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Despite extensive and ongoing debate about economic sanctions, policy makers disagree about their effectiveness. This is to some extent surprising given the frequency and ceremony with which states sanction each other to achieve their policy goals. Analytically, this confusion is understandable; the multitude of factors that influence the outcome of a conflict involving sanctions confounds the task of evaluating the impact of sanctions.

Ongoing efforts by the United States and the United Nations to influence proliferators and human rights violators, such as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Burma with sanctions suggest that they will remain a preferred policy tool for the major powers. In that light, it is essential to continue honing our understanding of the conditions under which they can be expected to achieve established policy goals.

This paper advances the debate about sanctions efficacy by assessing their role in a broader conflict management strategy. It argues that sanctions are more likely to succeed when they yield conditions conducive to bargaining between the parties to a dispute. The centrality of bargaining means that if sanctioners are unwilling to compromise over major policy goals, sanctions alone are unlikely to succeed. Therefore, countries aiming to achieve policy goals through sanctions must be prepared to engage, negotiate and compromise with their adversaries.

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Anticipating Opportunities: Using Intelligence to Shape the Future
"We spend $45 billion annually to reduce uncertainty, to help us combat threats to our nation, our people, and our security," said Payne Distinguished Lecturer Thomas Fingar in his third Payne lecture on October 21, devoted to anticipating the future -- "not for purposes of prediction but for purposes of shaping it."  Noting that strategic intelligence treats the future neither as "inevitable or immutable," Fingar employed real-life examples from his career in national intelligence (most recently as deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council) to explore concrete ways intelligence can be used to move developments in a more favorable direction.

Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World examined the trends which will "drive, shape and constrain" individuals, governments, and nations around the world. Among prominent trends, he cited globalization, which will provide unprecedented prosperity but greater inequality; the rise of the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, and China; the rise of new powers such as Indonesia, Turkey, and Iran; and the coming demographic boom, which will add 1.2 billion people to the world, with less than 3 percent of that occurring in the West.

The Geopolitical Implications of Climate Change.  Instructed by the Congress to provide an assessment of the impact of global climate change, given controversy about the imminence of the threat and man's role in it, the NIC studied which regions and countries would be most dramatically affected by climate change, with a focus on water, food production, and changes in weather patterns. The results remain classified, because of the potential impact on vulnerable countries. 

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities. This estimate, attacked from both the right and the left, concluded with a moderate to high degree of confidence that Iran had not obtained sufficient fissile material from external sources (to make a bomb) and that its fastest route to produce a nuclear weapon would be through domestic production of enriched uranium. The NIE also judged that Iran had halted the weaponization portions of its nuclear program in 2003, but had retained the option to pursue a weapon and whether to do so was a "political decision" which could be made at any time.

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Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), has been awarded $500,000 by the National Science Foundation to identify patterns in the evolution of terrorist organizations and to analyze their comparative development.

The three-year grant is part of the Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative launched in 2008, which focuses on "supporting research related to basic social and behavioral science of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy."

Crenshaw's interdisciplinary project, "Mapping Terrorist Organizations," will analyze terrorist groups and trace their relationships over time. It will be the first worldwide, comprehensive study of its kind-extending back to the Russian revolutionary movement up to Al Qaeda today.

"We want to understand how groups affiliate with Al Qaeda and analyze their relationships," Crenshaw said. "Evolutionary mapping can enhance our understanding of how terrorist groups develop and interact with each other and with the government, how strategies of violence and non-violence are related, why groups persist or disappear, and how opportunities and constraints in the environment change organizational behavior over time."

According to Crenshaw, it is critical to understand the organization and evolution of terrorism in multiple contexts. "To craft effective counter-terrorism strategies, governments need to know not only what type of adversary they are confronting but its stage of organizational development and relationship to other groups," Crenshaw wrote in the project summary. "The timing of a government policy initiative may be as important as its substance."

"Mapping Terrorist Organizations" will incorporate research in economics, sociology, business, biology, political science and history. It will include existing research to build a new database using original language sources rather than secondary analyses. The goal is to produce an online database and series of interactive maps that will generate new observations and research questions, Crenshaw said.

The results, for example, could reveal the structure of violent and non-violent opposition groups within the same movements or conflicts, and identify patterns that explain how these groups evolve over time. Such findings could be used to analyze the development of Al Qaeda and its Islamist or jihadist affiliates, including the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, she said.

The findings may also shed light on what happens when a group splits due to leadership quarrels or when a government is overturned, Crenshaw said. "Analysis that links levels of terrorist violence to changes in organizational structures and explains the complex relationships among actors in protracted conflicts will break new ground," the summary noted.

Extensive information on terrorist groups already exists, but it has been difficult to compile and analyze. Despite such obstacles, Crenshaw said, violent organizations can be understood in the same terms as other political or economic groups. "Terrorist groups are not anomalous or unique," she wrote. "In fact, they can be compared to transnational activist networks."

Crenshaw should know. Widely respected as a pioneer in terrorism studies, the political scientist was one of a handful of scholars who followed the subject decades before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She joined CISAC in 2007, following a long career at Wesleyan University, where she was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought. In addition to her research at Stanford, Crenshaw is a lead investigator at START, the Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

End goal

Crenshaw wants to use the findings to better analyze how threats to U.S. security evolve over time. "Terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies abroad often appear to come without warning, but they are the result of a long process of organizational development," she wrote. "Terrorist organizations do not operate in isolation from a wider social environment. Without understanding processes of development and interaction, governments may miss signals along the way and be vulnerable to surprise attack. They may also respond ineffectively because they cannot anticipate the consequences of their actions." The project seeks to find patterns in the evolution of terrorism and to explain their causes and consequences. This, in turn, should contribute to developing more effective counter-terrorism policy, Crenshaw said.

Conflicts to be mapped

  • Russian revolutionary organizations, 1860s-1914.
  • Anarchist groups in Europe and the United States, 1880s-1914. (Note: although the anarchist movement is typically regarded as completely unstructured, there was more organization than an initial survey might suppose, and the transnational dispersion of the movement is frequently cited as a precedent for Al Qaeda.)
  • Ireland and Northern Ireland, 1860s-present.
  • Algeria, 1945-1962 and 1992-present
  • Palestinian resistance groups, 1967-present.
  • Colombia, 1960s-present.
  • El Salvador, 1970s-1990s
  • Argentina, 1960s-1980s
  • Chile, 1973-1990
  • Peru, 1970-1990s
  • Brazil, 1967-1971
  • Sri Lanka, 1980s-present
  • India (Punjab), 1980-present
  • Philippines, 1960s-present
  • Indonesia, 1998-present
  • Italy, 1970s-1990s
  • Germany, 1970s-1990s
  • France/Belgium, 1980-1990s
  • Kashmir, 1988-present
  • Pakistan, 1980-present
  • United States, 1960s-present (especially far right movement)
  • Spain, 1960s-present
  • Egypt, 1950s-present
  • Turkey, 1960s-present
  • Lebanon, 1975-present
  • Al Qaeda, 1987-present
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More than 75 people connected to CISAC's past and present gathered in Encina Hall on Friday, May 29, to reminisce and look toward the center's next quarter century. The CISAC String Quartet led by Paul Stockton, who has just left CISAC to work as an assistant defense secretary, welcomed guests with concertos by Bach and Beethoven. Meanwhile, a slide show depicting CISAC's history through the decades brought back memories of potluck meals, receptions and group clean-up parties at Galvez House.

Co-Director Siegfried Hecker's opening and closing remarks acted as bookends to speeches highlighting the center's different eras. Law School Professor John Barton, a member of the center's executive committee, was a founder of CISAC's predecessor organization, the Center for International Security and Arms Control. He spoke about how turbulence on campus in the 1970s surrounding the Vietnam War led to courses focusing on international security matters under the Stanford Arms Control Program and, eventually, the center's establishment. Gloria Duffy, president of the Commonwealth Club of California, was a CISAC fellow from 1980-82, and spoke about the 1980s as "a time of alarm in our field." Acting Co-Director Lynn Eden, who was affiliated with the center as a fellow from 1987 to 1990, spoke about the 1990s, followed by Jessica McLaughlin, a 2005 graduate from CISAC's honor's program, who explained how she continues to apply the skills she learned in the program to her job as a management consultant. Former U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry, a former CISAC co-director, looked to the future and what the center must do to remain as effective and relevant to international security as it has been in the past. John Lewis, Scott Sagan, Michael May and David Holloway, who have all held leadership positions at CISAC, also made remarks about the center.


CISAC 25th Anniversary

Program

 

Background Music by the CISAC Quartet:

Beethoven Opus 59 #1

Bach Brandenburg Concerto #3, first movement

 

Introductory Remarks

Siegfried Hecker

Dr. Siegfried Hecker is a professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, a senior fellow at FSI, and co-director of CISAC. He is also an emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

 

Guest speakers (in order of appearance)

John Barton '68: CISAC in the 1970s

Professor John Barton is one of the founders of CISAC's predecessor organization (the Center for International Security and Arms Control), a professor at the Law School, and a member of CISAC's Executive Committee.

 

Gloria Duffy: CISAC in the 1980s

Dr. Gloria Duffy was a CISAC fellow from 1980 to 1982.  She served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton Administration.  Dr. Duffy is currently president of the Commonwealth Club of California.

 

Lynn Eden: CISAC in the 1990s

Dr. Lynn Eden is acting co-director and a senior research scholar at the Center. She was a CISAC fellow from 1987-88 and 1989-1990.

Jessica McLaughlin '05: CISAC in the New Millennium

Ms. Jessica McLaughlin graduated from Stanford in 2005, majoring in management science and engineering, with a certificate in Honors in International Security Studies through CISAC's undergraduate honors program.  Her thesis, "A Bayesian Updating Model for Intelligence Analysis," won CISAC's William J. Perry Prize for excellence in policy-relevant research in international security studies.  She is a management consultant at Oliver Wyman.

 

William J. Perry BS'49, MS '50: The Future of CISAC

Professor William J. Perry holds several positions at Stanford and was previously a co-director of CISAC. He was the 19th secretary of defense of the United States, serving from February 1994 to January 1997.

 

Closing Remarks

Siegfried Hecker

 

Special thanks to the CISAC Quartet:

Beverly Jean Harlan, Anne Prescott, Nancy Solomon, Paul N. Stockton

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Lynn Eden is acting co-director (2008-09) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford. In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972) was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

Fred Turner's research and teaching focus on digital media, journalism and the roles played by media in American cultural history.

Turner is the author of two books, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006) andEchoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (1996; Revised 2nd ed. 2001). His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the role of the Burning Man festival in contemporary new media industries.

Turner's research and writing have received a number of awards, including a PSP Award for Excellence, for the best book in Communication and Cultural Studies published in 2006 from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers; the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics from the Media Ecology Association; the James W. Carey Media Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research; and both a Best Paper Award and a Book Award Special Mention from the Communication and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. During the 2007-2008 academic year, he was a Leonore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Turner taught Communication at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also worked as a journalist for ten years. His news stories, features and reviews have appeared in venues ranging from the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine to Nature.

Turner earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, in 2002. He has also earned a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia University.

If you would like to be added to the email announcement list, please visit https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/socialscienceseminar

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Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.

In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

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Lynn Eden CISAC Acting Co-Director (2008-09) and Senior Research Scholar Speaker
Fred Turner Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Communicaiton, Stanford University Commentator
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Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is on sabbatical in 2008-09. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989), The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons(Princeton University Press, 1993), and with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is the co-editor of Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James L. Wirtz, Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000). Sagan was the recipient of Stanford University's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and the 1998 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. As part of CISAC's mission of training the next generation of security specialists he and Stephen Stedman founded Stanford's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies in 2000.

His recent articles include "How to Keep the Bomb From Iran," in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2006); "The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969" co-written by Jeremi Suri and published in International Security in spring 2003; and "The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Will More Nuclear Security Forces Produce More Nuclear Security?" published in Risk Analysis in 2004. The first piece warns against "proliferation fatalism" and "deterrence optimism" to argue that the United States should work to prevent Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons by addressing the security concerns that are likely motivators for Iran's nuclear ambitions. The International Security piece looks into the events surrounding a secret nuclear alert ordered by President Nixon to determine how effective the alert was at achieving the president's goal of forcing negotiations for the end of the Vietnam War. It also questions many of the assumptions made about nuclear signaling and discusses the dangers of new nuclear powers using this technique. Sagan's article on redundancy in Risk Analysis won Columbia University's Institute for War and Peace Studies 2003 Best Paper in Political Violence prize. In this article, Sagan looks at how we should think about nuclear security and the emerging terrorist threat, specifically whether more nuclear facility security personnel increases our safety. His article, "Realism, Ethics, and Weapons of Mass Destruction" appears in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, edited by Sohail Hashmi and Steven Lee. In addition to these works, Sagan is also finishing a collection of essays for a book tentatively entitled Inside Nuclear South Asia.

Gareth Evans has been since January 2000 President and Chief Executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (Crisis Group), the independent global non-governmental organisation with nearly 140 full-time staff on five continents which works, through field-based analysis and high-level policy advocacy, to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. Born in 1944, he went to Melbourne High School, and holds first class honours degrees in Law from Melbourne University (BA, LLB (Hons)) and in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University (MA). Evans was one of Australia's longest serving Foreign Ministers, best known internationally for his roles in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, bringing to a conclusion the international Chemical Weapons Convention, founding the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and initiating the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

He was Australian Humanist of the Year in 1990, won the ANZAC Peace Prize in 1994 for his work on Cambodia, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2001, and was awarded Honorary Doctorates of Laws by Melbourne University in 2002 and Carleton University in 2005. In 2000-2001 he was co-chair, with Mohamed Sahnoun, of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), appointed by the Government of Canada, which published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. He was a member of the of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, whose report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility was published in December 2004; the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction sponsored by Sweden and chaired by Hans Blix which reported in June 2006;  the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, sponsored by Sweden and France and chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, which reported in September 2006, and the Independent Commission on the Role of the IAEA to 2020 and Beyond, which reported in May 2008. In June 2008 he was appointed to co-chair (with former Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi) the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. He had previously served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, co-chaired by Cyrus Vance and David Hamburg (1994-97), and is currently a member of the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Committee on Genocide. 

Michael May is Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000. May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971. May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards. His current research interests are in the area of nuclear and terrorism, energy, security and environment, and the relation of nuclear weapons and foreign policy. 

If you would like to be added to the email announcement list, please visit https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/socialscienceseminar 

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Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of DaedalusEthics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).

Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).

In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.     

Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Scott D. Sagan Co-Director of CISAC (sabbatical 2008-09) and Professor of Political Science Speaker
Gareth Evans President and Chief Executive, International Crisis Group Commentator
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Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus
FSI Senior Fellow
CISAC Faculty Member
Not in Residence
michaelmayrsd17_040_0117aa.jpg PhD

Michael May is Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000.

May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971.

May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the International Institute on Strategic Studies, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards.

His current research interests are nuclear weapons policy in the US and in other countries; nuclear terrorism; nuclear and other forms of energy and their impact on the environment, health and safety and security; the use of statistics and mathematical models in the public sphere.

May is continuing work on creating a secure future for civilian nuclear applications. In October 2007, May hosted an international workshop on how the nuclear weapon states can help rebuild the consensus underlying the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Proceedings and a summary report are available online or by email request. May also chaired a technical working group on nuclear forensics. The final report is available online.

In April 2007, May in cooperation with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and Professor Ashton Carter of Harvard hosted a workshop on what would have to be done to be ready for a terrorist nuclear detonation. The report is available online at the Preventive Defense Project. A summary, titled, "The Day After: Action Following a Nuclear Blast in a U.S. City," was published fall 2007 in Washington Quarterly and is available online.

Recent work also includes a study of nuclear postures in several countries (2007 - 2009); an article on nuclear disarmament and one on tactical nuclear weapons; and a report with Kate Marvel for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on possible game changers in the nuclear energy industry.

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Michael M. May Professor of Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus; FSI Senior Fellow; CISAC Faculty Member Commentator
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