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.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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.