About the event: Modern survey experiments indicate that in the event of a limited nuclear strike, the public in the targeted country, including a great democracy, would demand a decisive response. The implications for crisis stability are dire. Just at the moment when democratic decision makers would struggle to formulate a proportional response, they would also have to contend with an enraged populace shouting for vengeance. Public opinion as recently characterized is anathema to sound crisis management. The same mass sentiment that bolstered democratic resolve in the triumphal years after the Cold War now abandons presidents in the age of nuclear multipolarity to foredoomed strategies that overplay their hand. This, however, is not the whole story. Public opinion in real life also prevents leaders from throwing it all away or allowing crises to slip out of control. The Missiles of October in 1962 threatened international peace under different geopolitical circumstances, but the role of public opinion then has lessons for today. What might be called the Robert McNamara-Brent Scowcroft school still reigns. Rather than preclude crisis management, public opinion on net enables it: amplifying popular demand for peace and motivating extraordinary leader performance to preserve it.

About the speaker: Dr. Damon Coletta served as the endowed Scowcroft Professor of Political Science (2020-2021) at the United States Air Force Academy and director of the department’s Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies (2022-2023).  Damon edits the peer-reviewed e-journal, Space & Defense (2012-2024) and serves as social sciences liaison to USAFA’s nationally recognized Nuclear Weapons & Strategy minor program.  He completed a book on science & technology policy and international security, Courting Science: Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century (Stanford, 2016), and coedited NATO’s Return to Europe (Georgetown, 2017).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the event: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been invoked over one hundred times since its formal endorsement by the UN General Assembly in 2005. Although R2P was designed to protect populations around the world from mass atrocity, it is selectively applied to societies outside of the North. Cases of inaction are also observed over atrocities in the South that would otherwise qualify for intervention by UN standards. Why does the international community intervene in some cases and not others? I argue that R2P betrays a racialized bias whereby the legal principle of sovereignty is transformed into a conditional privilege withheld from most non-European countries all else equal. Debates over a peoples’ capacity for self-rule are historically framed or even justified by racism. Since R2P restores a similar debate wherein state sovereignty becomes contingent, it can affirm prevailing beliefs about race and capacity for self-governance as a means to political ends. I examine R2P cross-nationally by matching countries on characteristics that likely drive intervention. Using UN resolutions and original data on mass atrocity events, I measure the relationship between country racial majority and the decision to intervene. The results suggest that R2P is disproportionately invoked over societies racialized as non-white. To address variation in R2P invocation over countries in the South, I examine a set of cases qualitatively and show that inaction by the international community is racial as it is strategic. A theory of race deepens understanding of the contradictory values that cohere to shape international law and intervention. 

About the speaker: Bianca Freeman is a 2024-2026 UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD from UC San Diego Political Science in the summer of 2024. Bianca’s research focuses on the politics of race and racism in international law. In her dissertation and book project, she examines norms and agreements between states as legal outcomes of racial hierarchy in world politics. Bianca has published or has work forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science, Security Studies, International Studies Review, International Politics, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. 

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About the event: Questions about the likelihood of conflict between the United States and China have dominated international policy discussion for years. But the leading theory of power transitions between a declining hegemon and a rising rival is based exclusively on European examples, such as the Peloponnesian War, as well as the rise of Germany under Bismarck and the Anglo-German rivalry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What lessons does East Asian history offer, for both the power transitions debate and the future of U.S.-China relations?
Examining the rise and fall of East Asian powers over 1,500 years, we point out that East Asia historically has functioned very differently than did Europe; and even today the region has dynamics that are not leading to balancing or competitive behavior. In fact, the East Asian experience underscores domestic risks and constraints on great powers, not relative rise and decline in international competition. The threat of a US-China war from power transition is lower than often recognized, and the East Asian region is more stable than normally recognized.

About the speaker: Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods. Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

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About the Event: Kim Jong Un’s recent remarks highlighting the goal of exponentially increasing North Korea’s nuclear arsenal underscore the regime’s aggressive pursuit of advanced nuclear capabilities. This growing threat poses a critical concern for global security, particularly amid escalating geopolitical tensions and the burgeoning military cooperation between Russia and North Korea. This study utilizes an integrated methodology, combining satellite imagery, geological analysis, and technical assessments, to evaluate North Korea’s fissile material production capacity and strategic resources availability necessary to fulfill its nuclear ambitions. By examining the evolving state of North Korea's plutonium production and uranium enrichment capacities, as well as its efficiency of mining operations and critical metal reserves, this research provides key insights into the country’s potential for sustained nuclear development, highlighting how control over strategic resources remains a pivotal factor in North Korea’s pursuit of military development and geopolitical leverage.

About the Speaker: Sulgiye Park is a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where she specializes in North Korea and China’s nuclear fuel pathway. She received her Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Stanford University, focusing on nuclear materials in extreme environments. She later worked at the Stanford Institute of Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), fabricating nanodiamonds for technological applications, which granted her a Jamieson Award. As a Stanton and MacArthur Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Dr. Park focused on the critical nexus between natural resource management, strategic supply chains, and nuclear security. Her work highlighted the foundational role of geologic resources in enabling nuclear ambitions, including geologic analyses of North Korea’s uranium and critical metal reserves. She utilized open-source intelligence to monitor nuclear activities, providing insights into nonproliferation challenges. Dr. Park also examined regulatory frameworks for U.S. nuclear waste management and studied rare-earth metal production and critical metal supply chain vulnerabilities, emphasizing their strategic importance for national security and technological innovation.

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Limited number of lunches available for registered guests until 12:30pm on day of event.

About the Event: When and how do nationalist protests at home affect crisis bargaining at the international level? Though plausible, the overall effect and the scope conditions for nationalist protests to influence international crisis bargaining remain unspecified, particularly due to two uncertainties: the host government, which is uncertain whether a protest will escalate into an anti-government mobilization, and the foreign government, which is uncertain whether the observed protest constitutes a genuinely credible constraint or just a strategic misrepresentation of the host government’s preference over the disputed issue. The lack of ex-ante theoretical expectations has led to the proliferation of ad hoc ex-post justifications for nationalist protests’ determinant or indeterminate roles during international crises. Using a two-step modeling approach, this paper shows that the threat to the host government posed by the nationalist protests is a prerequisite for them to exert influence on international crisis bargaining. Moreover, the relationship between the threats to the host government from nationalist protests and the likelihood of bargaining failure is non-monotonic - that is, first decreasing and then increasing in the magnitude of the threat. This result is tested with an in-depth case study of the (in)effective signaling with the 2014 anti-China protest in Vietnam.

About the Speaker: Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods.

More broadly, Xinru’s research encompasses three main objectives: Substantively, she aims to better theorize and enhance cross-country perspectives on critical phenomena such as nationalism and its impact on international security; Methodologically, she strives to improve measurement and causal inference based on careful methodologies, including formal modeling and computational methods; Empirically, she challenges prevailing assumptions that inflate the perceived risk of militarized conflicts in East Asia, by providing original data and analysis rooted in local knowledge and regional perceptions.

Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Limited number of lunches available for registered guests until 12:30pm on day of event.

About the Event: In response to Hamas’s deadly attack against Israel and its citizens on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a significant ground invasion into Gaza in self-defense, aimed at eliminating Hamas’s military capabilities and removing it from political power. Israel’s military operations have generated extensive commentary about its compliance with international humanitarian law, particularly concerning the jus in bello principles of distinction and proportionality. However, there has been much less scrutiny of Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality, a well-established principle under international law that considers the overall scope of a state’s use of force and dictates that a war’s means must not be excessive in relation to its aims. Our paper assesses Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality. After providing an overview of the jus ad bellum proportionality principle, we rely on novel radar satellite imagery analysis to document the widespread destruction that has resulted from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Based on these data, we argue that Israel’s use of force is excessive, and that the war Israel is currently waging in Gaza is not in compliance with the principle of jus ad bellum proportionality.

About the Speakers:

Bailey Ulbricht is the founding Executive Director at the Stanford Humanitarian Program, where she works on legal research projects aimed at reducing harm in conflict settings and other insecure environments. She has a particular interest in how technology exacerbates harms, or conversely, how it can be used to document or reduce harms. Before coming to Stanford, she founded the humanitarian ed-tech nonprofit Paper-Airplanes, was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Turkey, and was a humanitarian worker with refugee communities on the Turkish-Syrian border. Bailey has two masters' degrees in Islamic Law and Islamic Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her B.A. in International Relations magna cum laude from Carleton College and her J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Allen S. Weiner, Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, is an international legal scholar who focuses primarily on international security and international conflict resolution. He also studies the challenges of online misinformation and disinformation. Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, the Stanford Humanitarian Program, and the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.  His scholarship is deeply informed by practice; he served as an international lawyer in the U.S. State Department for more than a decade before joining the Stanford faculty.  He earned his A.B. at Harvard and his J.D. at Stanford.

Jamon Van Den Hoek is an Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University where he directs the Conflict Ecology lab. Jamon's research focuses on using satellite and geospatial data to gauge the direct and indirect consequences of armed conflict on vulnerable people and landscapes. Before coming to Oregon State, Jamon was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Corey Scher is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Corey studies physical impacts of war and conflict using Earth observation data, geostatistics, and theory from the geosciences. His mapping of damage to urban areas in geographies including Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon has been featured in journalistic and humanitarian publications worldwide. He holds a master's degree in geology from the City College of New York and a bachelor's degree in geology from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Limited number of lunches available for registered guests until 12:30pm on day of event.

About the event: A rigorous understanding of the past provides powerful insights and tools that enable better choices in the present. This is especially true for the extraordinarily consequential worlds of statecraft and strategy. This book proposes ways to apply historical knowledge to understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us.

It may seem obvious that we should employ history to improve decision-making, but it is rarely done. History is more often misused, deployed ineffectively, or exploited for problematic and even nefarious purposes. Our times favor other ways of knowing the world over historical thinking. Sadly, historians rarely engage decision-makers, and decision-makers seldom consult historians. This is unfortunate, as good historical work captures, perhaps better than any other discipline, the challenges and complexities the decision-maker faces. The academic discipline of history has not helped: in recent years it has de-emphasized the history of statecraft, strategy, and policy in favor of other subjects.

How can history be better understood and used more effectively? The book explains and deploys two key interconnected concepts: first, a historical sensibility, which is the foundation for the second, the act of thinking historically. Thinking Historically demonstrates how a historical sensibility, married to thinking historically, can generate better insights about the world while improving how we make critical choices facing a complex, uncertain future.

About the speaker: Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Previously, he was the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. From 2005 until 2010, he directed The American Assembly’s multiyear, national initiative, The Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions. He is the founding Chair of the Board of Editors for the Texas National Security Journal. Gavin’s writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971; Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age ; and Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (Brookings Institution Press), which was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His IISS-Adelphi book, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era in 2024. Thinking Historically – A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, will be published by Yale University Press, 2025.

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About the Event: In an international security environment marked by the heightened risk of nuclear weapons use and the weakening of the global nuclear order, reviving arms control between the two largest nuclear weapon States—the United States and Russia—is imperative. But under what circumstances might they return to the negotiating table? One school of thought holds that it may take another event like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to (re)awaken American and Russian leaders to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the need for greater restraint. Yet this claim, and the interpretation of Cold War history on which it rests, have not been subject to rigorous analysis in existing work. Using insights from cognitive psychology on the phenomenon of “wakeup calls,” I fill this gap by testing prevailing assumptions about the role of nuclear crises in driving arms control and assessing what the results mean for theory and practice. I show that these assumptions are not supported empirically and argue that future nuclear crises could have adverse effects on arms control depending on the priors of the leaders in office. These results challenge normative claims promoted in the scholarship on nuclear learning about the kinds of lessons nuclear crises teach and the influence of these events on elite inferential learning. In so doing, they demonstrate why electing leaders into office who have already learned the value of arms control is more likely to precipitate a return to the negotiating table than relying on external events to teach them.

About the Speaker: Sarah Bidgood is a postdoctoral fellow in technology and international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), based in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on nuclear diplomacy and military innovation in the United States, Russian Federation, and beyond. From 2023-2024, Sarah was a Stanton nuclear security fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program. Prior to this, she served as director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, where she remains a non-resident scholar. Sarah’s work has been published as single and co-authored articles in journals such as International Security, Cold War History, and The Nonproliferation Review, as well as outlets including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Arms Control Today, and War on the Rocks. She is a coauthor of Death Dust: The Rise, Decline, and Future of Radiological Weapons Programs, which was published by Stanford University Press in December 2023. Sarah received her PhD in Defence Studies from King's College London and holds an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in Russian.

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About the Event: It has long been a presumption that the president enjoys vast powers with respect to decisions to intervene with military force abroad: the United States has an “imperial presidency”. This book challenges this conventional wisdom by arguing that this is more illusion than reality. Presidents have to operate in the shadow of Congress: they realize that if they act absent sufficient political cover from lawmakers, they leave themselves highly exposed should the use of force end poorly. Introducing a new measure of congressional sentiment toward the use of force, this book shows that while presidents frequently use force without formal approval from Congress, they are virtually always doing so pursuant to Congress’s informal support and urging. Moreover, it demonstrates that presidents are actually unwilling to undertake the largest interventions (full-scale war) absent the formal imprimatur of the legislator. Lastly, it shows that allies and adversaries pay close attention to domestic constraints on the president, yielding implications for deterrence and alliance reassurance. While in reality substantially constrained politically by Congress, presidents intentionally project a facade of imperialism in order to caution adversaries and hearten allies.

About the Speaker: Before coming to CISAC, Patrick was a Research Fellow with the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California San Diego in May 2023, and his J.D. at the UCLA School of Law in 2017. For the summer of 2022, Patrick was a Summer Associate with the RAND Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy, and for the 2020-2021 academic year he was a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center.

Patrick’s research and teaching interests include congressional-executive relations in U.S. foreign policy, constitutional law, deterrence theory, and the U.S.-China relationship. He is especially interested in the influence of Congress in use of military force decisions, as well as the role of legal constraints in international security.

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Reception to follow from 5:00pm - 6:30pm in the lobby in front of the William J. Perry Conference Room

About the event: New Cold Wars—the latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon David E. Sanger—is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations with two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace—so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. Now the three powers are engaged in a high-stakes struggle for military, economic, political, and technological supremacy, with nations around the world pressured to take sides. Yet all three are discovering that they are maneuvering for influence in a far more turbulent world than they imagined. Based on a remarkable array of interviews with top officials from five presidential administrations, U.S. intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and tech companies, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era’s critical questions. New Cold Wars is a remarkable first-draft history chronicling America’s return to superpower conflict, the choices that lie ahead, and what is at stake for the United States and the world.

About the speaker: David E. Sanger is national security correspondent for the New York Times and bestselling author of The Inheritance and Confront and Conceal. He has been a member of three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, including in 2017 for international reporting. A regular contributor to CNN, he also teaches national security policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.