About the event: The Middle East experiences plenty of religiously-motivated violence, but this violence is initiated by non-state actors, such as terror groups, secessionist movements, and national liberation movements. States have bigger fish to fry. They may intervene in ongoing conflicts between religiously-motivated organizations or employ these organizations as proxies. But whether they initiate or join wars, they do not do so for religious reasons. Hassner seeks to explain this pattern by contrasting state interests with non-state interests. He does so by investigating major Middle East wars in contrast to civil wars and insurgencies. Hassner also seeks to show that the security policy of religiously-motivated non-state actors undergoes a process of moderation when they assume the responsibilities of statehood. Their religious identities do not disappear, but their religious ambitions weaken, are supplemented by nationalist and secular ideological concerns, and their wars take on new motivations and goals. The “taming” of religion by states does not end wars but it changes their fundamental character.

About the speaker: Ron Hassner teaches international conflict and religion. His research explores the role of ideas, practices and symbols in international security with particular attention to the relationship between religion and violence. His published work focuses on territorial disputes, religion in the military, conflicts over holy places, the pervasive role of religion on the modern battlefield, and military intelligence. He is the editor of the Cornell University Press book series "Religion and Conflict" and the editor-in-chief of the journal Security Studies.

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About the event: How would the leader of a nuclear-armed state respond if they believed themselves to be the target of a decapitation strike? This project examines how fears of leadership targeting shape policy choices between pre-delegation and the automation of launch authority. Zhang argues that choices over command-and-control design are driven by three forces: a tradeoff between revenge and deterrence, domestic politics, and national risk cultures. These factors jointly determine whether a state gravitates toward pre-delegation or automation. Empirically, he analyzes the Soviet Perimeter system, known in the West as the “Dead Hand,” developed between 1974 and 1985 when Soviet leaders feared that the United States was acquiring the capability and the doctrine to eliminate them in a decapitation strike. Zhang then compares this to U.S. efforts to cope with similar fears of decapitation, such as the Emergency Rocket Communications System (ERCS), an American analogue to Perimeter, and the emphasis on Continuity of Government (COG) procedures. These case studies shed light on how states respond to the threat of nuclear decapitation, when they choose pre-delegation or automation as solutions, and how those choices shape the stability or volatility of nuclear deterrence. More broadly, the project contributes to research on the determinants of nuclear command-and-control design, its implications for strategic stability, and the broader debate over automation versus human-in-the-loop design.

About the speaker: X Zhang is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Zhang received a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and their research examines the political psychology of international security, with a focus on interstate conflict, public opinion, and the domestic foundations of foreign policy. Zhang is also a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center.

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The Liautaud Fellowship, made possible by the generosity of the Liautaud family, brings former heads of state, senior policymakers, and other eminent experts to Stanford, with the goal of promoting meaningful dialogue on the challenges world leaders face in crafting policy solutions to pressing global problems.

About the event: Lithuania is a country with a millennia-long history and a very strongly developed sense of independence and statehood. Ever since Lithuania declared its independence in 1990, a country of just 2.8 million has stood in support of freedom fighters everywhere. When Russia started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Lithuania became a model of support, sending equipment, taking in thousands of refugees, and standing with Ukraine on the diplomatic front. It is no secret that if Putin were to shift his march of aggression westward, the Baltic states, and among them Lithuania, could become a potential target. For realists in this world, it is a natural flow of history: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. But it is clear that Lithuania is not preparing for demise; it shows that a small country can wield power that is not calculated in numbers of people, square kilometres of territory, or military divisions. In this lecture, Gabrielius Landsbergis will explore what gives a small country its power.

About the speaker: Gabrielius Landsbergis, formerly the minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Lithuania, is the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at FSI, effective September 15, 2025.

As a Liautaud Fellow, Landsbergis will be deeply enmeshed in the daily intellectual life of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, (FSI), with simultaneous affiliations with The Europe Center (TEC), and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

Prior to his appointment at Stanford, Landsbergis served as the minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Lithuania. Previously, he was the chairman of the Homeland Union Party while concurrently a member of the Lithuanian Parliament. Before assuming these roles, Landsbergis was also a member of the European Parliament and began his career as a diplomat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.

Landsbergis’ tenure serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs was defined by a value-based approach to foreign policy. During his time in office, he cemented deepening transatlantic relations, sustained support for Ukraine, and the elevation of global partnerships as strategic pillars of Lithuania’s foreign policy.

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About the event: America’s Founding Fathers feared that a standing army would be a permanent political danger, yet the US military has in the 250 years since become a bulwark of democracy. Kori Schake explains why in this compelling history of civil-military relations from independence to the challenges of the present.

The book begins with General George Washington’s vital foundational example of subordination to elected leaders during the Revolutionary War. Schake recounts numerous instances in the following century when charismatic military leaders tried to challenge political leaders and explains the emergence of restrictions on uses of the military for domestic law enforcement. She explores the crucial struggle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, when Ulysses Grant had to choose whether to obey the commander in chief or the law—and chose to obey the law. And she shows how the professionalization of the military in the 20th century inculcated norms of civilian control.

The US military is historically anomalous for maintaining its strength and popularity while never becoming a threat to democracy. Schake concludes by asking if its admirable record can be sustained when the public is pulling the military into the political divisions of our time.

About the speaker: Kori Schake leads the foreign and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Safe Passage: the Transition from British to American Hegemony, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, War on the Rocks, and Bloomberg.

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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 their effectiveness remains inconclusive. This talk questions whether gender experts are influential or ineffective advocates for women. While their explicit commitment to gendered issues may benefit women, the overt femininity of the role may disadvantage their capacity in overtly masculine security spaces. Leveraging an original dataset capturing the role of 2299 delegates across 116 comprehensive peace agreements finalized between 1990 and 2021, we find that gender experts increase the likelihood that agreements contain provisions for women. However, interviews and archival analysis suggest that the systemic structure of peace negotiations constrains gender experts’ overall influence. Consequently, we explain how gender experts are simultaneously powerful and powerless. Findings capture gender experts’ limitations, caution against policy that makes gender experts solely responsible for gendered considerations in peace processes, and contribute to understanding gendered power dynamics in negotiations more broadly.

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, Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Her research focuses on Women, Peace and Security, and explores power dynamics in peace negotiations. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and she previously worked as a Gender Specialist with the UN in Kosovo and as a Gender Consultant for USAID in Ghana.

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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.

Kuokštis’ 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. He examines allied defense spending patterns using difference-in-differences methods, and separately runs 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 CISAC during 2025–26. His research spans international political economy and security, focusing on exchange rate regimes, labor market institutions, NATO burden-sharing, and fintech regulation. At CISAC, he is designing a survey experiment examining how changes in NATO allies' defense commitments shape Lithuanian public preferences on defense spending. He has published in journals including Political Science Research and Methods, European Journal of Political Economy, and JCMS. He previously held research positions at Harvard (Fulbright), Yale, and Hokkaido University.

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

In-person registration is at full capacity and now closed. Online registration is still available.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.