About the Event: A panel discussion convened in partnership with the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, University of San Francisco, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, and the World House Project, Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, Stanford University.

About the Speakers:

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as Chairman of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

Clayborne Carson, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History, emeritus, at Stanford University, has devoted his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the human rights movements inspired by King, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and other visionaries. His award-winning first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, was published in 1981 and remains the definitive study of the courageous activists and organizers who challenged the strongholds of segregation. In 1985, Mrs. Coretta Scott King chose Dr. Carson to edit and publish a definitive, multi-volume edition of her late husband’s speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. In addition to publishing numerous other books and scholarly articles, Carson has also reached broader audiences as a senior advisor to the Eyes on the Prize series and his contributions to more than two dozen subsequent documentaries. After launching the online Liberation Curriculum for K-12 students, Carson founded Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute in 2005 to disseminate King-related educational resources to a global audience. After retiring as the King Institute’s Director, Carson has continued his online educational efforts by establishing The World House Project to collaborate with other human rights advocates to realize King's vision of a global community in which all people can "learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining Stanford Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO’s adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism.  Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation.

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In this seminar, energy and natural resources sector policies of the three former communist countries in Asia - Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan - in close geographic proximity to Russia and China will be considered. There are similarities in the nature of transition from communist regime to democratic societies in these three states, although major differences in social and cultural issues exist. The reliance on energy in neighboring countries Russia and China as well as export of raw materials to these markets have major influence on specific policy agenda. Particular attention is given to energy minerals and trade balance and imbalance thereof. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Undraa Agvaanluvsan currently serves as the president of Mitchell Foundation for Arts and Sciences. She is also an Asia21 fellow of the Asia Society and co-chair of Mongolia chapter of the Women Corporate Directors, a global organization of women serving in public and private corporate boards. During 2021-22, she served on the WCD Global Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. Dr. Undraa Agvaanluvsan is a former Member of Parliament of Mongolia and the chair of the Parliamentary subcommittee on Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to being elected as a legislator, she served as an Ambassador-at-large in charge of nuclear security issues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia, where she worked on nuclear energy and fuel cycle, uranium and rareearth minerals development policy. She is a nuclear physicist by training, obtained her PhD at North Carolina State University, USA and diploma in High Energy Physics at the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. She conducted research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, USA and taught energy policy at International Policy Studies Program at Stanford University, where she was a Science fellow and visiting professor at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. She published more than 90 papers, conference proceedings, and articles on neutron and proton induced nuclear reactions, the nuclear level density and radiative strength functions, quantum chaos and the Random Matrix Theory, including its application to the modeling of electric-grid resilience.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: We cannot understand much of anything about power politics without morality. Yet up to this point we have tried to do just that. By turning our attention to how states respond to being wronged rather than when they do right and realizing the moral basis of the groups that interact in foreign affairs, I show that morality is virtually everywhere in international relations – in the perception of threat, the persistence of conflict, the judgment of domestic audiences, and the articulation of expansionist goals. The inescapability of our moral impulses owes to their evolutionary origins in helping individuals solve recurrent problems in their anarchic environment. Rather than a transcendence of material reality, morality is material reality. 

About the Speaker: Brian C. Rathbun is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. He is the author of four other books on international affairs and is a distinguished scholar of the International Studies Association. His latest book with Cambridge University Press, Reasoning of State, won the 2020 award for best book on foreign policy from the American Political Science Association.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Under what conditions do dual-use emerging technologies proliferate in the international system? While the fourth industrial revolution (Information and Communications Technology revolution) is often associated with big data, I argue that emerging technologies should also be known for their level of prominence, complexity, unparalleled connectivity, enhanced performance, and uncertainty compared to traditional technologies. Leveraging open-source, multi-year data consisting of about two million observations from the National Science Foundation, arXiv, Small Business Innovation Research, and Department of Defense’s Research, Development, Test and Evaluation program, I first share an illustrative example differentiating frontier, emerging, and mature technologies with quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and GPS respectively. After providing conceptualizations of technologies, I then outline the conceptualization and operationalization of the outcome variable, proliferation. Proliferation includes two stages, specifically possession and the operationality of the emerging technology. In putting forth a novel definition of emerging technologies, this paper includes extensive and robust empirical analysis of patents through the World Intellectual Property Organization, investment via Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, and publications via arXiv, awards via the Small Business Innovation Research Program and the National Science Foundation. Overall, scholarly attention to emerging technologies is increasingly important as these innovations continue to take shape and impact the nature of national and international security.

About the Speaker: Julie George is a PhD Candidate in the Government department at Cornell University, specializing in international security. Broadly, her doctoral research examines the proliferation of emerging technologies and its impact on the probability and nature of conflict and cooperation in the international system. This focus has led her to engage a broad selection of scholarship across science and technology studies, history, international organizations, and law. Currently, she is a predoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford University. More information regarding Julie’s research can be found at www.juliexgeorge.com.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Speaker: Professor Carter Malkasian is the Chair of the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School.
 
He was the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford from 2015 to 2019. He has extensive experience working in conflict zones, especially Afghanistan and Iraq, and has published several books.
 
The highlight of his work in conflict zones was nearly two years in Garmser district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, as a State Department political officer from from 2009 to 2011. Before that, he was a civilian advisor to the I Marine Expeditionary Force in al-Anbar for one year in 2004–2005 and six months in 2006. He also worked Kunar in 2007 and Honduras in 2012; and was General Dunford’s senior advisor in Afghanistan from March 2013 to August 2014.
 
His newest book is The American War in Afghanistan: A History. The New York Times rated it as one of the top 100 books of 2021.
 
His 2013 book, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (Oxford University Press), won the 2014 silver medal for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Book Award.
 
Other books include Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Islamic State, A History of Modern Wars of Attrition (2002), and The Korean War, 1950-1953.
 
He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley and completed his doctorate in history at Oxford University. He speaks Pashto.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In the wake of natural disasters, humanitarian aid can make the difference between life and death for people in harm’s way. But despite the suffering of their citizens, leaders sometimes fail to secure international humanitarian aid or conceal the existence of an emergency. Their actions can prevent or delay the delivery of all humanitarian aid. This paper answers the question: under what conditions do recipient governments seek or refuse humanitarian aid after natural disasters?  I argue that leaders act strategically, based on the understanding that their response to natural disasters will influence powerful donor states’ perceptions of the regime’s competence. Donors reward competent leader are rewarded with more advantageous resources while incompetent leaders face greater conditionality. Consequently, state leaders seek humanitarian when doing so will lead powerful donors to perceive the recipient as competent, and they fail to seek aid and conceal the existence of emergencies when doing so would signal incompetence. Seeking aid signals competence when the natural disaster is exogenous to government policy choices and it is implausible that the government could respond adequately alone. When donors can blame event on the government's failure to prevent, even providing emergency relief without donor support makes the government look incompetent, which creates incentives for governments to conceal such events. I use new data on of government policy decisions in response to droughts and floods and a survey of government officials in a poor aid-dependent state to test this argument.

About the Speaker: Allison Grossman is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University and an Affiliated Researcher at Stanford's King Center on Global Development. Her research investigates how so-called "fragile" states cooperate with (0r contest) international efforts to mitigate suffering and improve the welfare of their residents. She investigates these issues of global concern in West African states, including Niger, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 2021. Her research has been published in the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and PS: Political Science & Politics.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: A great puzzle of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to establish the postwar political order. This project traces how parties derived from violent, wartime belligerents successfully campaign as the best providers of future societal peace, attracting votes not just from their core supporters but oftentimes also from the citizens targeted in war. Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork, the project combines case studies of victim voters in Latin America with experimental survey evidence and new data on postwar elections around the world. It argues that, contrary to oft-cited fears, postconflict elections do not necessarily give rise to renewed instability or political violence. The project demonstrates how war-scarred citizens reward belligerent parties for promising peace and security instead of blaming them for war. Yet, in so casting their ballots, voters sacrifice justice, liberal democracy, and social welfare. Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, the project links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war and offers global perspectives on important questions about electoral behavior in the wake of mass violence.

About the Speaker: Sarah Z. Daly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her first book, Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016 in its Comparative Politics series. It was runner-up for the 2017 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize and is based on her PhD dissertation, which was awarded the Lucian Pye Award for the Best Dissertation in Political Science. Her second book, Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in its International Politics and History series in November 2022. For this research she was a named a 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and received the Minerva-United States Institute of Peace, Peace and Security Early Career Scholar Award. Her research on war and peace, political life after war, and organized crime has appeared in British Journal of Political Science, World Politics, International Security,  Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, and Journal of Peace Research, among other journals. Daly’s research has been funded by multiple sources including the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies. She has held fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and Latin American Studies Program at Princeton University. Daly received a BA from Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa), MSc from London School of Economics, and PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: To manage the risks of potential dual use research of concern (DURC), US government policy and biorisk management professionals recommend tailoring mitigation strategies to an assessment of a given project’s risk. However, there is little empirical research on how different reviewers assess risks and recommend mitigation strategies for the same set of life sciences projects. If reviewers cannot agree on risk assessments, or if the choice of mitigation strategies does not heavily depend on risk assessments, then the purpose of assessment becomes less clear.

Using a modified version of the US government’s Companion Guide for DURC assessment, we elicited detailed reviews of the risks, benefits, and recommended risk management strategies for four real-world synthetic biology projects from 18 experienced DURC reviewers and 49 synthetic biology students. We find significant variation within and between reviewer groups and projects in both assessed DURC risk and recommended strategies for managing it. This empirical variation raises questions about the role of DURC assessment, challenges conventional conceptions of DURC assessment “expertise”, and highlights the need for experimentation in DURC management.

About the Speaker: Dr. Daniel Greene is a Senior Analyst at Gryphon Scientific, a biosecurity and public health research consultancy. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he worked with Drs. Megan Palmer and David Relman to study the societal risks and potential of life-science research. His primary research focus was on measuring and cultivating a culture of responsibility in the life sciences by using a combination of survey experiments, qualitative methods, data science, and policy analysis. Daniel has a PhD in Education from Stanford University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In this talk, Dr. Kassenova will share highlights from her recently released book Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb. She will share the history of Soviet nuclear tests in the Kazakh steppe, their harm to the people and the environment, and the story of the public anti-nuclear movement that led to the closure of the nuclear testing site. She will also explain why Kazakhstan decided to give up its nuclear inheritance, including more than a thousand nuclear weapons, more than a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, tons of nuclear materials, and critical nuclear infrastructure. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize access of proliferators to the global financial system. Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds and is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS). From 2011 to 2015 Kassenova served on the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

The Hoover Project on China’s Global Sharp Power and the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation 
invite you to

Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes a weekly column for Bloomberg Opinion on foreign policy and is the author or editor of several books, including his newest books, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today, and Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, with Michael Beckley. He is a member of the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board and previously worked as a special assistant to the secretary of defense.

Michael Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a leading expert on the balance of power between the United States and China, and the author of two books and multiple award-winning articles. Previously, Professor Beckley was an International Security Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He continues to advise offices within the U.S. intelligence community and U.S. Department of Defense.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, ​Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He co-chairs the Hoover Institution’s programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region.

Glenn Tiffert is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China. He co-chairs the Hoover project on China’s Global Sharp Power and works closely with government and civil society partners to document and build resilience against authoritarian interference with democratic institutions. Most recently, he co-authored and edited Global Engagement: Rethinking Risk in the Research Enterprise (2020).