Stanford University

Germany, Europe and Russia

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/BGjRsO0fKds

 

About this Event: Germany plays a key role in shaping European and Western policy toward Russia.  Berlin is a leading voice within the European Union on Russian issues, and Chancellor Angela Merkel co-chairs with the French president the "Normandy" effort that seeks to broker a setttlement between Ukraine and Russia to the conflict in Donbas.  Emily Haber, the German ambassador to the United States, will join us for a conversation on how Berlin sees the Russian challenge and how the West should respond.

 

About the Speaker: Emily Margarethe Haber has been German Ambassador to the United States since June 2018. 

Immediately prior to this, Haber, a career foreign service officer, was deployed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, serving as State Secretary overseeing security and migration at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe. In this capacity, she worked closely with the US administration on topics ranging from the fight against international terrorism to global cyberattacks and cybersecurity. In 2009, she was appointed Political Director and, in 2011, State Secretary at the Foreign Office, the first woman to hold either post. 

Emily Haber is married to Hansjörg Haber. The couple has two sons. 

Emily Margarethe Haber German Ambassador to the United States
Seminars
European Security Initiative

Good Science and Silenced Security: On Anticipatory Governance in Biobanking

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/P1-Q0OSo4yM

 

About this Event: The governance of big data and the prevention of their misuse is among the most topical issues in current debates among security experts. But what does it mean when security is not an issue for the stakeholders governing big biomedical data? This paper answers this question by looking at what it describes as a peculiar omission of the issue of security in the biggest harmonization cluster of biomedical research in Europe - BBMRI-ERIC. While it does treat personal data, the risks and threats are constructed through a language of anticipation and self-governance rather than security. The analysis explains why: based on document analysis, interviews, and field research, it studies (1) how are risks and threats constructed in the research with big biomedical data, (2) what regime of their governance is established in this area, and (3) what are the implications for the practices of science and the politics of security. The paper argues that this silence is a by-product of bureaucratization and responsibilization of security, which is in biobanking characteristic by discourse and practices of responsible research, ethics, and law. The paper suggests that this regime of governance precludes the prospects of addressing bigger questions that biobanks may need to deal with in the future, such as regarding the access to the biomedical data by state or private actors and their use for policing, surveillance, or other types of population governance.

 

Speaker's Biography: Dagmar Rychnovská is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Techno-science and societal transformation group at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. She holds a PhD in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an MA in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich), and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam). Her research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, security studies, and science and technology studies. Her current research explores security controversies in research and innovation governance, with a focus on bioweapons, biotechnologies, and biobanks.

Dagmar Rychnovská Institute for Advanced Studies
Seminars
Research Seminar Series

Rose Gottemoeller

Center for International Security and Cooperation
Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

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William J. Perry Lecturer, Freeman Spogli Institute
Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution
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Rose Gottemoeller is the William J. Perry Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute.

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. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation.

Prior to her government service, she was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with joint appointments to the Nonproliferation and Russia programs. She served as the Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from 2006 to 2008, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program.  

At Stanford, Gottemoeller teaches and mentors students in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program and the CISAC Honors program; contributes to policy research and outreach activities; and convenes workshops, seminars and other events relating to her areas of expertise, including nuclear security, Russian relations, the NATO alliance, EU cooperation and non-proliferation. 

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Naimark's New Book Makes Financial Times Best History Books List

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Norman M. Naimark
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The Financial Times named Norman Naimark's latest book, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty, one of the best history books in 2019. The Financial Times writes "Naimark has few peers as a scholar of Stalinism, the Soviet Union and mid-20th-century Europe. Here he selects seven case studies, from Denmark and Finland to Austria and Albania, to illustrate the complexity of Stalin’s objectives after the second world war as European leaders on both sides of the emerging Iron Curtain strove to reclaim national sovereignty."

 

Read the rest at Financial Times

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CANCELLED: Populism and Democratic Backsliding in Europe

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NOTICE

Seminar Cancellation

The Populism and Democratic Backsliding in Europe seminar has been CANCELLED. Rescheduling of this seminar is yet to be determined.


Thank you,
CISAC Events 

 

 

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Abstract: How does populism erode democracy, and where does it come from? Populist parties have surged in support, and several have entered governments in Europe. In some cases, this has meant the erosion of the rule of law and liberal democratic institutions, the undermining of informal democratic values, and the divisive politics of national identity and belonging. Ironically, the causes of the populist upsurge lie in the earlier economic and political successes, especially in the younger European democracies. 
 

Speaker's Biography: Anna Grzymala-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.

Her most recent book project, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.

Anna Grzymala-Busse Stanford University
Seminars
Research Seminar Series

Jared Dunnmon

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Dr. Jared Dunnmon is currently the Cofounder and Chief Scientist of a maritime logistics startup.  He has previously served as the Technical Director for Artificial Intelligence at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Vice President of Future Technologies at battery firm Our Next Energy (ONE), and a member of the early team at Snorkel AI. Prior to this, Jared was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Stanford University, where he was advised by Prof. Chris Ré at the Stanford AI Lab. Jared holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University (2017), a B.S. from Duke University, and both an MSc in Mathematical Modeling and Scientific Computing and an MBA from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

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Beyond “Bots and Trolls” — Understanding Disinformation as Collaborative Work

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Abstract: Russia’s challenge to the West includes information operations (e.g., disinformation, political propaganda, and other forms of online manipulation) aimed at destabilizing the common ground that democratic societies in Europe and the United States need in order to govern themselves.  Kate Starbird will describe two case studies of online information operations connected to Russia’s media/intelligence apparatus:  interference in the 2016 U.S. election and the campaign against the “White Helmets” in Syria.  She argues that defending against Russian online information operations will require a more nuanced understanding of the problem, in particular, moving beyond focusing on “bots” and “trolls” to looking at the collaborative nature of disinformation campaigns that target, infiltrate, shape, and leverage online communities—communities which may not recognize their role in these campaigns. 

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/lF4M11FkEKY

 

Speaker's Biography:

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Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Starbird’s research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of the how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. One aspect of her research focuses on how online rumors spread during natural disasters and man-made crisis events. More recently, she has begun to focus on disinformation and other forms of strategic information operations online. Starbird earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Technology, Media and Society and holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Kate Starbird University of Washington
Seminars
European Security Initiative

Reid Pauly

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Reid Pauly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University and the Dean’s Assistant Professor of Nuclear Security and Policy at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. He studies nuclear proliferation and nuclear strategy, coercion, secrecy in international politics, and wargaming. Pauly is the author of The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma (Cornell University Press, 2025). His scholarship has also been published in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, the European Journal of International Relations, and Foreign Affairs. Pauly earned his Ph.D. from MIT and has held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum, and Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding. 

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US National Security in an Era of Great Power Competition and Technological Disruption

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The world is experiencing an unprecedented period of geopolitical change and technological disruption. How should we rethink U.S. national security and defense in an era of intensifying great power competition? What principles should guide US policy and presidents in the future?

 

Drell Lecture Recording: https://youtu.be/y8a307Sttjc

 

Drell Lecture Transcript: Click here to view

 

Speaker's Biography: Michèle Flournoy is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of WestExec Advisors, and former Co- Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where she currently serves on the board.

Michèle served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 2009 to February 2012. She was the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the formulation of national security and defense policy, oversight of military plans and operations, and in National Security Council deliberations.

Michèle is a former member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, the CIA Director’s External Advisory Board, and the Defense Policy Board. She’s currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group, is a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and sits on the Honorary Advisory Committee of The Leadership Council for Women in National Security. Michèle serves on the boards of Booz Allen Hamilton, Amida Technology Solutions, The Mission Continues, Spirit of America, CARE, the U.S. Naval Academy Foundation.


Hauck Auditorium, David and Joan Traitel Building of Hoover Institution435 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA, 94305
Michèle Flournoy Co-Founder and Managing Partner WestExec Advisors
Drell Lecture

The New Geopolitics of Energy

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Abstract: Russia is a major energy exporter and has used those exports to advance its geopolitical goals. Based on her book "The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas” (Harvard UP, 2017), Dr. Agnia Grigas will discuss the recent transformation in global energy markets and the resulting shift in the geopolitics of energy, specifically relations between key producing and competing states such as Russia and the United States, and key consuming regions such as Europe and developing Asia. Focusing on natural gas, Dr. Grigas will address Russia’s energy challenge to European security and steps the United States can and should take to mitigate this challenge.
 
Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/EImxZfGJN9o
 
Speaker Biography: 
 
Dr. Agnia Grigas is a strategic advisor on energy and geopolitical economy for US government institutions and multinational corporations. She is the author of three acclaimed books: "The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas,"​  "​Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire,"​ and "The Politics of Energy and Memory between the Baltic States and Russia."  She serves as nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Associate at Argonne National Laboratory and advisory board member for the McKinnon Center for Global Affairs at Occidental College, the Vilnius Institute for Policy Analysis and LITGAS.  She holds a Master’s and Doctorate in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a BA in Economics and Political Science from Columbia University. Follow via: @AgniaGrigas & grigas.net

 

Agnia Grigas Strategic Advisor
European Security Initiative
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