* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

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About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

About the event: China is practicing gray-zone coercion in the Indo-Pacific, deploying military vessels for drills in the waters between Taiwan and the Philippines. This “salami-slicing” strategy, advanced under Xi Jinping, incrementally escalates pressure on neighboring states while remaining below the threshold of open conflict. Disruption of critical sea lanes—through which fuel and food supplies transit—would have catastrophic implications for human populations dependent on uninterrupted maritime traffic. This talk presents research from the Stanford Geopolitical Coercion and Global Health Impact Initiative on maritime disruptions in the Indo-Pacific and what they would mean for human populations if maritime traffic were interrupted in a manner comparable to a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with particular attention to effects on food security, energy access, and maternal and child health.

About the speaker: Dr. Ruth Gibson is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Innovation in Global Health, Affiliated Scholar at CISAC and the Founding Executive Director of the Stanford Geopolitical Human Impact Research Lab—the first research initiative at Stanford University dedicated to examining how geopolitical decisions shape human lives, with particular attention to children. Based in the Department of Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, the Initiative brings together health modeling, open-source intelligence, and international humanitarian law to produce rigorous, policy-relevant scholarship. She co-leads The Lancet Series on Foreign Engagement and Health in an Era of Geopolitical Crisis with Professor Gary Darmstadt. Dr. Gibson earned her PhD in geopolitical coercion and global health from the University of British Columbia and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation from 2022 to 2025. Drawing on more than a decade of international global health experience across five continents, her research focuses on the health consequences of sanctions, blockades, and armed conflict, especially their effects on maternal and child health.

About the event: Why do adversaries sometimes cooperate to restrain their military competition? Why do they design arms control agreements with intrusive verification in some cases but rely on minimal transparency in others? Amidst ongoing international competition, arms control remains rare despite potential mutual benefits, and agreements vary dramatically in their approaches to monitoring. This book reveals how uncertainty from domestic political changes - such as leadership transitions or social unrest - can enable arms control. It identifies two paths to agreement: during periods of uncertainty, states that previously relied on informal understandings hedge by establishing lightly-monitored agreements, while those that anticipated deception take calculated risks through agreements with intensive verification. Through comprehensive data analysis and rich case studies, Jane Vaynman challenges conventional wisdom about uncertainty in international relations while offering insights for policymakers. As states confront challenges from nuclear competition to emerging technologies, understanding when arms control becomes viable is more vital than ever.

About the speaker: Dr. Jane Vaynman is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Vaynman’s work focuses on security cooperation between adversarial states, the design of arms control agreements, and the effects of technology on patterns of international cooperation and competition. From 2022-2024, she served as a senior advisor in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability at the U.S. Department of State. Her prior academic appointments include the Department of Political Science at Temple University and the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. She was also previously a Lightning Scholar at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Dr. Vaynman received her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University and B.A. in international relations from Stanford University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: This talk will discuss recent advancements in AI for biology, and relevant security and oversight considerations. It will also discuss how policy can be used to incentivize and shape technology development for defensive purposes, clarifying how the colloquial "defensive acceleration" or d/acc concept in AI circles relates to formal offense-defense balance concepts.

About the speaker: Dr. Pannu is an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Senior Scholar at the Center for Health Security. She is currently Director of Frontier Safety at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a philanthropic research organization focused on AI for biology. Dr. Pannu’s primary areas of research include biosecurity, pandemic preparedness, and emerging technology security and governance. Dr. Pannu previously worked on AI-enabled diagnostics at Google and has served as a subject-matter expert for the National Academies of Sciences, the EU AI Office, and the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, among others. She serves on the board of Blueprint Biosecurity, a nonprofit dedicated to achieving breakthroughs in humanity's ability to prevent pandemics. Dr. Pannu regularly briefs government officials and policymakers on emerging technologies with security implications, including artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Civil wars, interstate wars, and terrorism receive a great deal of media and policy attention, for good reasons. By contrast, the major forms of interpersonal violence—homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical punishment of children—generally have a much lower profile. In Worse than War, Anke Hoeffler and James Fearon assemble and analyze the data on the global prevalence and costs of collective and interpersonal violence. They show that interpersonal violence is vastly more widespread and imposes far greater societal costs than collective violence. Wars tend to be concentrated in a small number of countries, and often relatively small areas within them. By contrast, almost all countries have rates of homicide and nonfatal assault, particularly of women and children, that far exceed the global average rates of death and injury in wars and terrorism. Further, high rates of interpersonal violence are not simply fixed by culture or other structural factors. Evidence from a host of program evaluations, natural experiments, and longer-term social movements make it clear that rates of homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical punishment of children can be reduced if they are effectively targeted. Interventions that promote peace in civil war–torn countries are also possible, but the opportunities are few and increasingly far between.

In the below podcast episode, Fearon joins Tim Phillips to argue that the violence happening quietly inside homes and on ordinary streets does far more damage than war and terrorism combined. Drawing on the new book Worse Than War, Fearon estimates that interpersonal violence, meaning homicide, intimate partner violence and severe physical abuse of children, kills and injures more people than war, and costs society more too. 

About the speaker: James D. Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research has focused on civil and interstate war, with a current focus on risks of conflict in the Western Pacific. Fearon is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Join us for a special seminar featuring Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp, author of the bestseller Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. In this new book, Kemp conducts a historical autopsy of hundreds of polities over the last 300,000 years to draw lessons from history on how collapse could unfold in the future and what we can do to avoid it. Drawing on cutting-edge research in anthropology and archaeology, Goliath’s Curse is a radical retelling of human history with many surprising lessons, including the role of inequality in past collapses, how these historical breakdowns often were blessings and not just reversions to a ‘dark age’, and why collapse in the future is a far grimmer prospect.

Dr. Stephen Luby, a physician, researcher, and educator whose global health work has spanned five years in Pakistan and eight years in Bangladesh before joining the Stanford faculty. Dr. Luby brings the perspective of a public health expert deeply familiar with the challenges faced by both fragile and resilient societies on the ground.

Dr. Scott Sagan, Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a leading authority on international security and political science. Dr. Sagan brings a global security and governance lens, informed by his academic and government experience, to the discussion of how great powers succeed or fail in adapting to existential threats.

Together, Drs. Kemp, Luby, and Sagan will engage in a wide-ranging discussion on what history can teach us about the risks and possibilities of collapse today, from the threats of pandemic and climate crisis to the resiliency of democratic institutions and the fragility of hierarchical power structures. The event will conclude with a moderated audience Q&A.

About the speakers: Luke Kemp researches the end of the world. He is the author of the bestselling book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge. He has advised and led foresight studies for multiple international organisations, including the WHO and Convention on Biological Diversity. Luke’s work has been covered by the BBC, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Prof. Stephen Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. He then earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Continue reading here.

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. Continue reading here.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The most important thing to say about nuclear weapons is that they have not been used in war since August 1945. This book examines the history of those weapons from the discovery of fission in December 1938 to Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations in December 1988.  It adopts an international and transnational perspective in looking at the nuclear arms race, nuclear crises, peace movements, military strategies, arms control treaties, and the creation of international organizations, since these all involve interactions – some hostile, some cooperative – among states.  These interactions need to be understood, as far as possible, from multiple angles if we are to understand the nuclear order that emerged during the Cold War. The world order is changing, and the nuclear order with it, in important ways.  Does this history suggest lessons for today?

About the speaker: David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute of International Studies, Emeritus.  He joined the Stanford Faculty in 1986.  Before that he taught at Lancaster University and the University of Edinburgh.  He obtained his undergraduate degree in Modern Languages and Literature and his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University.  At Stanford he has served as co-director of CISAC, director of FSI, and Associate Dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences.  

All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The Russian war in Ukraine is not merely a regional conflict. It is a systemic threat to European democratic resilience. This talk outlines the strategic lessons from Estonia’s recalibration in cybersecurity, energy, defense and diplomacy derived from Ukraine’s recent wartime experience. Examining how Estonia operates as a “digital front line” offers a scalable blueprint for hardening national infrastructure against hybrid threats beyond Northern Europe also pertinent for the US.

About the speaker: Merle Maigre is the Programme Director of Cybersecurity at Estonia’s e-Governance Academy. In 2023-2025, she also served as a chosen Member of the Advisory Group of European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). Previously, she was Executive Vice President for Government Relations at CybExer Technologies, an Estonian company that provides cyber range based training. In 2017- 2018 Merle Maigre served as the Director of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (CCDCOE) in Tallinn and in 2018-2022 as the International Advisory Board member of NATO CCDCOE. 2012-2017 she worked as the Security Policy Adviser to Estonian Presidents Kersti Kaljulaid and Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: This talk will describe two projects, one in the middle and one just getting under way, both related to the benefits and harms of COVID-19 control measures.

The first project aims overall to provide a rigorous estimate of the benefits of COVID-19 control measures prior to vaccination in terms of COVID-19 deaths averted. Prominent existing analyses (T. Bollyky et al., 2023, Lancet, and empirical estimates in Macedo and Lee In COVID’s Wake 2025, suggest that this benefit was nonexistent — that adoption of anti-COVID restrictions had no measurable impact on COVID-19 deaths — but suffer from major methodological limitations and defects. This part of the talk will lay out the conditions for an appropriate analysis of this question and will describe planned work to conduct such an analysis.

The second project, with CISAC fellow Johannes Ponge, aims to assess the degree to which existing pandemic response plans incorporate consideration of unintended consequences of these measures in sectors such as the economy, education, and mental health, and to create tools to aid decision makers in tracking such impacts in future pandemics.

About the speaker: Marc Lipsitch is an infectious disease epidemiologist, mathematical modeler, and microbiologist who has been actively working on biosecurity for more than a decade. His science focuses on pandemic preparedness and response, evaluation of disease control measures, and the impact of pathogen evolution on human disease. His biosecurity work to date has focused on surveillance design, pandemic response, and prevention through the regulation of risky research. He joined Stanford this year after 26 years at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, where he led the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, and 4 years at the US CDC, where he was founding Director for Science and then Senior Advisor at the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics.
 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.