Stanford University

Conflict

Responding to Terrorism: Provocation, Retaliation and Deterrence

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Martha Crenshaw

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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emerita
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science, Emerita
crenshaw_martha.jpg PhD

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow emerita at CISAC and FSI. She taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1974 to 2007.  She has published extensively on the subject of terrorism.  In 2011 Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work.  A book co-authored with Gary LaFree titled Countering Terrorism was published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2017. She recently authored a report for the U.S. Institute of Peace, “Rethinking Transnational Terrorism:  An Integrated Approach”.

 

 She served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and is a former President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2005-2006 she was a Guggenheim Fellow. She was a lead investigator with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland from 2005 to 2017.  She is currently affiliated with the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center, also a Center of Excellence for the Department of Homeland Security.  In 2009 the National Science Foundation/Department of Defense Minerva Initiative awarded her a grant for a research project on "mapping terrorist organizations," which is ongoing.  She has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences.  In 2015 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.  She is the recipient of the International Studies Association International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award for 2016. Also in 2016 Ghent University awarded her an honorary doctorate.  She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Security Studies, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, Orbis, and Terrorism and Political Violence.

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Martha Crenshaw Senior Fellow Speaker CISAC
Thomas Hegghammer Zukerman Fellow Commentator CISAC
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Escalatory Models, Norms, Assurance, and Deterrence

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The advent of ubiquitous networking and computation and deepening globalization since the 1990s has eroded traditional international security architectures by multiplying conflict surfaces and empowering new actors. This talk describes research in the context of track 1.5 dialogues with Russia and China that aims to develop shared frameworks for understanding escalatory models of cyber conflict, sources of instability, and feasible approaches for risk mitigation. It will argue that cyber has made deterrence much more complex, and now, increased information assurance and new legal or normative constraints on state behavior are likely necessary for effective cross-sectoral deterrence. Finally, it suggests three tasks for cyber norms or confidence and security building measures to attenuate instability.

John Mallery is a research scientist at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is concerned with cyber policy and has been developing advanced architectural concepts for cyber security and transformational computing for the past decade. Since 2006, he organized a series of national workshops on technical and policy aspects of cyber.

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John C. Mallery Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Speaker Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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US Power, the Emerging Economies, and International Order

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Dr. Bruce Jones is Director and Senior Fellow of the NYU Center on International Cooperation, and Senior Fellow and Director of the Managing Global Order Program at the Brookings Institution.

Dr. Jones’ research focuses on US policy on global order and transnational threats; on the emerging powers’ strategic policy; on multilateral institutions in peace and security issues; on the role of the United Nations in crisis management and international security; and on fragile states.

Dr. Jones has served as Senior External Advisor for the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 on Conflict, Security and Development; as a member of the Secretary-General’s Senior Advisory Group to guide the Review of International Civilian Capacities (2010-2011); as the Lead Scholar on the International Task Force on Global Public Goods (2007); and as deputy research director for the UN High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004-2005).

Prior to assuming the Directorship of the Center, Dr. Jones served in several capacities at the United Nations. He was Senior Advisor in the Office of the Secretary-General during the UN reform effort leading up to the World Summit 2005, and in the same period was Acting Secretary of the Secretary-General’s Policy Committee. From 2000-2002 he was Special Assistant to the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East peace process; and held assignments in the UN Interim Mission in Kosovo, and in the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 

Dr. Jones holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics; and was Hamburg Fellow in Conflict Prevention at Stanford University. He is co-author with Carlos Pascual and Stephen Stedman of Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Brookings Press, 2009); co-editor with Shepard Forman of Cooperating for Peace and Security (Cambridge University Press, 2009); author of Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failures; Series Editor of the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations (Lynne Reinner) and author of several book chapters and journal articles on US strategy, global order, the Middle East, peacekeeping, post-conflict peacebuilding, and strategic coordination.

He is Consulting Professor at Stanford University, Adjunct Faculty at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service, and Professor by Courtesy at the NYU Department of Politics.

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Bruce Jones Director and Senior Fellow Speaker Center on International Cooperation, New York University

Stephen J. Stedman

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-2705 (650) 724-2996
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Stedman_Steve.jpg PhD

Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Stephen Stedman Senior Fellow Commentator Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law
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Ask the Experts: Preventing Sexual Violence

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Former CISAC fellow Dara Cohen, currently an assistant professor at Harvard University, wrote a co-authored blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations, discussing how to prevent sexual violence through research and policymaking. They dispel misconceptions about sexual violence in conflict areas and encourage policymakers to listen to those affected by wartime rape. 

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Dueling incentives : Sexual violence in Liberia and the politics of human rights advocacy

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Transnational advocacy organizations are influential actors in the international politics of human rights. While political scientists have described several methods these groups use – particularly a set of strategies termed ‘information politics’ – scholars have yet to consider the effects of these tactics beyond their immediate impact on public awareness, policy agendas or the behavior of state actors. This article investigates the information politics surrounding sexual violence during Liberia’s civil war. We show that two frequently-cited ‘facts’ about rape in Liberia are inaccurate, and consider how this conventional wisdom gained acceptance. Drawing on the Liberian case and findings from sociology and economics, we develop a theoretical framework that treats inaccurate claims as an effect of ‘dueling incentives’ – the conflict between advocacy organizations’ needs for short-term drama and long-term credibility. From this theoretical framework, we generate hypotheses regarding the effects of information politics on (1) short-term changes in funding for human rights advocacy organizations, (2) short-term changes in human rights outcomes, (3) the institutional health of humanitarian and human rights organizations, and (4) long-run outcomes for the ostensible beneficiaries of such organizations. We conclude by outlining a research agenda in this area, emphasizing the importance of empirical research on information politics in the human rights realm, and particularly its effects on the lives of aid recipients.

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Private Location-Based Services

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Location-based services from are quickly gaining popularity. Many such services track the user's location and make use of it as needed. While tracking raises privacy concerns, it is believed to be unavoidable if users want the benefits of location-based services. In this talk I will give several examples of services that provide location-based functionality without learning the user's location. Our goal is to show that privacy and functionality are not always in conflict. We will also discuss our experiences with deploying these mechanisms in the real world. This is joint work with Arvind Narayanan, Mike Hamburg, and Narendran Thiagarajan.

About the speaker: Dr. Boneh heads the applied crypto group at the Computer Science
department at Stanford University. Dr. Boneh's research focuses on applications of cryptography to computer security. His work includes cryptosystems with novel properties, security for mobile devices, web security, digital copyright protection, and cryptanalysis. He is the author of over a hundred technical publications in the field and a recipient of the Packard Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Award, the RSA award, and the Terman Award.

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Dan Boneh

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Rajeev Motwani Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering
Co-director of the Stanford Computer Security Lab
Co-director of the Stanford Cyber Initiative
Affiliate Faculty at CISAC
dabo.jpg MA, PhD

Professor Boneh heads the applied cryptography group and co-direct the computer security lab. Professor Boneh's research focuses on applications of cryptography to computer security. His work includes cryptosystems with novel properties, web security, security for mobile devices, and cryptanalysis. He is the author of over a hundred publications in the field and is a Packard and Alfred P. Sloan fellow. He is a recipient of the 2014 ACM prize and the 2013 Godel prize. In 2011 Dr. Boneh received the Ishii award for industry education innovation. Professor Boneh received his Ph.D from Princeton University and joined Stanford in 1997.

Dan Boneh Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University and CISAC Affiliate Speaker
Seminars

Organizational legacies of violence Conditions favoring insurgency onset in Colombia, 1964–1984

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Why do insurgencies erupt in some places and not in others? This article exploits an original violent event database of 274,428 municipality-month observations in Colombia to determine the conditions favoring organized violence at the subnational level. The data cast doubt on the conventional correlates of war: poverty, rough terrain, lootable natural resources, and large, sparsely distributed populations. The evidence suggests that rebellions begin not in localities that afford sanctuaries, impoverished recruits, and abundant finances, but instead in regions providing receptacles of collective action: the organizational legacies of war. Specifically, the data indicate that regions affected by past mobilization are six times more likely to experience rebellion than those without a tradition of armed organized action. The significant correlation between prior and future mobilization is robust across different measurements of the concepts, levels of aggregations of the data, units of analysis, and specifications of the model. These include rare events and spatial lag analyses. These results highlight the need for micro conflict data, theory disentangling the causes of war onset from those of war recurrence, and a reorientation away from physical geography and back to the human and social geography that determines if rebellion is organizationally feasible. The findings suggest new avenues of research on the post-war trajectories of armed organizations, the causes of repeated war, and the micro-foundations of rebellion.

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Sarah Z. Daly
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US Policy Toward Afghanistan, What’s Next?

November 19, 3:45PM
Breakout Session

Following a decade of war, the departure of all U.S. troops from Iraq and a significant drawdown of troops in Afghanistan are all but imminent.  These drawdowns – and the framework in which these drawdowns transpire – will have major implications for U.S. national security, bilateral and regional relations, and the image of the U.S. in the world.  We will be joined by Dr. Dan E. Caldwell, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University and the author of Vortex of Conflict: U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq; Ms. Anja Manuel, Principal at RiceHadley Group LLC; and Mr. Frederic Wehrey, Senior Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation, to discuss these timely issues.

 

Information on the event is available at: http://www.pacificcouncil.org/page.aspx?pid=730

Anja Manuel

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Affiliate
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Former diplomat, author, and advisor on foreign policy, Anja Manuel is Co-Founder and Principal along with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, a strategic consulting firm that helps US companies navigate international markets.

Anja is the author of the critically acclaimed This Brave New World: India, China, and the United States, published by Simon and Schuster, and numerous articles and papers.

She is the Executive Director of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum, a premier bipartisan forum on foreign policy in the United States.

From 2005 to 2007, she served as an official at the U.S. Department of State, as Special Assistant to the Undersecretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, responsible for Asia policy.

Earlier in her career, Anja was an attorney at WilmerHale, working on Supreme Court and international cases and representing clients before the US Congress, Supreme Court, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, and the SEC. She began her career as an investment banker at Salomon Brothers in London.

A cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and Stanford University, Anja also lectured and was a research affiliate at Stanford University from 2009 - 2019, and 2024-now, teaching courses on US Foreign Policy in Asia and Technology Policy.

Anja is a frequent speaker on foreign policy and technology policy, is a commentator for TV and radio (NBC/MSNBC, Bloomberg News, Fox Business, BBC, NPR, etc.), and writes for publications ranging from the Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, and Fortune, among others.

Anja currently serves on the corporate boards of Ripple Labs Inc. and Hims & Hers Health, Inc. and the Applied Materials Secure Innovation Advisory Board. Additionally, she is a member of the Defense Policy Board for the U.S. Department of Defense

She has serves/d on the boards/advisory boards of National Committee on US-China Relations, CARE.org, Center for a New American Security, Flexport Inc., Synapse Inc., and the boards of the Overseas Shipholding Group, Inc., American Ditchley Foundation, and formerly Governor Brown’s California Export Council. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Anja lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.

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Anja Manuel Affiliate, CISAC Speaker
Dan Caldwell Distinguished Professor of International Relations Speaker Pepperdine University
Frederic Wehrey Senior Policy Analyst Speaker the RAND Corporation
Panel Discussions

Does Decapitation Work? Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Targeting in Counterinsurgency Campaigns

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Is killing or capturing insurgent leaders an effective tactic? Previous research on interstate war and counterterrorism has suggested that targeting enemy leaders does not work. Most studies of the efficacy of leadership decapitation, however, have relied on unsystematic evidence and poor research design. An analysis based on fresh evidence and a new research design indicates the opposite relationship and yields four key findings. First, campaigns are more likely to end quickly when counterinsurgents successfully target enemy leaders. Second, counterinsurgents who capture or kill insurgent leaders are significantly more likely to defeat insurgencies than those who fail to capture or kill such leaders. Third, the intensity of a conflict is likelier to decrease following the successful removal of an enemy leader than it is after a failed attempt. Fourth, insurgent attacks are more likely to decrease after successful leadership decapitations than after failed attempts. Additional analysis suggests that these findings are attributable to successful leadership decapitation, and that the relationship between decapitation and campaign success holds across different types of insurgencies.

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Afghanistan: The Road Ahead

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About the topic: This talk will provide a current affairs assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. It will present the trajectory of the counterinsurgency campaign highlighting the security and governance challenges--including the building up of the Afghan National Security Forces, the economic sustainability of the state and private sector, as well as issues pertaining to minority and women's rights. The talk will also offer a range of likely endgames in light of the 2014 withdrawal.

About the Speaker: Fotini Christia joined the MIT faculty in the fall of 2008. She received her PhD in Public Policy at Harvard University, and has been a recipient of research fellowships from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs among others. Her research interests deal with issues of ethnicity, conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world. Fotini has written opinion pieces on her experiences from Afghanistan, Iran, the West Bank and Gaza and Uzbekistan for Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. She graduated magna cum laude with a joint BA in Economics-Operations Research from Columbia College and a Masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

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Fotini Christia Assistant Professor of Political Science, MIT Speaker
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