Abstract: Multilateral conferences are the bread-and-butter of international politics. In such settings, countries may pursue their interests individually, but most of the time they prefer to act through coalitions. Such coalitions are overlapping, creating a network structure. States build and utilize networks to get agenda items pushed through or to block unfavorable ones. While sometimes they are formed on the basis of formal institutions (such as the NAM or the EU), frequently their membership is based on either ad hoc cooperation, or existing informal bodies (such as the NSG, New Agenda Coalition, or Zangger Committee). The attention to such networks is, however, still in its infancy. This paper looks at how state networks within one of the most important recurring diplomatic conferences – the quinquennial NPT Review Conference – develop and transform over time. By doing so, the paper maps the existing networks, and explains their transformation as an instrument of global governance.

Speaker Bio: Michal Onderco is a Junior Faculty Fellow at CISAC (2018-2019), and his research focuses on politics of multilateral nuclear diplomacy. His current project tries to understand how states build coalitions in multilateral diplomacy, and why are some coalitions more successful than others.

Michal is currently on leave from Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he is Assistant Professor of International Relations. Previously, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Columbia University in New York, and a short-term Stanton Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo. He received his LLM in Law and Politics of International Security and PhD in Political Science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His earlier work was published in International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of Political Research, Cooperation & Conflict, The Nonproliferation Review, and European Political Science Review.

*This event is co-sponsored with the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies.

Jason Rezaian discusses his new book, Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison, with Brett McGurk, the former Special Envoy to Defeat ISIS. Rezaian was the Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief when he was imprisoned and McGurk led 14 months of secret negotiations with Iran that helped free him in 2016.

Jason Rezaian is one of the few Western journalists to have been based in Tehran in recent years. From 2009 until his arrest in 2014 he covered stories that tried to explain Iran to a general American audience, first as a freelancer for a variety of outlets and later as The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief.

He reported on two presidential elections, Iran’s nuclear negotiations with global powers, the effects of one of the most punitive sanctions regimes in modern times and environmental issues. In between those momentous topics he told the stories of everyday Iranians which sought to make them more accessible to readers, reporting on Iran’s small community of baseball players, the quest for the best high end hamburger in Tehran, and a clinic for female drug addicts.

In July of 2014 Rezaian and his wife were detained in their home and he went on to spend 545 in Tehran’s Evin prison, released on the same day that the historic nuclear deal between Iran and world powers was implemented. 

Brett McGurk is joining Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies as the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer.

McGurk recently served as special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the U.S. Department of State. He helped build and then led the coalition of seventy-five countries and four international organizations and was responsible for coordinating all aspects of U.S. policy in the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, and globally.

McGurk previously served in senior positions in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, including as Special Assistant to President Bush and Senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran and Special Presidential Envoy for the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State under Obama.

McGurk has led some of the most sensitive diplomatic missions in the Middle East over the last decade, including negotiations with partners and adversaries to advance U.S. interests. In 2015 and 2016, McGurk led 14 months of secret negotiations with Iran to secure the release of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezain, U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, and Pastor Saad Abadini, as well as three other American citizens.

Abstract: Materials used in key components of nuclear power reactors, such as the fuel cladding and the pressure vessel, provide shields for the release of highly radioactive isotopes generated in the nuclear fuel to the environment, thus their reliability is an important issue in the safety evaluation.  The accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 demonstrated that materials that are considered reliable during normal operating conditions will fail in an extreme accident condition. Subsequently, there has been an international effort on developing materials for Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF). In addition, the development of new generation of nuclear reactors also calls for new materials that may withstand higher temperatures, higher radiation doses and with better performance under severe corrosive conditions.  This talk will outline the challenges and status for such developments using recent data from the authors’ own research group as examples.  Also, since China is building the most nuclear reactors now and “a nuclear accident anywhere of the world will be an accident of everywhere of the world”, the importance and challenges of collaborating with the Chinese in this area will be discussed. 

Bio: Dr. Lumin Wang is a professor of nuclear engineering, and materials science & engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (UM). He came to the US from China in 1982, and received his MS and PhD degrees in Material Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and a research scientist at the University of New Mexico before joining the faculty of UM in 1997.  His research has focused on the study of radiation effects of materials using ion beams and transmission electron microscopy. He served as the director of Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory, a campus-wide material characterization center at UM between 2005 and 2010. Dr. Wang has published more than 400 papers in research journals and delivered more than 100 invited talks internationally. He has been a member of the International Committee of the American Nuclear Society and an adjunct chair professor of Xiamen University of China since 2011. He has taken more than 100 UM students to China to observe the construction of nuclear reactors during the last 8 summers.