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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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About the event: Nuclear weapons are considered a prominent international status symbol that signal military strength, technological prowess, and a state’s association with the great power club. This idea of “nuclear prestige” has affected our understanding of proliferation, nonproliferation, and nuclear modernization. Debate rages on whether nuclear prestige still exists. I contribute to this debate by arguing that nuclear prestige has never been symbolically dominant in the international community’s understanding of the bomb. I offer a theory of status symbols and demonstrate that global opposition and divided superpower messaging prevented the rise of nuclear prestige. I test my argument with a case study of contestation over the meaning of the bomb and pair it with a discourse analysis of 10,000 hand-coded observations of nuclear mentions in United Nations General Debate speeches (1946 – 2025). I contribute to our understanding of nuclear symbolism, the effectiveness of the NPT, and to our understanding of international status.

About the speaker: Kevin Bustamante is the Macarthur Hennessey Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame where he earned his PhD in August 2024. His research agenda centers around questions of international security and racism, with a focus on nuclear politics. His work has been published in Security Studies and his book project examines the transformation of dominant racial ideas over the last two centuries.

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About the event: The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced. Radioactive Governance offers an ethnographic look at how the disaster was handled by Japan. Unlike prior nuclear-related narratives, such as those surrounding Chernobyl or Hiroshima, which focused on themes of harm, trauma, and victimization, the Japanese government consistently put forward a discourse of minimal or no radiation-related dangers, a gradual bringing home of former evacuees, a restarting of nuclear power plants, and the promotion of a resilient mindset in the face of adversity. This narrative worked to counter other understandings of recovery, such as those of worried citizens unsuccessfully fighting for permanent evacuation because they were afraid to go back to their homes. Providing a rich theorization of how both governments and citizens shape narratives about catastrophic events, Radioactive Governance not only displays how Fukushima became a story of hope and resilience rather than of victimization, but also how radioactive governance shifted from the nuclear secrecy that characterized the Cold War era to relying on international organizations and domestic citizens to co-manage the aftermath of disasters.

About the speaker: Maxime Polleri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval and a member of the Graduate School of International Studies. As an anthropologist of technoscience, he studies the governance of disasters, waste and misinformation, with a primary focus on nuclear topics and a regional expertise on Japan.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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