Stanford University

Spacecraft Design Decisions and International Space Security

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A central dilemma persists for national space actors: satellites are critical to economic, scientific, and national security activities, but spacecraft are vulnerable to malfunction, environmental failure, and hostile disruptions. 'Distributed satellite' mission approaches may provide a means to supplement the security of certain satellite systems by increasing both redundancy and physical dispersion. But how do national leaders make decisions between satellite architectures given these overall risks and unknown development costs? This talk will review some current context in American space programs and present a formal model based on parallel Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) for analysis of satellite architecture decisions.

About the speaker: Matt Daniels is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University and an engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center. Matt's research focuses on developing probabilistic risk models to assess the viability of constellations of small, networked satellite modules for scientific and national security missions. His doctoral research aims to improve designs for new space systems. 
 


Matt has worked at NASA Ames since 2008, where he is an engineer in the Mission Design Center and works with the Office of the Director on international technical collaborations. At NASA he has helped create NASA-DARPA partnerships on new space projects and has been a member of NASA delegations to Europe, South America, and the Middle East. As an undergraduate, Matt worked at NASA Ames, NASA Headquarters, and the Department of State. Matt received his M.S. from Stanford University in aeronautics & astronautics, and his B.A. from Cornell University in physics and international relations. 

 

Matthew Daniels

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Dr. Matthew Daniels is a technology and policy leader in Washington and New York. He has held technical, leadership, and strategy roles at the White House, NASA, and Department of Defense. His work focuses on space security, exploration, and technology strategy.

At the White House, Matt led initiatives on space and national security, Lunar exploration, US-India space cooperation, and planetary defense. He has also served as Senior Advisor to the Director of Net Assessment, focusing on space and nuclear security; the DOD's Tech Director for AI, overseeing the DOD's broad AI R&D portfolio; and a senior technical advisor in the office of the NASA Administrator, focusing on deep space exploration and development. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Matt started as an engineer at NASA, received his Ph.D. from Stanford, and was a fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He has twice been a recipient of Department of Defense Distinguished Service medals. For his work on planetary defense, Asteroid 22028 Matthewdaniels, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey, is named for him. 

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Empirical Studies of Conflict Project launches data archive

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Joseph Felter, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel, spent much of his military career in areas impacted by insurgency and civil war, gaining firsthand knowledge about the complex nature of threat environments. Later, as a Stanford Ph.D. student in political science, Felter was struck by the significant barriers confronting scholars conducting research on the dynamics of politically motivated violence and conflict. 

Prior to deploying to Afghanistan in late 2009, Felter joined forces with Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to build a team of researchers and establish the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC). They wanted to make conflict analysis easier for academic colleagues and create mechanisms that would allow them to share their results with military and government decision-makers. 

They spent the last four years building a team of scholars from across multiple universities committed to conducting high-quality, evidence-based conflict research. The team developed an open-source website devoted to compiling micro-data and analysis on insurgency, civil war and other politically motivated violence around the world. The site launched this week, with the stated goal of “empowering the nation’s best minds with the quality of data and information needed to address some of the most enduring and pressing challenges to international security.” 

The U.S. government and its allies produce massive amounts of data for their internal use, ranging from public opinion surveys and administrative tracking data on spending, to detailed incident reports on conflict. But this information is rarely made available outside official channels.

The site hopes to empower the nation’s best minds with the quality of data and information needed to address some of the most enduring and pressing challenges to international security." - Felter

“Consequently, military commanders and government policymakers are denied a significant pool of expertise, and outside scholars lose the potential to better support national security priorities,” said Felter, former director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and commander of the International Security Assistance Force’s Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan, reporting directly to both U.S. Army Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. 

The independent research by the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project is supported in part by a variety of research grants including a substantial one from the Defense Department’s Minerva Research Initiative, administered through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego and the Hoover Institution at Stanford have provided critical resources and archival support. Private supporters include the Palo Alto-based data analysis software company, Palantir Technologies, which made a significant donation of software licenses for use by ESOC researchers. 

Felter said the website is designed to make it easier for other conflict scholars to do the kind of research that can make for better decisions and more efficient allocation of resources by military leaders and civilian policymakers, thereby enhancing security and good governance worldwide. 

CISAC's Joe Felter, left, and Eli Berman of UCSD on a research mission in Chamkani, eastern Afghanistan in April 2010.
Photo Credit: Joe Felter

 

“Decisions of great consequence are made by leaders of operational units in the field and by government decision-makers, based on the best information and analysis available to them at the time,” Felter said. “I’ve advised senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and can attest that more and better data-driven analysis is in great demand. The stakes are high; literally life and death in some cases. We hope this website and the data it makes available to the broader scholarly community can help inform important decisions and policymaking.” 

The ESOC website supports three of ESOC’s core objectives:

  • To answer key analytical questions for policymakers and those on the ground in insecure areas to help them manage conflicts and respond to security threats;

  • To harness the expertise of leading scholars and provide them with the detailed sub-national data required to provide cutting-edge analytical support to policymakers at government agencies and non-governmental organizations;

  • And to maintain a repository of quality data across multiple cases of conflict and make these data available to a broad community of scholars, policy analysts and military strategists.

"One of the critical barriers to getting more top-notch research done on policy-relevant problems in the areas of security and development is the huge investment it takes to build data on areas experiencing or emerging from conflict,” said Shapiro, a Navy veteran who teaches at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. 

“The ESOC website is designed to dramatically lower that barrier by making available a broad range of data which took our team years to develop,” he said. “In doing so, we hope to promote careful empirical work on how to reduce conflict, rebuild order, and apply scarce aid and security resources more effectively." 

The site is devoted to data on Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, Philippines and Vietnam, with more countries to be added in coming years. There are hundreds of maps, geographical, demographic and socioeconomic data files, links to publications and university databases and other materials related to the study of conflict. 

Felter said that as a result of their research, ESOC members have uncovered significant new findings, some of which has been shared with decision-makers in the field. “In Afghanistan, for example, we were able to provide empirical evidence that conflict episodes resulting in civilian casualties led to an increase in attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan. These findings were briefed to senior leaders in the International Security and Assistance Force as well as to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” 

“I’ve advised senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and can attest that more and better data-driven analysis is in great demand. The stakes are high; literally life and death in some cases." - Felter 

 They also were able to facilitate the release of data on insurgent attacks and aid spending in Iraq to test theories on what led to the dramatic reduction in violence in 2007. With aid spending, they found that the use of impromptu humanitarian relief projects could help gain popular support and cooperation, leading to a reduction in insurgent violence, but that large-scale aid projects could have the opposite effect. 

"Four years ago, practitioners would ask us how to best implement development projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict zones. We could only shrug,” said Eli Berman, a UC San Diego economics professor, research director for international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and ESOC member. “Today, we can confidently give advice based on solid evidence: projects are likely to be violence-reducing if they are modest – say less than $50,000 – secure from destruction and extortion, informed by development experts and conditional on government forces controlling the territory.” 

Felter and Shapiro hope that new discoveries by ESOC researchers and by scholars working with micro-conflict data made available by ESOC can help shape American counterinsurgency doctrine as it evolves going forward.

“ESOC works collaboratively with other institutions dedicated to making data available to the scholarly community, such as West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, where ESOC researchers are engaged in a  new joint project  building data from recently released documents from the Iraqi insurgency,” Felter said.

Other ESOC members include:

  • James D. Fearon, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University

  • David D. Laitin, the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

  • Jeremy M. Weinstein, Associate Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He serves as director of the Center for African Studies, and is an affiliated faculty member at CISAC and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Somali mother and child.
Photo Credit: Nicholai Lidow
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CDDRL-CISAC Special Seminar: The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

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Abstract:

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Speaker Bio:

Benjamin Lessing is a recent Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and will join the Political Science faculty at University of Chicago as assistant professor in 2013.

Lessing studies 'criminal conflict'—organized armed violence involving non-state actors who, unlike revolutionary insurgents, are not trying to topple the state. His doctoral dissertation examines armed conflict between drug trafficking organizations and the state in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Additionally, he has studied prison gangs’ pernicious effect on state authority, and the effect of paramilitary groups’ territorial control on electoral outcomes. 

Prior to his graduate work, he conducted field research on the licit and illicit small arms trade in Latin America and the Caribbean for international organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the Small Arms Survey, as well as Viva Rio, Brazil’s largest NGO, and was a Fulbright Student Grantee in Argentina and Uruguay.

 

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CISAC Conference Room

Benjamin Lessing Post-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL and CISAC

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Organizational legacies of violence Conditions favoring insurgency onset in Colombia, 1964–1984

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Why do insurgencies erupt in some places and not in others? This article exploits an original violent event database of 274,428 municipality-month observations in Colombia to determine the conditions favoring organized violence at the subnational level. The data cast doubt on the conventional correlates of war: poverty, rough terrain, lootable natural resources, and large, sparsely distributed populations. The evidence suggests that rebellions begin not in localities that afford sanctuaries, impoverished recruits, and abundant finances, but instead in regions providing receptacles of collective action: the organizational legacies of war. Specifically, the data indicate that regions affected by past mobilization are six times more likely to experience rebellion than those without a tradition of armed organized action. The significant correlation between prior and future mobilization is robust across different measurements of the concepts, levels of aggregations of the data, units of analysis, and specifications of the model. These include rare events and spatial lag analyses. These results highlight the need for micro conflict data, theory disentangling the causes of war onset from those of war recurrence, and a reorientation away from physical geography and back to the human and social geography that determines if rebellion is organizationally feasible. The findings suggest new avenues of research on the post-war trajectories of armed organizations, the causes of repeated war, and the micro-foundations of rebellion.

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Journal of Peace Research
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Sarah Z. Daly
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Public Goods Provision and the Efficacy of Governance

On May 18-19, the Program on Poverty and Governance will host a two-day conference on the provision of public goods and good governance throughout the world. This conference, co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, will bring together an interdisciplinary group of economists, political scientists, policymakers, and public health researchers examining these questions. Public goods—goods and services such as education, healthcare, sanitation, potable water, and other benefits provided by the government—are intrinsically tied to issues of governance, which we broadly define as the exercise of political authority and the use of institutional resources to manage society’s problems and affairs. More specifically, factors such how political leaders get elected, the way in which government projects get funded, whether the community participates in decision-making, and the extent to which the distribution of government benefits is done through clientelistic networks, among others, play an important role in the quality and coverage of public goods that governments provide. Additionally, a critical question in large parts of the developing world relates to the role of international players and foreign aid in the provision of public goods –does external provision of public goods enable or hinder governmental capacity to deliver public services in poor communities? Through two days of presentations and panel discussions, the conference will explore how various facets of governance affect the provision of public goods and services throughout the world.

The conference will be held in Encina Hall at Stanford University May 18th and 19th, 2012. Guests are encouraged to RSVP by May 16th. Any questions may be addressed to the Program on Poverty and Governance program associate Elena Cryst.

Click Here for Papers

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CISAC Conference Room

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
0
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Former U.S. Sen. Feingold and CISAC Co-Director Cuéllar encourage Americans to think globally

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A Wake-up Call for America: We Must Connect with the World

Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, currently the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service, uses an anecdote in his new book, While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era, to illustrate his concern that Americans have become too insular as a result of the 2001 terrorist attacks. While teaching at Marquette University Law School during the Arab Spring of last year, an undergraduate penned a column lamenting that so many students not only could not find Tunisia on the map – they could spell Kardashian before Kazakhstan.

Feingold writes that he admired this student for his confession about his lack of knowledge on global affairs, then quotes the final thought of the young columnist: “We are connected to the rest of the world in ways few of us can fully fathom, from the shoes we wear and coffee we drink to the cell phones we carry and the tweets we post.”

In a recent interview, CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Feingold discuss steps to be taken to ensure that all Americans – young and old, inside the Washington beltway and out on the farm in Wisconsin – take a patriotic stand by engaging with the world to restore our national unity and regain global respect.    

Senator Feingold, what prompted you to write this book now?

Feingold: For me, as for many Americans, 9/11 was a life-changing event, the wake-up call in which we all understood that we no longer could be safe just assuming the world would take care of itself. We got misdirected with things like Iraq and we developed this sort of invade-one-country-at-a-time approach. There was also exploitation of the fears from 9/11 for domestic agendas, from the Patriot Act to the way that Muslims and Arabs are treated in this country. And then, finally, with the rise of the tea party, I feel like we went back to sleep. But there are signals all over the place, of the continued presence of al-Qaida and the continued potency of al-Qaida, not to mention so many other trends from the Chinese influence in Africa to the Iranian influence in Latin America. We aren’t connecting as a government or as a people in a way that I think is commensurate with our place in the 21st century. I’m trying to issue a warning that we’re going to get fooled or surprised again if we think we can just go back to being just sort of safely over here across the oceans. That’s just not the world anymore.

So how do you wake up Americans and make them realize we cannot, as you say, survive as a nation without being active and aware of global events and trends? 

Feingold: It’s at all levels. I happen to think we have a good president and I think he’s going to be a great president by the end of his second term. And I think he’s started the process of alerting Americans to the need to connect to all places in the world; he’s leading us toward a global vision of the kind that I think we have to have to be safe and to be competitively successful and to be well perceived by the rest of the world. The president and other leaders should call on each of us to try and become citizen diplomats. Three hundred million people should be urged as part of their patriotic duty not just to go to the moon as we once were, but go to the rest of the world. This isn’t Pollyanna; this is about being safe. I don’t think this country is geared up to make that connection and I think it’s a fatal flaw. The Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians, they’re all over the world and they have a plan for what they’re doing. We don’t.

What do you see as the most pressing global security issues today?

Cuéllar:  The United States is confronting a changing world, where countries like India, Brazil, and China are evolving and assuming greater importance. Engaging these countries to address problems like nuclear proliferation will be critical in the years ahead.  The world also faces a persistent problem involving failed or failing states. In places like Somalia, piracy is not only a regional problem in the Gulf of Aden.  The problem is an example of how threats can affect multiple countries and impact flows of commodities, disrupting the rule of law, highlighting the challenges of governing common resources such as international sea lanes. Another challenge is the enormous potential of technology to change people’s lives for the better, coupled with risks that arise which we are only in a very imperfect and incomplete way managing; risks of vulnerabilities in our infrastructure; risks of theft of intellectual property, risks of disruption of organizations.

Feingold: I like this answer because Prof. Cuéllar did not just say, “Well, it’s Russia and Iran and Colombia.” There’s this tendency to just speak of countries. We’re just trained to say, “OK what’s the hot spot and let’s just worry about that.” Like right now it’s Iran; a few months ago it was Yemen. In my book what I’m trying to point out is that you have to look at trends and overall tendencies around the world and somehow we have to have the capacity to deal with more than one thing at a time.

Senator Feingold, you called the Bush Administration’s terrorist surveillance program – the wiretapping and surveillance of emails and financial records without court approval – one of the worst assaults on the Constitution in American history. How does the government protect our constitutional rights to privacy and probable cause while monitoring criminal and terrorist networks in a digital age?

Feingold: The assault on the Constitutional by the administration was not about whether we could do those things, its whether or not the president would basically make up his own laws just because we’re in a crisis. That to me is completely unconstitutional. We understand that a president might have to take emergency action and he may have to come to Congress and say, you know I did this, it may be beyond the law, would you please pass a law to approve it, or I’ll stop doing it. That’s not what Bush did. Bush hid it. Bush hid what he was doing on torture; Bush hid what he was doing on wiretapping. That’s a very dangerous thing that completely saps our strength from within and is completely unnecessary to stop the terrorists.

Cuéllar: The challenge of living up to our constitutional values while we secure the country is always critical. It requires organizations that can learn from their mistakes to be honest with each other enough and recognize when they have overstepped their bounds, that make good use of entities like inspectors-general, that leverage the ability of Congress to do oversight. These are all elements of making our constitutional values relevant. So me the challenge has always been how to you leverage all the information technology and all our ability to make smart, thoughtful, careful decisions – including decisions that do permit appropriate degrees of surveillance and intelligence – in order to avoid superficial reactions against individuals who simply appear threatening.

What key steps should the U.S. government take to improve its counter-terrorism efforts both at home and abroad?

Feingold: The first thing is to recognize the nature of the threat. One of the chapters in the book is called A Game of Risk, where we seem to think the way to counter terrorism is to invade a country and stay there forever and say we have to stay there or the terrorist are going to come back. But this isn’t the nature of al-Qaida or similar organizations. President Bush used to say there were 60 countries where al-Qaida was operating and, of course, one thing that was embarrassing about it was that Iraq wasn’t one of them. But we’re still in this place today. Al-Shabab in Somalia; al-Qaida and the Islamic Maghreb in northern Africa; a group called Boko Haram in Nigeria, which looks very much like an al-Qaida group, has pulled off some 70 attacks in the last year. So this is an international organization that communicates with each other and they’re not done just because Osama bin Laden is gone. So let’s not get caught unawares again.

Senator Feingold, what was your most memorable, defining challenge in Congress and how did that change the way you see yourself and the world around you?

It had to do with recognizing when 9/11 occurred that there really was a group of people out there who would love to kill all of us and, despite the fact that I’m progressive and I voted against most military interventions, just saying to myself: look, there are times when threats are real. And it caused me to actually seek to be on the Intelligence Committee which is something I never wanted to do; I was not sure of the importance of intelligence in the post Cold War era and it was a real change for me. I remember having an emotional response, saying, “You know what? This is real; what these folks did was real and they have intimidated an entire country if not the world.” I wanted to know everything I could about how they came to be and what they were planning next, and to be a person who could try to think ahead for other kinds of threats so we as Americans can get ahead of threats instead of being the people who are reacting.

 

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The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law

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From Oxford University Press:

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this narrative, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous--few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as Jenny Martinez shows in this novel interpretation of the roots of human rights law, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade. Originating in England in the late eighteenth century, abolitionism achieved remarkable success over the course of the nineteenth century. Martinez focuses in particular on the international admiralty courts, which tried the crews of captured slave ships. The courts, which were based in the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and Brazil, helped free at least 80,000 Africans from captured slavers between 1807 and 1871. Here then, buried in the dusty archives of admiralty courts, ships' logs, and the British foreign office, are the foundations of contemporary human rights law: international courts targeting states and non-state transnational actors while working on behalf the world's most persecuted peoples--captured West Africans bound for the slave plantations of the Americas. Fueled by a powerful thesis and novel evidence, Martinez's work will reshape the fields of human rights history and international human rights law.


Features

  • Forces us to fundamentally rethink the origins of human rights activism
  • Filled with fascinating stories of captured slave ship crews brought to trial across the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century
  • Shows how the prosecution of the international slave trade was crucial to the development of modern international law
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Jenny Martinez
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What to Do about Flu? A Public Health Challenge

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Infectious diseases, especially those transmitted from person to person through the respiratory route, continue to pose a threat to the global community. Public health surveillance systems and the International Health Regulations are intended to facilitate the recognition of and rapid response to infectious diseases that pose the risk of developing into a pandemic, but the response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic illustrates the continuing challenges to implementing appropriate prevention and control measures. The response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic will be discussed and its implications examined.

Speaker biography:

Arthur Reingold, MD is Professor and Head of the Division of Epidemiology and Associate Dean for Research in the School of Public Health (SPH) at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). He holds concurrent appointments in Medicine and in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He completed his BA and MD degrees at the University of Chicago and then completed a residency in internal medicine at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is board certified in internal medicine and holds a current medical license in California, but has devoted the last 25 years to the study and prevention of infectious diseases in the U.S and in developing countries throughout the world.

He began his career as an infectious disease epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), working there for eight years. While at CDC, he worked domestically on Toxic Shock Syndrome, Legionnaires’ disease, bacterial meningitis, fungal infections, and non-tuberculous mycobacterial infections and internationally on epidemic meningitis in West Africa and Nepal.

Since joining the faculty at UCB in 1987, he has worked on a variety of emerging and re-emerging infections in the U.S.; on acute rheumatic fever in New Zealand; and on AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and acute respiraatory infections in Brazil, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, India and Indonesia. He has directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program at UCB/UCSF since its inception in 1988; co-directed (with Dr. Duc Vugia of the California Department of Health Services), the CDC-funded California Emerging Infections Program since its inception in 1994; and served as the Principal Investigator of the UCB Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness (CIDP) since its inception in 2002.

He also has ongoing research projects concerning malaria in Uganda; HIV/AIDS and related conditions in Brazil; and tuberculosis in India.  He regularly teaches courses on epidemiologic methods, outbreak investigation, and the application of epidemiologic methods in developing countries, among others. He also teaches annual short courses on similar topics in Hong Kong, Brazil, Switzerland, and other countries.

He has been elected to membership in the American Epidemiological Society; fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Infectious Diseases Society of America; and membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. In Hong Kong, He has a close working relationship with Chinese University, particularly with its School of Public Health and its Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases. Dr. Reingold gives short courses at the School of Public Health each year and he serves on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Emerging Infectious diseases.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Arthur Reingold Professor of Epidemiology and Associate Dean of Research Speaker UC Berkeley School of Public Health
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Thomas Fingar proposes some questions for the Republican presidential debate

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1. Eight U.S. presidents have said that the United States wants China to be strong, secure, and prosperous. Do you share that objective and what consequences, positive and negative, has China’s rise had for the United States?

2. What is the best way for the United States to respond to the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other large and rapidly growing countries?

3. Do you consider China a partner or an adversary of the United States -- and what should U.S. policy toward China seek to accomplish?

4. Given the importance of defense industry jobs, especially in Republican-leaning states, is it politically necessary for the U.S. to have an enemy to justify a U.S. military budget larger than the total military budgets of most other nations, many of which are allies of the United States. In other words, do we “need” to depict China as an adversary?

5. Robert Zoelleck, when he was deputy secretary of state, urged China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system.  What did he mean by that and, in your opinion, is China a responsible participant in the international system

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President Obama’s Asia Overdrive

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When Asia’s leaders gather in Honolulu next week for the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Americans will get a glimpse of the Obama administration’s hyperactive Asia agenda. While America has always been a Pacific nation, the Obama administration is now beginning to match the world’s most populous and economically dynamic region with America’s own brand of energy and leadership.

Before President Barack Obama alights on the tarmac in Honolulu, he will have prepared the way to lead anew in Asia. Among a number of significant “firsts” for our nation in the region are:

  • President Obama in 2009 became the first U.S. president ever to attend a meeting with all 10 leaders of the nations that comprise the Association of South East Asian Nations.
  • The United States in 2010 became the first non-ASEAN country to establish a dedicated Mission to ASEAN in Jakarta.
  • Hillary Clinton was the first secretary of state in a generation to make Asia the destination of her first foreign trip.
  • Secretary Clinton also launched the “Lower Mekong Initiative,” a first-of-its-kind agreement between Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and the United States to enhance cooperation in the areas of water and forest management, education, and health.

Now, President Obama will arrive in Honolulu to, among other things, attempt to get APEC nations to agree to lower tariffs on renewable energy products. He will also continue to negotiate the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama administration initiative with eight Asian nations, with the objective of shaping a broad-based regional trade pact that would include Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Look for announcements of Japanese participation and a framework for the TPP agreement to be announced alongside the APEC summit.

After the APEC summit, President Obama will travel to Bali and attend the East Asia Summit, a fairly new 18-nation security forum—becoming the first U.S. president to attend this annual meeting.

All this activity is especially dramatic following eight years of low-key engagement where Asians griped about missed meetings and America’s strategic attention was focused almost exclusively in the Middle East. But most importantly, there is a well-thought out strategy for re-engagement—a strategy based on renewing long-time allies, engaging seriously newly emerging powers with an eye on preserving stability in the Pacific, while building stronger economic ties to boost American trade, job creation, and long-term economic prosperity at home.

Our stalwart ally Japan was rocked by this year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, and America is assisting in its recovery. Our alliance remains strong, and Japan continues to be an increasingly active U.S. partner in global affairs.

Relations with South Korea are better than they have ever been. The U.S. Congress just passed a historic free trade agreement, opening the South Korean market for a wealth of American goods. Twice in two years the Obama administration (over Chinese objections) deployed the USS George Washington to the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan to conduct exercises with South Korea in response to North Korean aggression. Last month, President Obama welcomed President Lee Myung-bak for a state visit, the first in 10 years by a South Korean president.

President Obama will visit Australia next week to announce a deepened military cooperation pact—building once again on a long-standing alliance. This follows on Secretary of State Clinton’s signing last year of the Wellington Declaration, a roadmap for deepening and expanding the bilateral relationship between the United States and New Zealand.

The Obama administration also is engaging more closely with emerging powers.

The administration in 2010 launched the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue, which has broadened and deepened relations with New Delhi to include issues from cybersecurity and terrorism to negotiations over a bilateral investment treaty and energy cooperation. Obama also launched the U.S.-Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership, including a series of agreements that will help defense and trade relations. The administration is also working carefully behind the scenes with Myanmar’s new leadership to urge liberalization there.

All of this brings us to China. The flurry of Asian activity makes sense in its own right to further U.S. economic, cultural, and strategic interests, but it is also a component of U.S. policy toward China. The Obama administration’s China policy involves increasing America’s ability to compete with China, working with China where fruitful, and pushing back when China’s actions cross the line. While the U.S.-China relationship is never easy, the administration has avoided major crises and managed to sell Taiwan the largest arm sales packages in any two-year period over the past 30 years without a major breach of relations with Beijing.

Indeed, where cooperation is possible, it is underway. A joint clean energy research center with China is now open, more U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials are based in China to monitor the safety of food and drugs coming to the U.S. market. What’s more, the Obama administration has had some significant success working with Beijing on the nuclear activities of North Korea and Iran, though it has followed a one step forward, two steps back pattern.

The U.S. needs to be engaged in Asia to ensure that China’s rise contributes to stability and prosperity in the region. In 2010, for example, when China made a series of aggressive moves related to the South China Sea, Secretary of State Clinton joined with her counterparts from Southeast Asia, including countries close to China such as Vietnam in what has been called a “showdown,” to make clear their desire for a peaceful, multilateral approach to the conflicting territorial claims there. China backed off its more forward actions and most strident rhetoric.

Similarly, the United States is creating incentives for China to conform to international law and standards. That’s why the Obama administration is negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade pact with high standards to join. The idea is build consensus in the region about a coherent set of regulations that might push China in a helpful direction. TPP rules, for example, are likely to prohibit state-owned enterprises from getting government subsidies not available to privately owned companies, an issue on which Washington has been pushing Beijing hard, with only slow progress to show for it.

These sorts of initiatives are not part of a strategy of “containment” of China, which is not possible or desirable. No Asian country would ever sign up to an anti-China alliance—each, in fact, wants to strengthen its relationship with Beijing. But at the same time, they want America to stick close by. Even if containment were possible, America benefits more from a strong, prosperous China than a weak and resentful one.

Can America afford all this Asian engagement? We have to and we will. The coming years will demand strategic choices. The next time you hear someone complaining about U.S. troops leaving Iraq, remind them that the United States is now investing more wisely and more constructively in the most important region of the world.

Nina Hachigian is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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