of eight million articles in six languages drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries to explore how political institutions determine propaganda strategies. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by a number of media platforms, including the New York Times and the Little Red Podcast.

Sumit Ganguly is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a distinguished professor emeritus of political science and is the Tagore Chair Emeritus in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University–Bloomington. He is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of more than 20 books on the contemporary politics of South Asia. Professor Ganguly is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently the editor in chief of the International Studies Review.

Harold Trinkunas is the Deputy Director and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Dr. Trinkunas served as the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow and director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on issues related to foreign policy, governance, and security, particularly in Latin America. Trinkunas has written on emerging powers and the international order, ungoverned spaces, terrorism financing, borders, and information operations.

Trinkunas has co-authored Militants, Criminals and Warlords: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder (Brookings Institution Press, 2017), Aspirational Power: Brazil’s Long Road to Global Influence (Brookings Institution Press, 2016) and authored Crafting Civilian Control of the Military in Venezuela (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). He co-edited and contributed to Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2021), Three Tweets to Midnight: The Effect of the Global Information Ecosystem on the Risk of Nuclear Conflict  (Hoover Institution Press, 2020), American Crossings: Border Politics in the Western Hemisphere (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty (Stanford University Press, 2010), Global Politics of Defense Reform (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), and Terrorism Financing and State Responses (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Dr. Trinkunas also previously served as an associate professor and chair of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He received his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 1999. He was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.