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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: The Women, Peace and Security sector advocates for the inclusion of designated gender experts in peace processes to improve outcomes for women. However, empirical support for the effectiveness of gender experts remains inconclusive. This talk explores whether gender experts serve as powerful advocates or powerless actors in efforts to advance gender-sensitive peace negotiation outcomes. Leveraging data capturing the gender and position of 2299 negotiation delegates across 116 comprehensive peace agreements finalized between 1990 and 2021, we find that gender experts increase the likelihood that peace agreements contain provisions for women. However, we find that gender experts primarily influence agreement outcomes by increasing women’s involvement in these processes. To examine this finding, we consider the impact of gender experts through the case of Northern Ireland, drawing from 42 interviews and archival work conducted between 2020 and 2023. We find that the systemic masculinized structure of peace negotiations hinders gender experts’ overall influence. Our mixed-methods findings explain how gender experts are simultaneously powerless and powerful. This study identifies the structural limitations of gender experts’ inclusion as the sole mechanism to advance women-specific provisions in peace processes, furthering our understanding of the gender dynamics of peace negotiations.

About the speaker: Elizabeth is a CISAC Postdoctoral Fellow and previously held fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, the US Institute of Peace, and Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Her research focuses on Women, Peace and Security, and explores women’s representation in peace negotiations. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of British Columbia. She previously worked as a Gender Specialist with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Kosovo and as a Gender Consultant for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Ghana.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The Baltic states keep surprising researchers — and that is why they are worth studying. They survived the Global Financial Crisis without devaluing their currencies and recovered quickly, even though many economists expected them to fail. Estonia did better than its neighbors during that crisis, and this could not be explained by economic factors alone — political trust turned out to matter. Now, Lithuania has overtaken Estonia in per capita income, which few predicted, and which remains to be explained. The Baltic puzzles are not just regional curiosities. They point to open questions in political economy and security studies.

My current research focuses on NATO burden-sharing. The standard story is that allies spend too little on defense because others will cover for them — but whether this actually happens, and how, is less clear than conventional wisdom suggests. I examine allied defense spending patterns using difference-in-differences methods, and separately run a survey experiment in Lithuania testing whether the visible presence of allied forces changes how citizens view allied commitment and how much they are willing to spend on defense. Lithuania is a crucial case for this question: Germany has committed to stationing a full permanent brigade there, creating a real-world experiment that most NATO countries never experience. Can European power substitute for — or does it complement — American security guarantees? The answer matters a great deal for how alliances actually hold together.

About the speaker: Vytautas Kuokštis is an associate professor at Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science (TSPMI), visiting Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) during the 2025–26 academic year. His research sits at the intersection of international political economy and security, with a focus on exchange rate regimes, labor market institutions, NATO burden-sharing, and the politics of financial technology (fintech).

At CISAC, Kuokštis is designing a survey experiment in Lithuania that examines how citizens respond to changes in NATO allies' defense commitments, and what this means for public preferences on national defense spending.

Kuokštis has published widely in journals including Political Science Research and Methods, European Journal of Political Economy, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Regulation & Governance, Policy & Politics, European Journal of Law and Economics, and European Security. Before coming to Stanford, Kuokštis held research positions at Harvard University (Fulbright Fellow), Yale University, and Hokkaido University. He received advanced quantitative methods training at Yale and the Essex Summer School, and organized the Baltic Studies Conference at Yale. At Vilnius University, he teaches courses on introductory economics, international political economy, and causal inference.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

This event is hosted by the Indo-Pacific Policy Lab.

About the event: In Retrench, Defend, Compete, Charles L. Glaser advances a thought-provoking strategy for securing vital US interests in the face of China's rise.

Many believe China's ascent will drive it to war with the United States. Yet this is far from inevitable; geography and nuclear weapons should ensure US security. The real danger, Glaser contends, lies in East Asia's territorial disputes, especially over Taiwan. To reduce the risk of war, Glaser makes a bold case for ending US security commitments to Taiwan and carefully calibrating its policies on protecting South China Sea maritime features. The United States should also strengthen its alliances with Japan and South Korea and eliminate unnecessarily provocative nuclear and conventional weapons policies. These measures, Glaser argues, would defuse China's biggest security concerns while preserving America's core strategic interests.

Fusing theoretical insights with policy analysis, Retrench, Defend, Compete lays out a distinctive and compelling approach for managing the world's most consequential geopolitical rivalry—before it's too late.

About the speaker: Charles L. Glaser is a Senior Fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. He was the Founding Director of the Elliott School's Institute for Security and Conflict Studies.

Glaser studies international relations theory and international security policy. His research focuses on defensive realism and deterrence theory, as well as U.S. security policy regarding China, nuclear weapons, and energy security.

His books include Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America’s Future Against a Rising China, Rational Theory of International Politics and Analyzing Strategic Nuclear Policy; and two co-edited volumes—Managing U.S. Nuclear Operations in the 21st Century and Crude Strategy.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: China's nuclear forces, policies, and, possibly, strategy seem to be changing dramatically, with official US estimates suggesting the country may reach peer status by the end of the decade. Policymakers and scholars alike want to understand why these changes are occurring, but determining what is changing must precede explaining why. China, like many other nuclear powers, veils its nuclear forces in secrecy. That veil, however, has been increasingly pierced by open-source intelligence. The discovery of more than three hundred ICBM silos under construction surprised many experts who long believed China was moving decisively toward mobile forces. This talk considers the relationship between models of China's decision-making and sources of information, both historical and contemporary. I compare the gaze of the intelligence community with that of scholars to create a framework for reconsidering our understanding of China's nuclear forces in the past and to suggest how open-source information could shape our understanding in the future. While focused on China's nuclear arsenal, the case illustrates a broader point: open-source analysis represents a distinct way of knowing about the world, but only when married to traditional research methods. Scholars working on other opaque policy challenges, especially in security, face similar empirical problems, and this talk offers a framework for thinking about how open-source research might contribute to their work.

About the speaker: Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is a Distinguished Scholar of Global Security at Middlebury College. He is also a member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control and the Frontier Red Team for Anthropic. From 2022 to 2025, Dr. Lewis was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board. He is the author of three books, The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China’s Search for Security in the Nuclear Age; Paper Tigers: China’s Nuclear Posture; and The 2020 Commission on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks on the United States.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Michael F. Joseph will present the theory and experimental chapter from his forthcoming book (Cambridge May, 2026), The Origins of Great Power Rivalries. In it, he advances a comprehensive rationalist theory of how great powers assess emerging threats; why enduring great power rivalries unfold through either delayed competition, or delayed peace; and how diplomacy functions when rising powers emerge on the scene. In an important departure from traditional realist theory, Joseph argues that countries are motivated by distinct principles - normative values that shape foreign policy beyond simple security concerns. He then integrates these complex motives into a formal model of great power rivalry to explain how rational states draw qualitative inferences about rivals' intentions by examining the historical context of their demands, not just military capabilities. Empirically, he shows that his predictions about the instances and timing of competition better fit great power rivalry cases than leading rationalist and psychological alternatives via a medium-n analysis of great power rivalries since 1850. He illuminates British reactions to Stalin at the beginning of the Cold War via an in depth historical analysis. He animates a theoretically sophisticated defense of America's approach to China in the post-Cold War era with 100s of Washington-insider interviews and a novel analysis of recently declassified estimates. He demonstrates that real life intelligence analysts integrate diplomacy, historical context and an appreciation of strategic incentives as his theory expects, by embedding a survey experiment into an intelligence simulation given to 100s of real-life intelligence analysts and national security professionals from the CIA, State Department, DOD and elsewhere. Michael is known for "hot takes," and all information he presents is his personal opinion and does not reflect the position of any government and should not be taken seriously be anyone.

About the speaker: Michael F. Joseph is an Assistant Professor at UCSD. He harnesses a decade of foreign policy experience and sophisticated research skills to resolve modern national security problems of great power competition, and technology in the intelligence community. His research was recognized with APSA's 2021 Formal Theory Section Award, the 2023 Palmer Prize, and a $450,000 NSF Grant for National Security Preparedness, among other accolades. His book is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. His articles are published or forthcoming in the APSR (x3), JOP (x2), IO, and other journals. Policy insights from this research have attracted policy-maker attention in DC, and appear in the Washington Post, War on the Rocks, and other leading outlets.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: This project presents the concept of wartime access—decisions by states to let other states fight wars from inside their borders—and establishes its centrality to U.S. power projection. Although permissive wartime access has been a defining feature of the post-1945 world, states do not always let the United States military in. States sometimes restrict access sharply or deny it altogether. This project asks, why do states sometimes grant, sometimes restrict, and sometimes deny wartime access? It argues that the general trend of permission is attributable to states’ expectations that they will derive security benefits from the United States in exchange for granting access, and that the United States will protect them from retaliation by the target and help them manage any spillover from the war. While security factors tend to point states towards granting access, states tend to deny or heavily restrict access when the domestic political costs of open alignment with the United States are prohibitively high. The study develops a new dataset of 85 partner access decisions across eleven U.S.-led wars since 1945 and conducts paired comparisons of wartime access decisions within each war. The project concludes with a discussion of policy implications, with particular attention to wartime access in the context of a hypothetical U.S. effort to defend Taiwan.

About the speaker: Rachel Metz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University. Metz’s research and teaching focus on international security, security assistance and security cooperation, military effectiveness, nuclear strategy, and methods for studying military operations. Her book project examines the United States’ approach to building militaries in partner states, and her research has been published in International Organization, International Security, Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, H-Diplo, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, The National Interest, and The Washington Post, among other outlets.

Metz received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a member of the Security Studies Program. Her work has received funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation, Defense Security Cooperation University, and the Carnegie Corporation. Previously, Metz was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, an adjunct researcher for the RAND Corporation, and a Eurasia Group Fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. Metz is a research affiliate at MIT.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The threat of illicit nuclear and other radioactive materials poses a risk to international security. The analysis of post-Soviet disintegration cases of illicit trafficking suggests that those incidents were mostly opportunistic thefts resulting from a weakened security system and/or lack of strict oversight. With the growing threat of global terrorism and the emergence of various terrorist networks across the world, however, the focus has shifted to the probability of a terrorist outfit gaining access to these deadly weapons and materials, especially in South Asia. In that regard, the study identifies the role of a nuclear security regime in mitigating the risks arising from the threat of illicit trafficking incidents. It identifies a distinct nuclear security regime under the regime theory and seeks its application in a regional framework in the South Asian context. It assesses the nuclear security norms and practices of India and Pakistan and proposes a template of a regional cooperative mechanism that can be built upon the principles, norms, rules, and procedures of the nuclear security regime. The template is tailored according to the regional environment in South Asia and it has practical features that range from some ideal approaches to more realistic measures. In that regard, the proposed nuclear security regime seeks to de-securitize the nuclear security debate, which in turn, will facilitate framing nuclear security cooperation as a mutual interest and nuclear security risks as common threats even among the competitive states.

About the speaker: Sitara Noor is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University, California. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science in July 2025 from University of Vienna. Her research interests include nuclear security, non-proliferation, and strategic stability, with a particular focus on South Asia. She was formerly a Managing the Atom Fellow at Belfer Center from 2022 to 2024. In 2023, she was a Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome. She also held the position of Research Fellow at VCDNP in Vienna, Austria, during 2016-2017. Earlier in her career, she worked as an International Relations Analyst at Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority (2008 to 2015).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: A cross-national shift toward lower-yield nuclear weapons has generated renewed interest in crisis dynamics near the nuclear threshold. Lower-yield nuclear weapons alter nuclear nonuse mechanisms of credibility, costliness, and normative inhibitions. In comparison to higher-yield, city-destroying nuclear weapons, the lower-yield weapons offer a less costly and therefore more credible deterrent. But by reducing costliness, they also undercut norms grounded in the devastating effects of nuclear weapons. With Kristyn Karl and Matthew Wells, I conducted nationally representative survey experiments in India and Pakistan, and in the United States and United Kingdom, to investigate how citizens consider low-yield nuclear weapons use in an escalating crisis. We offered low-yield nuclear weapons as one of three possible retaliatory strike options in different crisis scenarios, some of which involved a low-yield nuclear attack by the adversary, and we varied the vividness of information we provided about the unique effects of a nuclear explosion. We also examined how beliefs about retribution and feelings toward citizens in the rival country affect willingness to use nuclear weapons. Across the four national samples, we found evidence of both nuclear restraint and permissiveness. In three of the four countries, respondents were more willing to use nuclear weapons in retaliation if the adversary first crossed the nuclear threshold by conducting a low-yield nuclear strike. In all four samples, larger proportions of respondents preferred lower-yield to higher-yield nuclear retaliation. These and other main findings, which I will present for each of the two pairs of survey experiments, complicate theoretical understandings of the conventional-nuclear threshold and have broad implications for both deterrence mechanisms and nuclear non-use norms.

About the speaker: Lisa Langdon Koch is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, specializing in international relations. She is the author of Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press, 2023), which won the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award. She has published numerous articles on topics like nuclear proliferation and foreign policy. Her research has been funded by the Stanton Foundation Nuclear Security Grant Program and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In 2023, Koch received the Glenn R. Huntoon Award for Superior Teaching. She is a 2000 Harry S. Truman Scholar.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. Their descendants endowed the annual lecture series at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in order to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and to increase support for informed international cooperation.

The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking; a broad, practical grasp of a given field; and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges.

About the event: Arms racing and future strategic stability assessments are largely focused on moving from the Cold War paradigm of two nuclear powers – the US and Russia, to the likely new reality of three nuclear peers – the US, Russia, and China.  However, there are technologies being matured that may be more important drivers of the new arms race than the increase in the number of Chinese nuclear weapon systems.  Emerging capabilities include adversary development of long-life and loitering delivery platforms, the US investment in Golden Dome and international improvements in integrated air and missile defense, the rapid advancement of AI and autonomous systems, and the potential resumption of nuclear testing.  These developments are as disruptive as the creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-powered submarines in the 1950s and have the potential to drastically change the nuclear weapons landscape.  This talk will discuss the potential impact of these emerging technologies.

About the speaker: Jill Hruby served as the Under Secretary for Nuclear Security at the Department of Energy from 2021 to 2025. Prior to that, Hruby had a 34-year career at Sandia National Laboratories, retiring as the Director in 2017. Hruby was the inaugural Sam Nunn Distinguished Fellow at NTI. Currently, Hruby is on boards at Lawrence Livermore and the Atomic Weapon Establishment. She is a member of the Anthropic National Security Advisory Committee, the National Academy Committee for International Security and Arms Control, among other advisory roles. This quarter, she is the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.