About the Event: 

In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables.

The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger.

The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, brings together a diverse collection of rigorous and creative scholars who analyze how the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. Scholars, pundits, and policymakers who think that the spread of nuclear weapons can create stable forms of nuclear deterrence in the future will be forced to think again. The volume was produced under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project “Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age”, co-chaired by CISAC Director Scott D. Sagan.

About the Speakers:

Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She works in the areas of political psychology.  She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has also taught at Cornell and UCSB.   She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences twice. She is the author of five books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over two hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as American foreign and defense policy, experimentation, national security intelligence, gender, social identity, cybersecurity, emotion and decision-making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.

Amy Zegart is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Political Science by courtesy at Stanford University. She is also the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Chair of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence and International Security Steering Committee, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She specializes in U.S. intelligence, cybersecurity, emerging technologies and national security, and global political risk management.

The author of five books, Zegart’s award-winning research includes the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022); Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (Brookings, 2019), co-edited with Herb Lin; Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (Twelve, 2018), co-authored with Condoleezza Rice; and the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11 – Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton 2007).  Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and elsewhere. 

Zegart has been featured by the National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. She served on the Clinton administration’s National Security Council staff and as a foreign policy adviser to the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. She has also testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and advises senior officials on intelligence, homeland security, and cybersecurity matters.

Previously, Zegart served as co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, founding co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Program, and chief academic officer of the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Stanford, she was Professor of Public Policy at UCLA and a McKinsey & Company consultant.

She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Political Science Association’s Leonard D. White Dissertation Prize, and research grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Hewlett Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Zegart received an A.B. in East Asian studies magna cum laude from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. She serves on the board of directors of Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (KTOS) and the Capital Group. 

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About the Event: How “global” is the global far-right? In the past two decades, groups and individuals associated with the far-right have planned or carried out violence in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Sweden, and New Zealand, among other countries. These far-right actors harbor nativist and isolationist views, so we might expect them to operate independently and unconnected from other extremist actors abroad. However, this is not what we observe. Far-right extremists are surprisingly interconnected, both within and across countries. Drawing on original data collected for the Mapping Militants Project, we explore the types of ties that bind the largely decentralized global far-right and assess the potential trajectory of the transnational threat posed by these actors. We argue that traditional counterterrorism practices must be adjusted to address the unique challenges posed by far-right extremists. 

About the Speakers:

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow emerita at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, and professor emerita in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University.  Her first article on terrorism was published in 1972 while she was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. A Guggenheim Fellow and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, she has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences.  Publications include Countering Terrorism with Gary LaFree (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) and “Rethinking Transnational Terrorism:  An Integrated Approach,” United States Institute of Peace Peaceworks Report, 2020.  She is a Principal Investigator with NCITE, and was formerly a Principal Investigator with START, also a DHS Center of Excellence at the University of Maryland.  She is also the director of the Mapping Militants Project, currently supported by NCITE.    

Iris Malone is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. Dr. Malone's research agenda includes two projects, which tend to entail the use of machine learning methods. First, she focuses on the causes of terrorism and insurgency. This project entails research on patterns of militant formation and organizational behavior. Second, she focuses on how states identify and respond to emerging militant threats. This project entails research on threat assessment, conflict forecasting, and state-sponsored terrorism.

Kaitlyn (Katy) Robinson is an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University. Her research examines how international and organizational politics influence civil war. She seeks to explain variation in how non-state armed groups organize, build relationships with foreign states, and carry out violence in armed conflict. She is a researcher on the Mapping Militants Project, which aims to document the organization, behavior, and relationships of armed groups across several different conflicts. Kaitlyn received her PhD and MA in Political Science from Stanford University and her BA in Political Science and History from the University of Michigan. Before graduate school, she worked at U.S. Department of Defense in the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies.

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Co-sponsored with Stanford University Libraries

About the Event: Join us for an engaging conversation with the Ambassador of Estonia to the U.S. Kristjan Prikk, Rose Gottemoeller, and Steven Pifer, who will discuss Russia's war in Ukraine - what's at stake and what we should do about it.
Russia's unprovoked war against Ukraine has brought about the most serious reassessment of the European security realities since the end of the Cold War. The epic clash of political wills, the magnitude of military operations, and the scale of atrocities against the Ukrainian people are beyond anything Europe has seen since World War II. The past nine months have forced many to reassess what is possible and impossible in international security A.D. 2022. What is this war about, after all? What's at stake in this – to paraphrase former British PM Chamberlain – "quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom most Americans know nothing?" What should be the lessons for U.S. strategists and policymakers? What are the wider implications for U.S. national security interests, particularly those related to the Indo-Pacific? How has the Alliance supported Ukraine since the war started? What should the end of this war look like and how to get there?

All these questions are relevant and should be carefully weighed with current information from the war as well as historic perspective and regional knowledge in mind.

About the Speakers: 

Estonia's Ambassador to the U.S. Mr. Kristjan Prikk started his mission in Washington, D.C. in May 2021. He is a graduate of the USA Army War College and has served as the National Security Coordinator to the Prime Minister. Prior to arriving in D.C., he was the Permanent Secretary of the Estonian Ministry of Defense. Among his previous assignments are two other tours in Washington as an Estonian diplomat and work on NATO-Russia and NATO-Ukraine topics at a time when these relationships were considerably less charged than today.

Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining Stanford, Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO's adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism.  Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. 

Steven Pifer is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as a non-resident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. He was a William J. Perry Fellow at the center from 2018-2022 and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin from January-May 2021. Pifer's research focuses on nuclear arms control, Ukraine, Russia, and European security. A retired Foreign Service officer, Pifer's more than 25 years with the State Department focused on U.S. relations with the former Soviet Union and Europe, as well as arms control and security issues, and included service as the third US ambassador to Ukraine.

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About the Event: Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted in arms control talks with Russia that a follow-on agreement to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) should cover all nuclear weapons and that such an agreement should focus on the nuclear warheads themselves. This would represent a significant change from previous agreements, which focused on delivery vehicles, such as missiles. The United States has been particularly interested in potential limits on nonstrategic nuclear warheads (NSNW). Such weapons have never been subject to an arms control agreement. Because Russia possesses an advantage in the number of such weapons, the US Senate has insisted that negotiators include them in a future agreement, making their inclusion necessary if such an accord is to win Senate approval and ultimately be ratified by Washington. In the wake of Russian nuclear threats in the Ukraine conflict, such demands can only be expected to grow if and when US and Russian negotiators return to the negotiating table.

Such an agreement will face major negotiating and implementation challenges—not only between Washington and Moscow, but also between Washington and NATO European allies. That is because the US side of such an agreement would primarily affect an estimated 100 US B61 gravity bombs deployed at European bases in NATO countries. Yet, these allies have not played a substantive role in US-Russian arms control negotiations since the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was completed in the 1980s; inspections under the treaty ended in 2001.1 As a result, many of these allies and NATO officials have recognized the need to “do their homework” so they can be prepared to engage in substantive consultations with the United States during negotiation of such a treaty and to implement it once it enters into force.

To stimulate this process, four NATO allies (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway) and one NATO partner (Sweden) funded a research team led by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and former NATO Deputy Secretary General and New START lead negotiator Rose Gottemoeller. The research focused on the negotiating, policy, legal, and technical issues that allies will likely have to address to reach such an accord. The research team also carried out a series of interviews to understand the views in NATO states on such an agreement and to gauge the constraints they could be expected to face in the process. The interviews and the primary drafting of the report occurred before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the report was first presented at a conference on “Maintaining Strategic Stability amid a Detoriorating European Security Environment” in Copenhagen in May. Mr. Pomper will discuss the paper and ongoing efforts to build Allied capacity to tackle these issues. 

In addition, prior to this paper US and allied research on verification measures for NSNW had largely focused on scientific and technical tools to conduct on-site inspections. The research team developed an original and unique methodology for a data exchange employing historic stockpile data and taking advantage of past US-Russian cooperation and cryptography. This data exchange would serve as the critical backbone for other verification measures, no matter the type of warhead or the type of agreement (freeze, limitation, or reduction). As Mr Moon will explain, his technical team with support from colleagues at Stanford and the State Department Verification Fund is now preparing a proof-of-concept demonstration of this approach and then will develop the framework for a full verification protocol. 

About the Speakers: 

Miles A. Pomper is currently leading a project to build NATO capacity for addressing deterrence, arms, control and verification issues, supported by Denmark, Germany, and Sweden as well as a parallel technical project funded by the U.S. State Department.  He is the lead author of Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe co-authored by Rose Gottemoeller, Bill Moon, and other leading experts. Miles is a Senior Fellow at the Washington, DC, office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He has authored or co-authored several other reports and book chapters on nonstrategic nuclear warheads, arms control, and deterrence in Europe, including Ensuring Deterrence Against Russia: The View from NATO States (2015). He is also the author or co-author of dozens of other reports and book chapters on nuclear arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, and nuclear and radiological terrorism. He is the former editor of Arms Control Today, the former lead foreign-policy reporter for the Capitol Hill publication CQ Weekly, and a former diplomat with the US Information Agency. He holds master's degrees in international affairs from Columbia University and in journalism from Northwestern University and a B.A. in history from Columbia. 

William M. Moon is currently the technical lead on a project to build NATO capacity for addressing deterrence, arms, control and verification issues, supported by Denmark, Germany, and Sweden as well as a parallel technical project funded by the U.S. State Department.  He is a co-author of Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe co-authored by Miles Pomper, Rose Gottemoeller, and other leading experts. Bill is a Non-resident Fellow at the Stimson Center and an Independent Consultant.  He has authored a series of reports on nuclear security and the Cooperative Threat Reduction program based on his experiences leading the CTR Global Nuclear Security program for over 25 years at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.  He holds master's degrees in international affairs from Columbia University and in Resourcing National Security from the National Defense University, and a B.A. in Government and Russian Studies from Hamilton College.

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About the Event: In the wake of natural disasters, humanitarian aid can make the difference between life and death for people in harm’s way. But despite the suffering of their citizens, leaders sometimes fail to secure international humanitarian aid or conceal the existence of an emergency. Their actions can prevent or delay the delivery of all humanitarian aid. This paper answers the question: under what conditions do recipient governments seek or refuse humanitarian aid after natural disasters?  I argue that leaders act strategically, based on the understanding that their response to natural disasters will influence powerful donor states’ perceptions of the regime’s competence. Donors reward competent leader are rewarded with more advantageous resources while incompetent leaders face greater conditionality. Consequently, state leaders seek humanitarian when doing so will lead powerful donors to perceive the recipient as competent, and they fail to seek aid and conceal the existence of emergencies when doing so would signal incompetence. Seeking aid signals competence when the natural disaster is exogenous to government policy choices and it is implausible that the government could respond adequately alone. When donors can blame event on the government's failure to prevent, even providing emergency relief without donor support makes the government look incompetent, which creates incentives for governments to conceal such events. I use new data on of government policy decisions in response to droughts and floods and a survey of government officials in a poor aid-dependent state to test this argument.

About the Speaker: Allison Grossman is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University and an Affiliated Researcher at Stanford's King Center on Global Development. Her research investigates how so-called "fragile" states cooperate with (0r contest) international efforts to mitigate suffering and improve the welfare of their residents. She investigates these issues of global concern in West African states, including Niger, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 2021. Her research has been published in the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and PS: Political Science & Politics.

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About the Event: A great puzzle of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to establish the postwar political order. This project traces how parties derived from violent, wartime belligerents successfully campaign as the best providers of future societal peace, attracting votes not just from their core supporters but oftentimes also from the citizens targeted in war. Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork, the project combines case studies of victim voters in Latin America with experimental survey evidence and new data on postwar elections around the world. It argues that, contrary to oft-cited fears, postconflict elections do not necessarily give rise to renewed instability or political violence. The project demonstrates how war-scarred citizens reward belligerent parties for promising peace and security instead of blaming them for war. Yet, in so casting their ballots, voters sacrifice justice, liberal democracy, and social welfare. Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, the project links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war and offers global perspectives on important questions about electoral behavior in the wake of mass violence.

About the Speaker: Sarah Z. Daly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her first book, Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016 in its Comparative Politics series. It was runner-up for the 2017 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize and is based on her PhD dissertation, which was awarded the Lucian Pye Award for the Best Dissertation in Political Science. Her second book, Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in its International Politics and History series in November 2022. For this research she was a named a 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and received the Minerva-United States Institute of Peace, Peace and Security Early Career Scholar Award. Her research on war and peace, political life after war, and organized crime has appeared in British Journal of Political Science, World Politics, International Security,  Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, and Journal of Peace Research, among other journals. Daly’s research has been funded by multiple sources including the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies. She has held fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and Latin American Studies Program at Princeton University. Daly received a BA from Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa), MSc from London School of Economics, and PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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About the Event: To manage the risks of potential dual use research of concern (DURC), US government policy and biorisk management professionals recommend tailoring mitigation strategies to an assessment of a given project’s risk. However, there is little empirical research on how different reviewers assess risks and recommend mitigation strategies for the same set of life sciences projects. If reviewers cannot agree on risk assessments, or if the choice of mitigation strategies does not heavily depend on risk assessments, then the purpose of assessment becomes less clear.

Using a modified version of the US government’s Companion Guide for DURC assessment, we elicited detailed reviews of the risks, benefits, and recommended risk management strategies for four real-world synthetic biology projects from 18 experienced DURC reviewers and 49 synthetic biology students. We find significant variation within and between reviewer groups and projects in both assessed DURC risk and recommended strategies for managing it. This empirical variation raises questions about the role of DURC assessment, challenges conventional conceptions of DURC assessment “expertise”, and highlights the need for experimentation in DURC management.

About the Speaker: Dr. Daniel Greene is a Senior Analyst at Gryphon Scientific, a biosecurity and public health research consultancy. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he worked with Drs. Megan Palmer and David Relman to study the societal risks and potential of life-science research. His primary research focus was on measuring and cultivating a culture of responsibility in the life sciences by using a combination of survey experiments, qualitative methods, data science, and policy analysis. Daniel has a PhD in Education from Stanford University.

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About the Event: How do perceptions of international affairs vary between countries? To what extent do technology companies mediate these perceptions? International relations scholarship has largely neglected the role of internet search engines, yet they are a ubiquitous method by which people seek information about the world. This study conducts a large-scale audit of Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for various topics related to international affairs. Our preliminary results indicate three patterns. First, variation in localized results strongly correlates with user language, suggesting that language is a primary factor mediating people’s exposure to information about international affairs. Second, we find significant differences in the reach of ideological content, including state propaganda as well as material from transnational advocacy networks. Finally, we trace how SERPs change in response to salient events. Analyzing results related to the 2022 Ukraine crisis generated both before and after the Russian invasion, we find that geographic clustering in the content of SERPs becomes more substantial following the invasion, suggesting an increase in localization. Substantively, this analysis contributes to several literatures, including the role of technology in international politics, surveillance capitalism, and AI governance. Methodologically, this paper is the first in the field (to our knowledge) to use SBERT, a state-of-the-art natural language processing model for sentence embeddings.

About the Speaker: Rochelle Terman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science with a designated emphasis in Gender & Women’s Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Chicago, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her research interests focus on international norms, human rights, and computational social science.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.