Co-sponsored with The World House Project at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

About the Event: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the 1951 Oscars. In this talk, Kal Raustiala, author of The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire explores Bunche’s extraordinary life and career, from professor of political science at Howard to the OSS, State Department, and eventually the UN, his professional home for 25 years. Bunche was a world class mediator and arguably the father of modern peacekeeping. But he was also a Black man in the very white world of diplomacy, who during the Cold War stood at the center of the one of the world’s great historical revolutions: the postwar decolonization of much of Africa and Asia.

About the Speaker: Kal Raustiala is the Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law at UCLA Law School, Professor at the UCLA International Institute, and Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. From 2012-2015 he served as UCLA’s Associate Vice Provost for International Studies and Faculty Director of the International Education Office.

Professor Raustiala's research focuses on international law, international relations, and intellectual property. His recent publications include “The Fight Against China’s Bribe Machine,” Foreign Affairs, October 2021 (with Nicolas Barile); “Faster Fashion: The Piracy Paradox and its Perils,” 39 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, (Spring 2021)(with Christopher Sprigman); “NGOs in International Treatymaking,” in Duncan Hollis, ed, The Oxford Guide to Treaties, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2020); “ Hollywood is Running Out of Villains,” Foreign Affairs, August 2020; “Innovation in the Information Age: The United States, China, and the Struggle Over Intellectual Property in the 21st Century,” 58 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (June 2020); and “The Second Digital Disruption: Streaming and the Dawn of Data-Driven Creativity,” NYU Law Review (2019, (with Christopher Sprigman). His books include Global Governance in a World of Change (Michael Barnett, Jon Pevehouse, and Kal Raustiala, eds, Cambridge University Press, 2021); Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (Oxford, 2009); and The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford, 2012) (with Christopher Sprigman), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His biography of the late UN diplomat, civil rights advocate, and UCLA alum Ralph Bunche, The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire, will be published in late 2022 by Oxford University Press.

In 2016 Professor Raustiala was elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Princeton University, the University of Chicago Law School, Melbourne University in Australia, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2016, he was the Yong Shook Lin Visiting Professor of Intellectual Property at the National University of Singapore. A graduate of Duke University, Professor Raustiala holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego.

Prior to coming to UCLA, Professor Raustiala was a research fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a Peccei Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems, and an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Raustiala has served on the editorial boards of International Organization and the American Journal of International Law and is a frequent media contributor whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde. Along with Catherine Amirfar of Debevoise & Plimpton, he is co-host of the American Society of International Law’s International Law Behind the Headlines podcast.

 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.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: We cannot understand much of anything about power politics without morality. Yet up to this point we have tried to do just that. By turning our attention to how states respond to being wronged rather than when they do right and realizing the moral basis of the groups that interact in foreign affairs, I show that morality is virtually everywhere in international relations – in the perception of threat, the persistence of conflict, the judgment of domestic audiences, and the articulation of expansionist goals. The inescapability of our moral impulses owes to their evolutionary origins in helping individuals solve recurrent problems in their anarchic environment. Rather than a transcendence of material reality, morality is material reality. 

About the Speaker: Brian C. Rathbun is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. He is the author of four other books on international affairs and is a distinguished scholar of the International Studies Association. His latest book with Cambridge University Press, Reasoning of State, won the 2020 award for best book on foreign policy from the American Political Science Association.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Under what conditions do dual-use emerging technologies proliferate in the international system? While the fourth industrial revolution (Information and Communications Technology revolution) is often associated with big data, I argue that emerging technologies should also be known for their level of prominence, complexity, unparalleled connectivity, enhanced performance, and uncertainty compared to traditional technologies. Leveraging open-source, multi-year data consisting of about two million observations from the National Science Foundation, arXiv, Small Business Innovation Research, and Department of Defense’s Research, Development, Test and Evaluation program, I first share an illustrative example differentiating frontier, emerging, and mature technologies with quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and GPS respectively. After providing conceptualizations of technologies, I then outline the conceptualization and operationalization of the outcome variable, proliferation. Proliferation includes two stages, specifically possession and the operationality of the emerging technology. In putting forth a novel definition of emerging technologies, this paper includes extensive and robust empirical analysis of patents through the World Intellectual Property Organization, investment via Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, and publications via arXiv, awards via the Small Business Innovation Research Program and the National Science Foundation. Overall, scholarly attention to emerging technologies is increasingly important as these innovations continue to take shape and impact the nature of national and international security.

About the Speaker: Julie George is a PhD Candidate in the Government department at Cornell University, specializing in international security. Broadly, her doctoral research examines the proliferation of emerging technologies and its impact on the probability and nature of conflict and cooperation in the international system. This focus has led her to engage a broad selection of scholarship across science and technology studies, history, international organizations, and law. Currently, she is a predoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford University. More information regarding Julie’s research can be found at www.juliexgeorge.com.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Speaker: Professor Carter Malkasian is the Chair of the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School.
 
He was the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford from 2015 to 2019. He has extensive experience working in conflict zones, especially Afghanistan and Iraq, and has published several books.
 
The highlight of his work in conflict zones was nearly two years in Garmser district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, as a State Department political officer from from 2009 to 2011. Before that, he was a civilian advisor to the I Marine Expeditionary Force in al-Anbar for one year in 2004–2005 and six months in 2006. He also worked Kunar in 2007 and Honduras in 2012; and was General Dunford’s senior advisor in Afghanistan from March 2013 to August 2014.
 
His newest book is The American War in Afghanistan: A History. The New York Times rated it as one of the top 100 books of 2021.
 
His 2013 book, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (Oxford University Press), won the 2014 silver medal for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Book Award.
 
Other books include Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Islamic State, A History of Modern Wars of Attrition (2002), and The Korean War, 1950-1953.
 
He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley and completed his doctorate in history at Oxford University. He speaks Pashto.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In this talk, Dr. Kassenova will share highlights from her recently released book Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb. She will share the history of Soviet nuclear tests in the Kazakh steppe, their harm to the people and the environment, and the story of the public anti-nuclear movement that led to the closure of the nuclear testing site. She will also explain why Kazakhstan decided to give up its nuclear inheritance, including more than a thousand nuclear weapons, more than a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, tons of nuclear materials, and critical nuclear infrastructure. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize access of proliferators to the global financial system. Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds and is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS). From 2011 to 2015 Kassenova served on the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Topic: Four decades of Soviet nuclear testing left behind a legacy of radioactive contamination in a sizable area of contemporary Kazakhstan. My research examines the social consequences and lasting implications of this on local populations living in a village of Koyan. Taking the 1949-1989 Soviet atomic weapons program and the secretive Cold War context as my starting point, I investigate local understandings of health and livelihood on a landscape marred by atomic testing and one continuously inhabited by rural Kazakhs for generations. I demonstrate that since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the advent of free market reforms in Kazakhstan a new kind of post-socialist identity has appeared. Furthermore, in order to navigate this post-Soviet social order and cultural marginalization, people in Koyan have “embraced” nuclear pollution as something natural in their environment. Specifically, they see their own survival as proof that they have evolved to fit a radioactive ecosystem. My Kazakh colleagues say “clean air is our death,” meaning that moving away from these damaged ecosystems will kill them. Emerging strategies for survival reflect a new social order in Kazakhstan: that order embraces a nuclear future by agreeing to accept funding to become a Global Nuclear Fuel Bank and a dumping ground for much of the West’s toxic waste, while at the same time publicly lamenting its Soviet nuclear past. I address how people in Koyan have learned to engage with the nuclear test site’s past, present state practices, scientific expertise and authority, and how health, suffering, and notions of well-being constitute a new post-socialist identity.

About the Speaker: Magdalena Stawkowski received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation, “Radioactive Knowledge: State Control of Scientific Information in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan,” is based on sixteen months of field work in the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site region and is an ethnographic account of the local understandings of health, livelihood, and suffering among rural ethnic Kazakh communities. In it, Magdalena traces the lesser-known history of the Soviet nuclear program from the perspective of people who were most affected by its military-industrial complex, exploring how they cope with their own present-day toxic environments. She is a recipient of an award for outstanding contribution to the anti-nuclear movement by Olzhas Suleimenov, the Ambassador of Kazakhstan to UNESCO, Kazakh poet, and the founder of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Anti-Nuclear Movement in Kazakhstan. Magdalena’s recent co-authored article appeared in the Journal of the History of Biology and is titled “James V. Neel and Yuri E. Dubrova: Cold War Debates and the Genetic Effects of Low Dose Radiation.”