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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.

View Written Draft Paper

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: “Less autonomy, more humanity.” That is the motto of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of 250 human-rights organizations working to negotiate an international treaty that would effectively prohibit states from developing and using autonomous weapons systems. The Campaign’s motto captures the primary legal objection to autonomous weapons: namely, that “killer robots” will never be able to comply with international humanitarian law as well as human soldiers because such compliance requires the kind of judgment, situational awareness, and ability to interpret emotions that only humans possess. This lecture challenges that objection. It begins by showing that those uniquely human traits are far less necessary to IHL compliance than commonly assumed. It then explains why the legal critique of autonomous weapons depends on an idea of “the human” – as fundamentally rational, self-determining, and capable of self-control – that is believed by decades of research into how humans actually make decisions, particularly in dangerous and stressful situations such as combat. And finally, it concludes that the real objection of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is not that autonomous weapons will make worse soldiers than humans – but that they will make better ones.

About the speaker: Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Military Studies and Distinguished RecurringVisiting Professor of Law at Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. He is an Academic Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London and currently serves as Special Advisor on War Crimes to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, where he led the development of the Office's recently issued Policy on Addressing Environmental Damage Through the Rome Statute. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Opinio Juris, the world's oldest blog dedicated to international law.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: International relations scholars have long studied how technological shifts impact the course of wars, especially as armies are forced to innovate on the battlefield. From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, SpaceX’s Starlink service (a private company) has played a vital infrastructure role for Ukraine’s military, something it was never envisioned or designed to do. In addition, in contrast with past conflicts, Starlink’s major policy choices are primarily controlled by a single individual – Elon Musk –  who has his own political preferences and agenda, distinct from the U.S. or other countries. We leverage a natural experiment to ascertain the effect of Starlink access for Ukrainian forces on battlefield outcomes. We leverage a geographic discontinuity to determine the overall effect of access to Starlink on Ukraine’s territorial control as well as overall volume of munitions and combat activities. The design relies on an idiosyncratic mismatch between SpaceX’s internal system (which uses fixed hexagon shapes) for allocating access and the actual boundaries of the frontline and Ukraine’s provinces. Second, we use a difference-in-differences approach to examine how Starlink access mattered before and after a late 2022 policy change at SpaceX decided personally by Elon Musk to limit Starlink access to Ukrainian forces in certain areas and for certain activities. Initial findings are that Starlink access significantly improves Ukraine’s ability to hold territory, though it appears not to greatly affect the volume of drones, artillery or other munitions. The results suggest Starlink mostly affects quality of strikes rather than quantity. 

Co-authored with Tatsuya Koyama and Yuri Zhukov.

About the speaker: Renard Sexton is a Visiting Scholar at CISAC and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University.

Sexton studies conflict and development with a focus on local level violence and interventions intended to curb violence. His research covers insurgency, terrorism, social conflict around natural resources, and police crackdowns; he has regional expertise in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia and Andean Latin America. His research has been published in top scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review and American Journal of Political Science. His policy pieces and commentary have been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, International Crisis Group, Foreign Policy and other outlets. Before joining Emory, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Economics of Conflict fellow at the International Crisis Group.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities supported by select American bombing in June 2025 changed the nuclear and political landscape in the Middle East. We will explore how much the bombing set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and prospects, and how that may influence the political situation in Iran, Israel and the region.

About the speakers:

Siegfried Hecker was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including 12 years as director. He was at Stanford University for 17 years, including 6 years as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is now part-time professor of practice at Texas A&M University and at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea.  

He is the author (with collaborating author Elliot Serbin) of Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program (Stanford University Press, January 2023) and editor of Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers, Los Alamos Historical Society, June 2016.
 

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a Professor (by courtesy) in the Stanford Global Studies Division. He is also one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise includes U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. He taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science until 1986, where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university’s Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University for 14 years. He was a visiting Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Middle East Center for eight years.

Professor Milani came to Stanford in 2003 and became the founding director of the Iranian Studies Program in 2005. He also worked with two colleagues to launch the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. He has published more than twenty books and two hundred articles and book reviews in scholarly magazines, journals, and newspapers. His most recent books include A Window into Modern Iran: The Ardeshir Zahedi Papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (Hoover Institution Press, October 2019); Saadi and Humanism (in Persian), with Maryam Mirzadeh (Zemestan publisher, February 2020); and Thirty Portraits, Vol. 1 and 2 (Persian Circle, September 2022 and July 2023).
 

Or (Ori) Rabinowitz is a tenured senior lecturer (Associate Professor) at the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University and a Visiting Fellow of Israel Studies at Stanford, 2025-2026. After receiving the British Foreign Office's Chevening Scholarship, Rabinowitz completed a PhD at the War Studies Department of King’s College London in December 2011. In 2014, her book Bargaining on Nuclear Tests was published by Oxford University Press. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, think pieces, and op-eds in leading journals and magazines. She is the recipient of several prizes, grants, and awards, including two personal grants from the Israel Science Foundation. Her book manuscript on the evolution of US and Israeli counter-proliferation policy in the Middle East is currently under review.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Multiple large bodies of scholarship engage with questions directly concerned with political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses. Yet, efforts to collect data on these variables are fraught with challenges, and many extant empirical findings rely on data (particularly news report based events) suspected of or known to be biased in aggregate. We explore the use of anonymous, online surveying to detect otherwise unobserved activity. We run anonymous, online surveys in Bangladesh and Pakistan in the run up to, during and in the period following recent contentious 2024 elections in both countries and, separately, in the immediate aftermath of Bangladesh’s 2024 Students–People’s Uprising and expulsion of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. To assess the efficacy of the surveys, we partnered with professional journalists working on both countries to verify the authenticity of reported incidents. Results confirm their effectiveness in uncovering many instances of political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses otherwise likely to be missed/excluded from major news media reporting and ultimately major datasets derived from it. Yet, they also suggest that anonymous online survey responses and leading event datasets effectively complement, rather than substitute for, one another. Such surveys can be deployed rapidly to communicate with some of the most difficult to reach populations globally about the most sensitive political issues of interest to social scientists and policy professionals.

About the speaker: Andrew Shaver is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. Prior to that, he completed postdoctoral research fellowships at Stanford University's Political Science Department and, separately, at Dartmouth College. Professor Shaver earned his PhD in Public Affairs (security studies) from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and is the founding director of the Political Violence Lab. His research focuses on the causes, consequences, and detection and measurement of political violence and social unrest globally. His work appears in the American Political Science Review, American Economic Review, Annual Review of Sociology, and Journal of Politics, amongst other outlets. Professor Shaver previously served in different foreign affairs/national security positions within the U.S. Government.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: For years, development agencies have expanded, perceived as complements to national security with support for their autonomous administration. Today, however, issues of humanitarian aid and development are seen as increasingly linked to concerns about national security and politics, while aid skepticism is growing. The fruits of this shift were made all too clear when, in July 2025, the United States under the second Donald Trump administration merged its Agency for International Development (USAID) into its Department of State, echoing a similar move unfolding in other western donor countries. The merger in the U.S. solidified a global trend following similar mergers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark and New Zealand. Indeed, around the world over the past thirty years, many of the world’s wealthiest countries have merged their aid and diplomacy agencies.  Although mergers are trending, are they helping countries advance their security goals? While the U.S. merger is still unfolding with many of its results yet-to-be seen, other global merger experiences offer stories that collectively indicate lessons to be learned about the rising trend to merge development and diplomacy. This presentation presents research from a review of the twenty-year history of global affairs mergers, drawing on interviews with leaders, civil servants, and activists from around the world. Considering rising Chinese development investments, ongoing fallout from COVID-19, crises in Syria, Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, climate change, and other global challenges, can development and diplomacy truly be integrated, or do these fields require distinction for their effective delivery? How might the U.S. consider the evidence from other aid-diplomacy mergers to inform its efforts to reform global affairs administration to address connected security and development challenges? This research explores the effects of recent mergers of aid and foreign policy agencies in the context of evolving global challenges and discusses the implications for foreign policy agendas moving forward.

About the speaker: Rachel A. George, PhD is a Lecturer in International Relations at Stanford University. She is also a Research Project Lead with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Research Fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. Previously, she served as Lecturing Fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke Kunshan University. She was also Director for Education Content at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London.

Her work focuses on foreign policy, democracy, Middle East politics, international law, women, peace, and security, AI and other emerging technologies, and the connections between development and international security. Her research has been published in a range of outlets, including in Foreign Policy, Just Security, The Washington Quarterly, World Politics Review, The National Interest, CFR.org, Human Rights Review, and as chapters in The Arab Gulf States and the West: Perception and Misperception, Opportunities and Perils, and The Routledge History of Human Rights. She has also served as a contributor for BBC News, CNN and Arise America TV News. She has worked on projects with the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate, Transparency International, The World Bank, Global Affairs Canada, Swedish International Development Agency, UN Development Program, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Packard Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.

She holds a BA in Politics from Princeton University, an MA in Middle East Studies from Harvard University, and PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The Untold Story of China’s Nuclear Weapon Development and Testing offers the most comprehensive account of China’s nuclear weapons development from 1955 to 1996. Hui Zhang examines the purpose and technical specifics of each nuclear test and provides new details about China’s pursuit of warhead miniaturization. Based on a number of new Chinese-language sources that have not previously been analyzed, this book reveals that China has the ability to produce smaller, lighter warheads than some have suggested, as well as more options for missiles that could carry a larger number of warheads.

The book also provides a new framework for understanding China’s efforts to modernize its nuclear arsenal and offers clues about the future of China’s nuclear program. As the international community watches China’s rapid nuclear expansion with concern—and, in particular, as the United States considers whether it will be confronting two peer nuclear-armed adversaries (Russia and China) in the future—this book is a significant contribution to the policy debate over a potential new three-way nuclear arms race.

About the speaker: Hui Zhang is a Senior Research Associate at the Project on Managing the Atom in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Hui Zhang is leading a research initiative on China's nuclear policies for the Project on Managing the Atom in the Kennedy School of Government. His research includes verification techniques of nuclear arms control, the control of fissile material, nuclear terrorism, China's nuclear policy, nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation, and policy of nuclear fuel cycle and reprocessing.

Before coming to the Kennedy School in September 1999, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University from 1997-1999. Hui Zhang received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics in Beijing in 1996.

Dr. Zhang is the author of several technical reports and book chapters, and dozens of articles in academic journals and the print media including Science and Global Security, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of Atomic Scientist, Disarmament Diplomacy, Disarmament Forum, the Nonproliferation Review, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Nuclear Materials Management, INESAP, and China Security. Dr. Zhang gives many oral presentations and talks in international conferences and organizations.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: At the end of the Cold War, donors sought to bolster environmental programs and exchanges to build confidence and trust among scientists and NGOs and to support civil society activity in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the United States and European Union channeled financial resources to civil society organizations to empower local civil society actors, which were seen as essential for consolidating democracy in many Eastern European countries and with integration into the European Union. This project revisits efforts during the Cold War and its aftermath to assess the political and environmental impact of linking scientific and environmental efforts to political cooperation and democracy building. In doing so, the project examines the political and environmental impact of these programs along with what lessons can be drawn for current efforts to leverage the environment and natural resources as a tool for peacebuilding.

About the speaker: Erika Weinthal is John O. Blackburn Distinguished Professor of Environmental Policy at Duke University. She is Chair of the Environmental Social Systems Division in the Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the Bass Society of Fellows. She was a prior Chair of Duke’s Academic Council. Weinthal is the President of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and an associate editor of its journal, Environment and Security. In 2017, she received the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015.”  Her most recent book is The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics (2023).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict across the world. In the coming decades, climate change, forced migration, and violent extremism will exacerbate such disputes in places that are ill equipped to handle them. Local Peace, International Builders examines the conditions under which international interventions mitigate communal violence. The book argues that civilian perceptions of impartiality, driven primarily by the legacies of colonialism, shape interveners’ ability to manage local disputes. Drawing on georeferenced data on the deployment of over 100,000 UN peacekeepers to fragile settings in the twenty-first century as well as a multimethod study of intervention in Mali – where widespread violence is managed by the international community – this book highlights a critical pathway through which interventions can maintain order in the international system.

About the speaker: William G. Nomikos is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he directs the Data-driven Analysis of Peace Project (DAPP) lab. His research looks at how domestic political considerations shape the conduct of international interventions in fragile settings. His first book, Local Peace, International Builders: How the UN Builds Peace from the Bottom Up, examines the conditions under which international actors successfully bring order, peace, and stability to fragile settings. His follow up work on this subject examines what peacekeepers can do to mitigate climate change-induced social conflict in weakly institutionalized settings.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: For almost four decades, the United States has tried to stop North Korea’s attempts to build nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. Based on more than 300 interviews with officials in Washington, Seoul and Beijing, as well as his own encounters with North Korean government officials over two decades, Joel Wit’s new book, Flashpoint: The Inside Story of How America Failed to Disarm North Korea, tells the up until now untold story of how six American presidents failed to stop Pyongyang. The book uncovers the policy debates, diplomatic gambits, military planning and covert operations that shaped the struggle to halt North Korea’s Manhattan project. He points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for that failure. As a result, North Korea’s nuclear armed missiles can now threaten American cities.

About the speaker: Joel S. Wit is a Distinguished Fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center and former director of the 38North program.  As a State Department official, he helped negotiate the 1994 U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework and was in charge of its implementation until he left government in 2002.  He held countless talks with North Korean officials over the next 15 years. Wit served as a Senior Fellow at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins from 2017-2018 and at the Henry L. Stimson Center until 2022. He is a co-author (with Robert Gallucci and Daniel Poneman) of Going Critical: The First North Korea Nuclear Crisis.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.