Stanford University

Globalization

Global Politics of Defense Reform

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This volume analyzes the impact of key global trends on civil-military relations by examining defense reform processes since the end of the Cold War. Civil-military relations are reconceptualized to emphasize three dimensions: civilian control of the armed forces, effectiveness in carrying out roles and missions, and efficiency in use of resources.  The key global trends that affect these dimensions are the globalization of new norms and ideas, the democratization of governance, technological innovation, and economic liberalization. By focusing on defense reform processes, this book examines cases where civil-military relations can potentially alter quite rapidly under the impact of global trends. By comparing cases across Europe, Asia, North and South America, this book argues that democratization and globalization have had an outsized role in determining the timing and sequence of defense reform and the consequent impact on civil-military relations.

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0-230-60444-7

Is Mother Nature the Best Bioterrorist?

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As we find ourselves at the start of the "biological century" with a wealth of potential benefits to public health, agriculture, and global economies, it is almost deliberately naive to think that the extraordinary growth in the life sciences might not be exploited for nefarious purposes. A report published in 2006 by an ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Science recognized that the breadth of biological threats is much broader than commonly appreciated and will continue to expand for the foreseeable future. The nature of these threats, and a set of potential approaches with which to mitigate these threats, will be reviewed.

David Relman, MD, is professor of medicine, and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. He is also chief, infectious diseases section, at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in Palo Alto, California. His research is directed towards the characterization of the human indigenous microbial communities, with emphasis on understanding variation in diversity, succession, the effects of disturbance, and the role of these communities in health and disease.  This work brings together approaches from ecology, population biology, environmental microbiology, genomics and clinical medicine.  In addition, his research explores the classification structure of humans and non-human primates with systemic infectious diseases, based on patterns of genome-wide gene transcript abundance in blood and other tissues. The goals of this work are to recognize classes of pathogen and predict clinical outcome at early time points in the disease process, as well as to gain further insights into virulence. Past scientific achievements include the description of a novel approach for identifying previously-unknown pathogens, the identification of a number of new human microbial pathogens, including the agent of Whipple's disease, and some of the most extensive analyses to date of the human indigenous microbial ecosystem. See http://relman.stanford.edu

Among his other activities, Dr. Relman currently serves as Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIH), Chair of the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats (U.S. National Academies of Science), member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, and advises several U.S. Government departments and agencies on matters related to pathogen diversity, the future life sciences landscape, and the nature of present and future biological threats.  He co-chaired a three-year study at the National Academy of Sciences that produced a report entitled, "Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences" (2006). He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology. Dr. Relman received the Squibb Award of the IDSA in 2001, and was the recipient of both the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, and the Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, in 2006.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

David Relman Professor of Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology Speaker Stanford University
Seminars
Science, Technology and Security Seminars (2009-2010)

State Sovereignty and Security in East Asian International Relations

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Seo-Hyun Park (speaker) is a PhD candidate in the Government Department at Cornell University and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. Her dissertation project explores how the hierarchical regional order in East Asia has conditioned conceptions of state sovereignty and domestic identity politics in historical and contemporary Japan and Korea, with both countries alternating between deferential and defiant security strategies vis-a-vis regional hegemons such as China and the United States. Park has been a recipient of the Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the Mellon Fellowship, and the Cornell University Einaudi Center's Carpenter Fellowship. She has also conducted research in Japan and Korea as a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo and the Graduate School of International Studies at Yonsei University. Her research interests include the politics of sovereignty and national identity, globalization and regionalization, anti-Americanism, and territorial disputes as well as general issues in East Asian security and politics.

Phillip Lipscy (discussant), a specialist on Japanese political economy and international relations, is a center fellow at FSI and an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. His fields of research include international and comparative political economy, international security, Japanese politics, U.S.-Japan relations, and regional cooperation in East and South East Asia. Prior to joining Shorenstein APARC, Lipscy pursued his doctoral studies in government at Harvard University. He received his MA in international policy studies and BA in economics and political science at Stanford University. Lipscy has been affiliated with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, The Institute for Global and International Studies at The George Washington University, the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for International Policy Studies in Tokyo. Lipscy's most recent research investigates negotiations over representation in international organizations such as the United Nations Security Council, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. He is also researching the causes and implications of the rapid accumulation of international reserves in East and Southeast Asia.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Seo-Hyun Park Speaker
Phillip Lipscy Speaker
Seminars

DNA for Peace: The Balance Between Biosciences for Development and Security

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One of the world's greatest ethical challenges is the inequities in global health. Life expectancy in the United States is about 80 years and rising, while in many parts of the developing world, particularly in Africa as a result of HIV/AIDS, it is 40 years and falling. On the "bright side," the globalization of life sciences is key force to improve health in the developing world. For example, the rise of the Indian biotechnology industry has improved availability of vaccines and programs like the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provide hope for upstream discovery science against global health problems. However, on the "dark side," the globalization of life sciences poses risks to global biosecurity including bioterrorism by non-state actors.

This lecture will explore how to optimize the benefits of the "bright side," and mitigate the risks of the "dark side," of the globalization of life sciences. Dr. Singer will argue that the biological case is different from the nuclear case and demands a different approach, and explore the potential role of the United Nations in enhancing global biosecurity.

Peter A. Singer is senior scientist at the McLaughlin Rotman Centre, University Health Network; professor of medicine, University of Toronto; co-director of the Canadian Program in Genomics and Global Health; and a distinguished investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He studied internal medicine at the University of Toronto, medical ethics at the University of Chicago, public health at Yale University, and management at Harvard Business School. Between 1995 and 2006, Singer was Sun Life Financial Chair in Bioethics, director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics, and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto.

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History Corner, Building 200, Room 002

Peter A. Singer Senior Scientist, McLaughlin Rotman Centre, University Health Network, and Professor of Medicine Speaker University of Toronto
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CISAC scholar leads newly endowed, expanded International Policy Studies program

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Starting next fall, Stanford's 25-year-old International Policy Studies (IPS) master's program will double in length and expand its interdisciplinary scope to train a new generation of graduates prepared for careers in international policy-making and advocacy.

The two-year program is named in honor of Susan Ford Dorsey, president of the Sand Hill Foundation, who has made a gift of $7.5 million, which has been matched by university funds to create a $15 million endowment. According to program Director Stephen J. Stedman, the funding will be used to better integrate the program into the university's international policy research centers, increase access to courses in the law and business schools, use more full-time faculty to teach classes and introduce a practicum that involves solving real-world problems.

Ford Dorsey's endowment fulfills one of the key priorities of Stanford's International Initiative, according to Stedman, which is to address global problems by leveraging the university's cross-disciplinary and collaborative research and teaching. Ford Dorsey and her husband, Mike, serve on volunteer committees of The Stanford Challenge, which is seeking to raise $4.3 billion in a broad effort to expand the university's role in addressing global challenges and educating the next generation of leaders.

Stedman, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), was asked to lead the program because he has experience in both academic and policy work. In 2003, Stedman served as research director of the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan established to analyze global security threats and propose reforms to the international system. Upon completion of the panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Annan asked Stedman to stay on as a special adviser to help get support in implementing the panel's recommendations. Following the U.N. world leaders' summit in September 2005, during which more than 175 heads of state agreed upon a global security agenda developed from the panel's work, Stedman returned to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.

According to Stedman, the revamped curriculum will give students the skills to understand the complex connections between poverty, deadly infectious disease, environmental degradation, resource depletion, food insecurity, interstate conflict, civil war, nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

"In a world where problems cross borders and disciplines, where threats that were previously thought to be independent are found to be interconnected, where distinctions between what is domestic policy and what is foreign policy are becoming more and more tenuous, students need training and perspective to break down disciplinary silos," Stedman says in a statement on the program's website. "They need the tools and dexterity to work across issue areas and in diverse policy arenas. They need to see connections that others miss, and be able to describe and explain those connections so that others will then see them too."

The program, which will be jointly administered by the School of Humanities and Sciences and FSI, will continue to admit about 30 students a year, with up to half coming from outside the United States. Students are required to have taken prerequisite courses in economics and statistics, and to speak a foreign language.

At a Feb. 7 dinner celebrating the newly endowed program, Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group and a member of the U.N. High-Level Panel, talked about the need to "make idealism realistic" and discussed the concept of a state's "responsibility to protect" civilians as a new international norm. "In just five years, which is short in the history of ideas, a brand new historical norm" was introduced and recognized by much of the international community, he said. "This was a historic breakthrough. It should reinvigorate our belief in the art of the possible." Concerning the Ford Dorsey IPS program, Evans said, "When it comes to making idealism realistic  there really could be no better place anywhere in the world that this new master's program at Stanford."

The incoming fall cohort of IPS students will study writing and rhetoric and international economics. They will take core courses in Issues in International Policies, which introduces Stanford's policy research centers and provides analyses of current global issues, and Managing Global Complexity, which teaches concepts and theories of international relations while focusing on issues with competing policy concerns. "The goal is to understand that much of what we study today is marked by trade-offs among various goods that we seek to promote," Stedman says in the statement. "Globalization and interdependence creates opportunities for creative solutions to problems, while sometimes creating negative unintended consequences for policy solutions."

IPS students will take a "gateway" course before selecting a concentration during the second year. These specialized fields include democracy, development and the rule of law; energy, environment and natural resources; global health; global justice; international negotiation and conflict management; international political economy; and international security and cooperation. Finally, students will complete a small group practicum in which they will be required to develop solutions to current global problems.

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Rebel Recruitment in Civil Wars

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The speaker, Macartan Humphreys, is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting professor at CISAC. He is a research scholar at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute at Columbia and a member of the Millennium Development goals project poverty task force, where he works on conflict and development issues. Overall his research is on African political economy and formal political theory. His dissertation on the politics of factions developed game theoretic models of conflict and cooperation between internally divided groups. More recent research focuses on rebellions in West Africa, where he has undertaken field research in the Casamance, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Ongoing research now includes experimental work on ethnic politics, econometric work on natural resource conflicts, game theoretic work on ethnic politics and large N survey work of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Humphreys' work is motivated by concerns over the linkages between politics, conflict and human development. He received his PhD in government from Harvard in 2003 and his MPhil in economics from Oxford in 2000.

The respondent, David Patel, is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at CDDRL (fall quarter) and CISAC (winter and spring quarters). He is completing a dissertation looking at questions of religious organization and collective action in the Middle East, with a theoretical focus on the relationship of organization and information in particular. Empirically, his study looks at Islamic institutions and their role in political action in a wide range of settings including 7th century garrison cities of the early Islamic empire, through the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Patel has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East over the last several years, including extended visits to Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Iraq, where he spent seven months in Basra conducting research beginning in the fall of 2003. He works with David Laitin, Jim Fearon, and Avner Greif at Stanford. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Macartan Humphreys Speaker
David Patel Commentator
Seminars

Committing to War: Political Exclusion and Indiscriminate Violence in Africa

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Philip Roessler (speaker) is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC and in 2007 will be the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in comparative government at the University of Oxford. His PhD dissertation examines the effects of political authority on conflict initiation and escalation in Africa, with a focus on Sudan, where he conducted field research between March 2005 and April 2006. His article, "Donor-Induced Democratization and Privatization of State-Violence in Kenya and Rwanda," was published in Comparative Politics in January 2005 and his article (co-authored with Marc Morjé Howard), "Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes," appeared in the American Journal of Political Science in April 2006. Roessler is a PhD candidate in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland and he received his BA in political science from Indiana University.

Macartan Humphreys (respondent) is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting professor at CISAC. He is a research scholar at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute at Columbia and a member of the Millennium Development goals project poverty task force, where he works on conflict and development issues. Overall his research is on African political economy and formal political theory. His dissertation on the politics of factions developed game theoretic models of conflict and cooperation between internally divided groups. More recent research focuses on rebellions in West Africa, where he has undertaken field research in the Casamance, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Ongoing research now includes experimental work on ethnic politics, econometric work on natural resource conflicts, game theoretic work on ethnic politics and large N survey work of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Humphreys' work is motivated by concerns over the linkages between politics, conflict and human development. He received his PhD in government from Harvard in 2003 and his MPhil in economics from Oxford in 2000.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Philip Roessler Speaker
Macartan Humphreys Commentator
Seminars

Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay

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The current trend toward suicide bombings began in Lebanon in the early 1980s. The practice soon spread to civil conflicts in Sri Lanka, the Kurdish areas of Turkey, and Chechnya. Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians in the 1990s and during the Al Aqsa intifada further highlighted the threat. Al Qaeda's adoption of the tactic brought a transnational dimension. Interest in the phenomenon then surged after the shock of the 2001 attacks, which involved an unprecedented number of both perpetrators and casualties. Since then, suicide bombings have expanded in number and geographical range, reaching extraordinary levels in the Iraq War and spreading around the world to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Britain.

This review covers thirteen of the books published on the subject since 2002. Three analyze the Palestinian case and four others focus on Islamist violence. The other six, including two edited collections, intend to be comprehensive. This review also refers to a few selected publications that discuss the arguments presented in the works reviewed. It aims to give readers a glimpse of the content of the different volumes as well as offer a critique.

The essay reviews these works:

  • Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
  • Joyce M. Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
  • Diego Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
  • Mohammed M. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
  • Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
  • Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs, translated from the French by David Macey (London: Pluto Press, 2005).
  • Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
  • Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
  • Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
  • Ami Pedahzur, ed., Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
  • Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, translated from the German by Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
  • Shaul Shay, The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004).
  • Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus Pa.: Rodale [distributed by St. Martin's Press] 2003).
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Martha Crenshaw

How Globalization Went Bad

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The article asserts that globalization has made the world a more dangerous and less orderly place. The authors argue that since the emergence and expansion of globalization in the 1990s, the world has experienced more problems such as increasing terrorist activity, widening gaps between religious and cultural ideologies, unstable global financial systems, expanding dangers of pandemic disease, and the growing threat of global climate change.

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