ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Shiri Krebs is a JSD Candidate at Stanford Law School, specializing in international criminal and humanitarian law. She was recently awarded the Christiana Shi Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship in International Studies, and was also named the Zukerman Fellow, and Law and International Security Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Her doctoral dissertation focuses on war crimes investigations and fact-finding during armed conflicts. This interdisciplinary research project combines theories and methods from law, psychology, sociology and political science, including online survey experiments.

From 2005 to 2010 Shiri served as legal advisor on international law matters in the Chief-Justice's chambers, the Israeli Supreme Court. During that time she has taught public international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a teaching assistantship which granted her the Dean's award for excellent junior faculty members, as well as 'best teacher' award. After leaving the Supreme Court, Shiri joined the Israeli Democracy Institute as a researcher, working on 'Terrorism and Democracy' projects, and publishing frequent op-eds in various newspapers and blogs.

In September 2010 Shiri started her graduate studies at Stanford Law School. Her Masters thesis - an empirical analysis of preventive detention cases - was presented in several international conferences and has won the Steven M. Block Civil Liberties Award. 

In 2012, while working on her dissertation, Shiri was appointed as a Teaching Scholar at Santa Clara University School of Law, teaching international criminal law and international humanitarian law. She is currently serving as a Teaching Assistant for CISAC's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: No country was as devastated by the Cold War as Afghanistan, yet the historical understanding of how the global conflict came to Kabul remains tentative, generally limited to studies that begin in the late 1970s.  Scholars have generally treated the American role in pre-invasion Afghanistan as minimal, or have seamlessly connected Kabul's half-turn toward Moscow in the mid-1950s with the 1979 invasion.  Extensive research, however, demonstrates the profound impact Americans had in mid-century Afghanistan.  Based on multinational research, this paper will explore how Americans helped to bring the Cold War to the mountain kingdom in the early 1950s.  While the Truman administration considered Afghanistan marginal and strategically indefensible, a fateful combination of local initiative, misperception, and ideology helped to add the kingdom to the roster of Cold War battlegrounds, where it would remain until the conflict's end.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Robert Rakove is a lecturer for the International Relations Program.  He studies the modern history of U.S. foreign relations, paying particular attention to the Cold War in the Third World.  He received his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2008, and is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World.  He is presently at work on a history of the U.S.-Afghan relationship in the decades before the Soviet invasion.

This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN).

Ifat Maoz is a Full Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism, former Head of the Smart Family Institute of Communications at the Hebrew University (2008-2013), Director of the Swiss Center and Graduate Program of Conflict Studies (on Sabbatical leave 2013-14) and holds the Danny Arnold Chair in Communication. Prof. Maoz is a social psychologist researching psychology and media in conflict and intergroup relations. She has been a visiting scholar at the Psychology Department of Stanford University (1996) and a senior research fellow at the Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College (2002-3, 2006-8). Her current main interests include psychological, moral and media-related aspects in conflict and peace-making, cognitive processing of social and political information, dynamics of intergroup communication in conflict, models of intergroup encounters, audience responses, and public opinion in conflict and peace making. On sabbatical leave, Stanford University, Department of Psychology.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: While the overall record of compliance with interstate territorial agreement since 1815 is quite high, Europe experienced a disproportionate share of treaty failures compared to other regions of the world. In Europe, treaties were frequently made and frequently broken; everywhere else, the dominant pattern has been for treaties to be rarely made and rarely broken. I argue that this pattern arose due to multilateral and hierarchical nature of border settlements in Europe, which was heavily influenced by the region’s great powers. Although great powers often imposed treaty terms on other states, enforcement was, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, actively undermined by their own actions. Using a new data set on interstate territorial conflicts and agreements, I show that the fates of border settlements in Europe were highly interdependent and vulnerable to contagion, either failing or succeeding en masse. By contrast, in other regions, where border settlements tended to be bilaterally determined, treaty failures were less likely to cluster in time. In addition to their implications for the study of treaty compliance and conflict contagion, these results speak to the promise and dangers of externally-imposed peace agreements.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Kenneth A. Schultz is professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. His research examines international conflict and conflict resolution, with a particular focus on the domestic political influences on foreign policy choices. His most recent work deals with the origins and resolution of territorial conflicts between states. He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2001), World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (with David Lake and Jeffry Frieden, Norton, 2013), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. He was the recipient the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association, and a Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, given by Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Niccolò Petrelli is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on reassessing the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. Incorporating insights from the contiguous fields of study of "civil wars" and "peacekeeping operations" and employing critical historical analysis of case studies, the research aims to analyze the features, limits and influence of the theory of Counterinsurgency. Before joining CISAC in 2013, Niccolò was a military research fellow at the Military Center for Strategic Studies (Ce.Mi.S.S.) within the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (CASD) in Rome, Italy, and a research assistant at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya. Niccolò received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Roma Tre in 2013. In his dissertation, he examined the impact of strategic culture on the Israeli approach to counterinsurgency.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: In "Counterinsurgency: A Conceptual Reassessment," Niccolò Petrelli will address unresolved issues in the study of counterinsurgency (COIN). The talk will focus on three main questions: How did COIN theory emerge and which are its intellectual sources? To what extent has COIN practice been informed by theory? Is the population-centric COIN paradigm prevalent in scholarly studies and in the contemporary professional discourse historically accurate? In order to answer these questions, the talk will first outline a critical historical analysis of the development of COIN theory, tracing its intellectual roots and fundamental assumptions. Subsequently, it will reassess practice through the qualitative comparative analysis of several case studies of COIN campaigns.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: The use of unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, as a counterterrorism tool has become the subject of considerable debate. Proponents point to drones as both effective for disrupting terrorist networks and compatible with international legal commitments. Critics assert that attacks create more terrorists than they kill while also violating international law. Both defenders and detractors have increasingly sought to make their case in the public sphere with the intent of swaying public support. This research studies the marketplace of ideas on the question of drones with an eye towards explaining 1) the type of arguments—i.e., whether or not drones are compatible with international law or are militarily effective—that resonate most with the public; and 2) the source of those ideas, whether international organizations, non-governmental organizations, or the government. In doing so, it fills a gap in a literature that has typically focused on sources of public support for initially going to war rather than attitudes toward states’ actual conduct and wielding of violence in the midst of armed conflict.