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.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In this seminar, energy and natural resources sector policies of the three former communist countries in Asia - Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan - in close geographic proximity to Russia and China will be considered. There are similarities in the nature of transition from communist regime to democratic societies in these three states, although major differences in social and cultural issues exist. The reliance on energy in neighboring countries Russia and China as well as export of raw materials to these markets have major influence on specific policy agenda. Particular attention is given to energy minerals and trade balance and imbalance thereof. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Undraa Agvaanluvsan currently serves as the president of Mitchell Foundation for Arts and Sciences. She is also an Asia21 fellow of the Asia Society and co-chair of Mongolia chapter of the Women Corporate Directors, a global organization of women serving in public and private corporate boards. During 2021-22, she served on the WCD Global Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. Dr. Undraa Agvaanluvsan is a former Member of Parliament of Mongolia and the chair of the Parliamentary subcommittee on Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to being elected as a legislator, she served as an Ambassador-at-large in charge of nuclear security issues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia, where she worked on nuclear energy and fuel cycle, uranium and rareearth minerals development policy. She is a nuclear physicist by training, obtained her PhD at North Carolina State University, USA and diploma in High Energy Physics at the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. She conducted research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, USA and taught energy policy at International Policy Studies Program at Stanford University, where she was a Science fellow and visiting professor at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. She published more than 90 papers, conference proceedings, and articles on neutron and proton induced nuclear reactions, the nuclear level density and radiative strength functions, quantum chaos and the Random Matrix Theory, including its application to the modeling of electric-grid resilience.

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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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The Hoover Project on China’s Global Sharp Power and the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation 
invite you to

Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes a weekly column for Bloomberg Opinion on foreign policy and is the author or editor of several books, including his newest books, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today, and Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, with Michael Beckley. He is a member of the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board and previously worked as a special assistant to the secretary of defense.

Michael Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a leading expert on the balance of power between the United States and China, and the author of two books and multiple award-winning articles. Previously, Professor Beckley was an International Security Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He continues to advise offices within the U.S. intelligence community and U.S. Department of Defense.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, ​Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He co-chairs the Hoover Institution’s programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region.

Glenn Tiffert is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China. He co-chairs the Hoover project on China’s Global Sharp Power and works closely with government and civil society partners to document and build resilience against authoritarian interference with democratic institutions. Most recently, he co-authored and edited Global Engagement: Rethinking Risk in the Research Enterprise (2020).

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.