About the Event: How do U.S. policy-makers develop national security strategy in the face of newly emerging dangers?  And why are many of these strategies deemed ineffective?  In my book project, Seeking Security: Threat Perception and Policy-Making in a Dangerous World, I examine the way in which the cognitive processes associated with threat perception influence policy-makers’ preferences for specific, but sometimes incompatible, national security policy measures.  My theory linking threat perception to policy preferences is grounded in an original meta-analysis of the neuroscientific literature on human threat perception, as well as in extensive evidence from biology and cognitive science on threat learning and threat response.  In this talk, I will discuss the theory alongside data from two chapters covering the design of NSC-68 and its successor national security strategies during the early Cold War.  I combine an original corpus of digitized archival documents and new tools from natural language processing to show that much of the individual-level variation in preferences for how best to counter Communism can be traced back to differences in beliefs about the kind(s) of threat that Communism posed.
 
About the Speaker: Marika Landau-Wells is an Assistant Professor in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.  She received a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the SaxeLab.  For the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Landau-Wells was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Her research is broadly concerned with the effects of cognitive processes - including perception, attention, learning, and memory - on political behavior and foreign policy decision-making.

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About the Event: How does artificial intelligence shift power in international security? A burgeoning literature in international politics and security studies has documented its effects on the balance of power, strategic stability, and the future of warfare. In this work, power is largely material, if not kinetic, and the specifics of technologies are treated mostly as peripheral. By recovering classical International Relations theory in the form of Hans Morgenthau’s work on the role of scientific rationalism in guiding political decision-making and combining it with insights from Science and Technologies Studies, this paper investigates the role of so-called intelligent technologies, in particular machine learning, in the knowledge production for conflict prevention. Such technologies are met with enthusiasm in the policy sphere, prompting a wide range of actors in the field of conflict prevention to integrate them into their analyses. Leveraging original elite interviews with conflict modelers, practitioners, and policymakers, this paper tentatively argues the rush towards integrating AI and ML is not primarily about improving predictive analytics in terms of scale, speed, and cost, but about creating options and justifications for (in)action. Due to the internal opacity (‘black-boxing’) of machine learning, policymakers can delegate the responsibility of the analysis from the human to the machine, thus transforming problems of politics and power into problems of process and technology. This research has implications for appreciating the internal mechanisms and characteristics of emerging technologies, as well as their  underlying rationalities, to understand how they shape actors’ options for decision-making.
 
About the Speaker: Johanna Rodehau-Noack is an International Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her current work investigates the role of (emerging) technologies in conflict prevention and anticipation, and in particular how the use and promise of artificial intelligence shapes conceptions of armed conflict. Previously, she was a Global Innovation Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House. She received her doctorate in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She also holds an MA in Political Science and a BA in International Development from the University of Vienna, Austria.

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About the Event: One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders’ Game sheds light on this enduring puzzle, arguing that the primary constraints on decisions about war and peace come from elites, not the public. Elizabeth Saunders focuses on three groups of elites—presidential advisers, legislators, and military officials—to show how the dynamics of this insiders’ game are key to understanding the use of force in American foreign policy. She explores how elite preferences differ from those of ordinary voters, and how leaders must bargain with elites to secure their support for war. Saunders provides insights into why leaders start and prolong conflicts the public does not want, but also demonstrates how elites can force leaders to change course and end wars. Tracing presidential decisions about the use of force from the Cold War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saunders reveals how the elite politics of war are a central feature of democracy. The Insiders’ Game shifts the focus of democratic accountability from the voting booth to the halls of power. 

The Insiders' Game by Elizabeth N. Saunders: 30% off with code P325 at press.princeton.edu

About the Speaker: Elizabeth N. Saunders is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  Her research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics of international security and U.S. foreign policy.  She is the author of Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2011) and The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press, 2024). She holds an A.B. in physics and astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard College; an M.Phil. in international relations from the University of Cambridge; and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

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This event has reached capacity. Please email Kate Ter Wee at katecole@stanford.edu or register to attend online using the link above. 

About the Event: Russia’s war on Ukraine, Iran’s Proxy Wars in the Middle East as well as the support Russia and Iran receive from each other, China, and other states such as North Korea, have clarified the nature of geopolitical competition. It is important to understand both the history of how crucial challenges to international security developed and of the ideology, emotions and aspirations that drive the axis of aggressors if we are to prevent conflicts from cascading further and restore peace. 

Lunch to be provided for registered attendees.

About the Speaker:  LTG (ret.) H. R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Upon graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1984, McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years. He retired as a Lieutenant General in June 2018 after serving as the 25th assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. He holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. McMaster is the host of Battlegrounds: International Perspectives on Crucial Challenges and Opportunities and is a regular on Goodfellows. He is a Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University.

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About the Event: When a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure and urging reform. Yet many of the most egregious violations appear to go unpunished. In many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but also incites a backlash, provoking resistance and worsening human rights practices. The Geopolitics of Shaming presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.

Drawing on a wide range of evidence—from large-scale cross-national data to original survey experiments and detailed case studies—Rochelle Terman shows how human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relationships. Arguing that preexisting geopolitical relationships condition both the causes and consequences of shaming in world politics, she shows how adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response, while friends and allies are the most effective shamers but can be reluctant to impose meaningful sanctions.

Upending conventional wisdom on the role of norms in world affairs, The Geopolitics of Shaming demonstrates that politicization is integral to—not a corruption of—the success of the global human rights project.

About the Speaker: Rochelle Terman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She specializes in international relations, with an emphasis on international norms, human rights, and the Muslim world. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press.

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About the Event: Naming the Russo-Ukraine War has been controversial since 2014.  Why did Russian diplomats deploy the term “civil war” as a preferred descriptor until 2022 — and why did Ukrainians insist that the phrase be taboo?  We assess four complementary logics for the use of the “civil war” descriptor by Russian diplomats before Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022.  First, calling the war “civil” implies military non-involvement by Russia.  Second, explanations putting causal weight on Ukrainian domestic variables allow Russia to blame the violence on Western intervention (e.g., the CIA coup, color revolutions, NATO expansion, etc.) or well-rehearsed tropes about Ukraine’s unfitness as a state (e.g., a “fascist coup,” east-west cleavages in the pre-2014 Ukrainian state, stereotypes of Ukraine as a corrupt/“weak”/non-democratic polity, etc.).  Third, the narrative accesses legal precedents, especially Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and self determination as justifications authorizing Russia’s use of force. Fourth, favored internationalist mechanisms developed for settling civil wars privilege the United Nations Security Council, the OSCE, and other consensus forums, thus redirecting energy to forums where Russians enjoy a veto.  This not only functionally de-linked Crimea (“peaceful self-determination”) from the war in the Donbas (“violent and tragic, requiring costly/sustained collective action…”), but also reified Russia as a great power with UNSC veto.

About the Speaker: Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015), Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021), and Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before The Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge, 2023, with Dominique Arel).  He received his PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2009.

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About the Event: What are the political effects of nuclear weapons? What are the dynamics of territorial disputes and militarized crises between nuclear-armed states? As China continues with its unprecedented nuclear modernization program and U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreements are cast aside, these questions have taken on new urgency. We address these questions through a detailed reexamination of the 1969 border crisis between China and the Soviet Union. This crisis is a crucial case for both Cold War history and international relations theory. However, until recently, much of the evidence on this incidence remained either unused or inaccessible. Using hundreds of newly available and previously unused archival and primary sources from Albania, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and elsewhere, we shed light on new and important dynamics in the crisis including the role of psychological factors in interstate bargaining, elite politics in authoritarian states, and the impact of the strategic nuclear balance. The work has important implications for our understanding of the history of the Cold War, crisis escalation dynamics, state signaling and perception, and the political effects of nuclear weapons.
 
About the Speakers:

David Logan is Assistant Professor of Security Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He researches nuclear weapons, arms control, deterrence, and U.S.-China relations. He has conducted research for the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National Defense University, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He has published in International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Georgetown University Press, National Defense University Press, Foreign Affairs, and Los Angeles Times, among other venues. He holds a B.A. from Grinnell College and an M.P.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a global fellow in the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center, and a Center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. His book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was published in 2022 by Yale University Press, and he has a forthcoming biography on Xi Jinping’s father with Stanford University Press. He studies Chinese and Russian politics and foreign policy.

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About the Event: While rebels' electoral participation has become a focal point of scholarship on post-conflict development, the drivers and process of rebels' organizational transformation into political parties have remained elusive. Organizational theory provides a novel, yet critical, point of entry to understanding rebel-to-party transformation and the actors at the heart of it. I look inside rebels' wartime organizations and identify a set of subdivisions (in some groups) that mirror the key structures of political parties: governance wings, political-messaging wings, and social service wings. I argue that variation in rebels' wartime organizational structures gives rise to different party-building mechanisms with distinct prospects for success.  To test this theory, I use intra-organizational comparative process tracing of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, I create sub-organizational biographies and trace their evolution from inception to transformation.  This approach allows me to exploit systematic differences in the organizational structures of the FMLN's subgroups—while holding equal other key variables like ideology, prewar networks, and state context—to demonstrate how the construction of proto-party structures during wartime facilitates party-building at the war's end. 

About the Speaker: Sherry Zaks is a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as an assistant professor of Comparative Politics and Methodology at the University of Southern California. Her substantive work examines the conditions under which rebel groups are able to transform into political parties in the aftermath of civil wars. She draws on organizational sociology to develop a comprehensive model of militant groups and trace how wartime structures either facilitate or inhibit rebel-to-party transformations. On the methods side, Sherry’s work focuses on conceptualization, measurement, and process tracing. 

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About the Event: Debates on cohesion in the world’s most powerful alliance have largely overlooked NATO’s complex constellation of internal politics - instead overly focusing on US influence. While the US undoubtedly retains it outsized role in NATO, security scholarship offers few clues as to how or why Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine has affected NATO cohesion. Policymakers and pundits were quick to predict a long-lasting “NATO revival”, however, the aftermath has been a mixed bag: achievements (e.g. Swedish accession, augmented force posture) and setbacks (e.g. EU-NATO coordination on Ukraine, Russia-PRC responses, etc.). In this study, I argue that observed variation in NATO cohesion can best be explained by policymakers’ repeated use of internal, sticky narratives about other Allies’, which limit the number of issue areas on which formal agreements can occur. Even when Allies’ interests align, such pre-determined labeling of some Allies as spoilers and others as champions on specific issues constrains Allies’ outreach to one another. To test this narrative-focused argument, I conduct a discourse analysis of high-level, formally-agreed NATO documents (e.g. Strategic Concept, Communiqués and other NATO Summit “deliverables”), which are the products of months of intense negotiations, and leaders’ public statements immediately preceding and following the invasion. I also draw on interview evidence from several officials who were part of negotiations during this period. The study advances security scholarship by offering a new argument for why NATO cohesion has changed in the ways that it has, offers an explanation for observed disunity and updates negotiations literatures to stress the power of outgoing knowledge on coalition politics. The study’s empirical evidence also reveals that policymakers’ national narratives can both increase or decrease cohesion, depending on these narratives – even when the narratives themselves mischaracterize Allies’ actual bargaining space. The research advances existing security studies that find that individuals – and not just states – can play critical roles in alliance decision-making.

About the Speaker: Prof. Heidi Hardt is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. As a 2021-2022 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs TIRS fellow, she served the State Department (NATO Desk), a senator and congresswoman. She has authored articles, chapters and two books: NATO’s Lessons in Crisis: Institutional Memory in International Organization (Oxford, 2018) and Time to React: The Efficiency of International Organizations in Crisis Response (Oxford, 2014). Hardt examines transatlantic and European security, NATO, multilateral military operations, climate security, organizational change, learning, gender and elite decision-making. The NSF, Fulbright, NATO and Carnegie have funded her research.

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About the Event: When and why do terrorist groups attack outside their local conflict ecosystems? In the last decade, the number of terrorist groups carrying out violence across international borders has increased. Many explanations of transnational terrorism focus on state-level factors that make some countries more attractive bases or targets for transnational attacks than others. However, state-centric explanations fail to consider the organizational characteristics of the groups carrying out this violence. Transnational terrorism demands significant resources, strength, and coordination as well as intent. At what point in a group’s campaign is it motivated and capable of carrying out attacks abroad? Why are some groups more likely to transition to transnational violence? In this paper, we study the conditions under which terrorist groups move from conducting attacks in their home country to carrying out violence across state borders. We employ data from the Mapping Militants Project to analyze which organizational traits are associated with this choice. Our findings emphasize the importance of group-level attributes in understanding broader patterns of terrorism and consider the implications for counterterrorism policies.

About the Speakers: 

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow emerita at the FSI Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and a professor of political science by courtesy, emerita, at Stanford University. She taught in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University from 1974 to 2007. She has published extensively on the subject of terrorism. In 2011, Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work. A book co-authored with Gary LaFree titled Countering Terrorism was published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2017. She is the founder and a Principal Investigator on the Mapping Militants Project, which traces the evolution of violent militant or extremist organizations across several different conflict theatres.

Kaitlyn Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2022, and she was an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University from 2022-2023. Her research seeks to explain how violent non-state actors organize, build relationships with foreign states, and carry out violence in armed conflict. In this work, she draws on original datasets, fieldwork interviews, and archival materials. She is a Principal Investigator on the Mapping Militants Project, which traces the evolution of violent militant or extremist organizations across several different conflict theatres.

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