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Introductions will start at 2:40pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes with a 10 minute discussion.

 

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Y4kF9dTJTJinogbJqvNSpw

 

About the Event: How do Chinese state media partnerships impact perceptions of China in East Asia and the Pacific? Chinese state media groups form partnerships to publish content in local outlets, reaching foreign audiences through trusted sources. Previous scholars identify media partnerships as the most impactful form of Beijing’s public diplomacy, but do not investigate which factors moderate this influence. This thesis analyzes the relationship between partnerships and approval of China in 12 countries using an original dataset of 98 partnerships from 2006-2020. By recording the size of partner groups, strength of ties, and language of publication, this this investigation differentiates itself from previous studies. Partnerships are collectively associated with increasing approval and decreasing disapproval of China, but surprisingly the most influential partnerships are with small, Chinese language media groups. These results contradict the conventional logic that partnerships with larger, multilingual media would have greater impact. An interview with a Xinhua journalist and case studies of media organizations in Thailand and Australia suggest that small, Chinese language platforms are uniquely vulnerable to influence from PRC state media. Policymakers must support independent publishers to prevent the consolidation of the Chinese language media ecosystem.

 

About the Speaker: Dylan is a senior studying international relations and human rights. After researching disinformation for the Department of Defense and working for a journalism-tech startup, Dylan chose to investigate Chinese state media partnerships in East Asia and the Pacific. After graduation, he will move to D.C. and work as a Junior Fellow at the Stimson Center.

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Dylan Junkin CISAC Honors Student Stanford University
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THIS EVENT STARTS AT 2:40PM. Introductions will start at 2:40pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes with a 10 minute discussion.

 

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Y4kF9dTJTJinogbJqvNSpw

 

About the Event: How do U.S. and UN targeted sanctions impact the behavior and strategies of militant groups? Despite several theories on the use of sanctions to punish non-state actors, scholars have largely neglected the impact of targeted sanction application on militant group behavior. This thesis combines an original dataset of 160 U.S. and UN sanction regimes with data on the activity of over 600 militant groups to examine the relationship between sanction imposition and militant activity. The results show mixed impact of sanctions on militant activity. While UN targeted sanctions precipitate falls in militant activity, unilateral U.S. sanctions are associated with a significant increase in violence committed by sanctioned groups. Comparative analysis of two militant groups in India –The National Democratic Front of Bodoland and Hizbul Mujahideen– explores the causality of this finding. U.S. sanctions strip militant groups of international legitimacy but often fail to limit their availability to resources. As a result, U.S. sanctions reduce the incentives of non-state actors to seek international recognition and constrain the forms of violence and insurgency they employ. This thesis illustrates the importance of international cooperation in ensuring targeted sanctions effectively limit the operating capabilities of militant groups.

 

About the Speaker: Nathalie is a senior from Kansas City, Kansas, studying Economics and Political Science. Her experiences working for the World Bank and studying at Oxford have made her passionate about the intersection of economic development, human rights, and violence prevention. After graduation, she plans on conducting economic analysis for the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity in Washington, D.C.

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Nathalie Kiersznowski CISAC Honors Student Stanford University
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Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/L04_-G6N7Go

 

About the Event: What can wargames tell us about the ethics of decision-making under the threat of nuclear escalation? The “Cold War Game” (CWG) that took place from 1954-1956 at the RAND Corporation offers insights into the origins of deterrence and the dilemmas of contemplating the possible futures of war with rare events or little empirical data through the method of gaming. Based on extensive archival research at RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, this project identifies the methodological and epistemological issues faced by early systems analysts and social scientists in attempting to link political and economic issues to traditional military wargaming in the nuclear era. The CWG sought to both quantify the non-rational or social dimensions of nuclear decision-making as well as develop psychological insights, to recognize the ways that propaganda and psychology were used as techniques of warfare alongside the quantitative and rational analytics of game theory. I argue that discussions of the ethics of nuclear weapons were sidelined throughout the Cold War for nuclear strategists and my questions examine how ethics functioned even it its absence of explicit discourse. Nevertheless, a kind of ethical restraint became implicit throughout the CWG that tempered even the most bellicose players through the process of physical play by forcing strategists to face the weight of their decisions. Differing epistemological approaches to the game from the social science division and the mathematics/economics division at RAND offers a unique empirical test to compare qualitative and quantitative approaches to wargaming operating within the same context of uncertainty in the early Cold War period. The conclusions of this study offers insights for contemporary dilemmas of AI and wargaming the future of war today. Ultimately, the project offers both an in-depth look at the origins of the political-military wargames and interjects with the larger questions of how abstraction and technostrategic language enables and constrains the acceptable discourse for decision-making in the face of nuclear brinksmanship.

 

 

About the Speaker: John R. Emery is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine and then became a Tobis Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality at UC Irvine. His research agenda is at the intersection of security studies, ethics of war, and science and technology studies. His previous work on drones, ethics, AI, and counter-terrorism has been published in Law & Policy, Critical Military Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, and Peace Review. His current research agenda explores issues of human-machine interaction in the U.S. national security context analyzing both historical and contemporary cases.

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John R. Emery is an Assistant Professor of International Security at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of International and Area Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses broadly on the intersection of ethics of war, security studies and technology. His work on 1950s nuclear wargaming at the RAND Corporation and the impact of wargames on ethical intuition has been published in Texas National Security Review. Previous work on drones, ethics, counter-terrorism, and just war is published in Critical Military Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, and Peace Review. In 2017-2018 he was awarded the NSF-funded Technology, Law and Society Fellowship to undertake an interdisciplinary study of the impact of AI, Big Data, and blockchain on law and society scholarship.

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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/sFsmjTf9xUg

 

About the Event: Contemporary global politics are marked by a renewed debate over the significance and limits of state sovereignty. In the eyes of many, the COVID-19 pandemic has reasserted the importance of territorial sovereignty as well as of national identity and citizenship. Populations have become more acutely conscious of their rights and responsibilities as members of a particular political community, and their ultimate reliance upon their governments to protect them from the virus. Well before the outbreak of this pandemic, however, many scholars, policy-analysts, and state officials had already been highlighting the ‘return’ of sovereignty, often in juxtaposition to either the transnational economic forces of globalization or liberal international norms. Powerful economic and political trends (including protectionism and populism) were casting doubt on the reach and impact of liberal ideals such as free movement and economic interdependence. In part, these trends reflected a structural shift in international order in which the relative position of the United States was declining, and the standing of non-Western powers with attachment to what is loosely referred to as “Westphalian” sovereignty was increasing. Although some IR scholars have argued that today’s great powers (Russia, China and the US) are espousing and practicing a new form of “extra-legal sovereignty” (Paris 2020), the former two states - in order to garner wider support for their respective world views - regularly appeal to an understanding of sovereignty that underscores long-standing principles of territorial integrity and political independence.

This book project takes a step back, to more critically analyse the period preceding our current debate. Before we can address the question of whether and how Westphalian sovereignty has returned to shape contemporary global order, we should examine more deeply why sovereignty was alleged to have been transformed in the first place. In other words, what was the nature and reach of the post-Westphalian order that was proclaimed by so many in the first decades of the post-Cold War period?  While analysts and commentators have pointed to several manifestations of this changed understanding of sovereignty, I focus on the liberal idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, which, inter alia, seemingly underpinned the articulation in 2005 of the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’. According to this liberal understanding, sovereignty can no longer be conceived as unrivalled control over a delimited territory and the population residing within it – ‘sovereignty as authority’ – but rather as a status and set of rights which are conditional upon certain behaviours and capacities of states. Sovereignty is thus not solely the right of the state to be “undisturbed from without” but the responsibility to perform certain roles and tasks within its frontiers.

The central aim of this study is to examine the rise, contestation, and potential fate of what some have called this “revolutionary” understanding of sovereignty.  I ask three more specific questions. The first is conceptual and draws upon the history of ideas relating to sovereignty. Was the post-Cold War articulation of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ really so novel? Or was it juxtaposing itself to a very particular historical period, during which non-intervention was championed by newly decolonized states? The second set of issues is empirical. How has sovereignty been understood in the post-Cold War period, particularly through practices of intervention and state recognition? Have the key actors in international society spoken and acted in ways consistent with the liberal understanding of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’? And the final set of questions is normative. Is it desirable to understand sovereignty in this way? What are the benefits and limitations of viewing sovereignty as deeply connected with responsibility?

While the book project is organized around these three central themes, my presentation will focus in, for purposes of illustration, on the ‘responsibility to protect’ (RtoP). This chapter assesses the degree to which ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ has been widely accepted and practiced by states in their interpretation and implementation of this principle and, in so doing, seeks to both account for and analyse the nature and impact of the contestation that surrounds RtoP.  The chapter’s findings suggest that a conditional understanding of sovereignty was not necessarily shared or practiced across international society, even during the height of liberal internationalist ‘moment’ of the post-Cold War period - thereby posing a challenge not just to the proponents of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, but also to some of its fiercest critics, who overstate its negative effects on international politics.

I begin by arguing that while the 2005 Summit Outcome Document (SOD) was a significant intergovernmental agreement that provided greater precision about the source, scope, and bearer of the responsibility to protect, its particular formulation indicates that the logic of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ was not fully embraced.  Instead, the text reflected a horizontal logic, associated with respect for sovereign equality and positive international law, rather than a vertical logic that places the international community in a position of authority over states. While the notions of sovereignty and responsibility did come together, they did so in a way that did not override or replace sovereignty in situations of humanitarian emergency, but rather aimed to reinforce sovereignty and support states in protecting their populations.

In a second step, the chapter analyses the types of contestation that have accompanied RtoP’s development, which relate both to procedural matters (such as the appropriate intergovernmental body that should ‘own’ RtoP’s development) and to substantive elements of the principle – including, most notably, the relationship between national and international responsibility. I suggest that RtoP is particularly susceptible to contestation, given its complex structure and inherently indeterminate nature. I also argue that, far from establishing an independent international authority that specifies and enforces state responsibility, the most that RtoP creates within its so-called third pillar is a responsibility to consider a real or imminent crisis involving atrocity crimes - what in legal literature is sometimes called a ‘duty of conduct’.

In the final section of the chapter, I contend that the contestation surrounding RtoP can be better understood by giving greater attention to the normative underpinnings of contemporary critiques of the principle, most notably those which stress the importance of sovereignty equality. Given that RtoP has continued to be associated – rightly or wrongly – with the use of military force, it has frequently generated sharp debate among states about the meaning of sovereignty, and efforts to assert the continuing power of the principle of non-intervention. The result of this contestation, and the reshaping of RtoP by non-Western states such as China, has been a dampening of the original cosmopolitan roots of the principle and an increased focus on maintaining strong and capable states. In short, while RtoP has created a linkage in international discourse and practice between sovereignty and responsibility, it has not given effect to the liberal understanding of sovereignty as responsibility.

 

 

 

About the Speaker: Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. She was previously Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect.

Professor Welsh is the author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on humanitarian intervention, the evolution of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ in international society, the UN Security Council, norm conflict and contestation, and Canadian foreign policy.

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Jennifer Welsh Research Chair in Global Governance and Security McGill University
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Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/5616166186207/WN_Zdzl0PrwR7CXSPoASOs5Xg

 

About the Event: Conventional wisdom on proxy warfare exclusively focuses on explaining governments’ provision of military, logistical, and financial support to rebel groups involved in conflict abroad. In reality, foreign militant groups play a much larger role in these partnerships than recognized: foreign militants often provide government partners with intelligence, logistical support, access to their military infrastructure, and send elite units to train and supplement their state partner’s troops. Because armed non-state actors are smaller and face greater difficulties accessing resources, the fact that they provide any type of support – let alone deploying their forces to conduct joint combat operations with state armed forces abroad – is puzzling. In this presentation, I provide insights into the strategic benefits that foreign militants receive from supporting states, identify factors that influence the types of support foreign militants provide to government partners once the decision to provide support has been made, and highlight how foreign militants can constrain and influence their government partners’ future behavior. To do so, I conduct an in-depth examination of the overtime trends in the various types of support that Shia paramilitary groups from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan provided to the Syrian regime and Russian forces throughout the course of the decade-long Syrian conflict.

 

 

About the Speaker: Melissa Carlson is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s Middle East Initiative. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. Her research examines cooperation between states and non-state actors in conflict, and her book manuscript explains variations in the types of support that governments and foreign militants provide to each other. Previously, Melissa has worked with the International Organization of Migration’s Missions in Jordan and Iraq to examine relations between refugees, host governments, and aid organizations.

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CISAC Postdoctoral Fellow Stanford University
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Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/t4xteN7N99U

 

About the Event: In The State from Below, we seek to understand democracy through ground-up knowledge of the state. We use a new technology and civic infrastructure, Portals, to initiate conversations about policing in communities where these forms of state action are concentrated.  Portals are virtual chambers where people in disparate communities can converse as if in the same room.  Based on over 850 recorded and transcribed conversations across fourteen neighborhoods in five cities – the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of the police to date – we analyze patterns in political discourse.  We reveal four currents that challenge liberal-democratic framings of political life:  that an arrangement of distorted responsiveness characterizes the relationship between policed communities and the state; that the political desire of policed communities is not for greater engagement and responsiveness but for political recognition – to be known by the state; and that in contrast to prevailing wisdom about uninformed electorates, these citizens have too much knowledge of and too little power vis-à-vis state representatives.  Finally, we observe among policed communities an “ethics of aversion” in their political responses, a belief that power is best achieved by receding from state institutions in the short term and forging their own collective, community autonomy in the long term. At a broader level, we observe that it is not exclusion from democratic institutions that characterizes political inequality in our time, but inclusion in what we call racial authoritarianism, and the experience of misrecognition that results.

 

 

About the Speaker: Vesla Mae Weaver is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. 

She has contributed to scholarly debates around the persistence of racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons and police power for race-class subjugated communities. She is co-author with Amy Lerman of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, the first large-scale empirical study of what the tectonic shifts in incarceration and policing meant for political and civic life in communities where it was concentrated. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (with J. Hochschild and T. Burch). She is at work on a new book, The State From Below, based on the largest archive of policing narratives using an innovative civic infrastructure called Portals (https://www.portalspolicingproject.com).

Virtual Seminar

Vesla Weaver Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology Johns Hopkins University
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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/-hERfg-DCYw

 

About the Event: 

This presentation explores two topics at the nexus of technology and international security: interstate influence operations and technological revolutions.

After Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, influence operations have become a central focus among American policymakers, foreign policy pundits, and publics alike. Yet, Goldstein argues that they remain under-explored and under-theorized in international security studies, with disagreement over how to define the phenomenon implicit in the existing literature. Goldstein will introduce a conceptual framework for foreign influence operations and argue that security studies scholars should pay greater attention to the subject for two reasons. First, they are policy-relevant and likely to remain so; they are cost effective, propagandists are prone to inflate their impact, and they are difficult to deter. Second, studying influence operations can contribute to the academic discipline of security studies by helping to expand restrictive notions of state power and challenge dominant models of foreign policy decision-making.

How do emerging technologies affect the rise and fall of great powers? Scholars have long observed that rounds of technological revolution disrupt the economic balance of power, bringing about a power transition in the international system. However, there has been limited investigation of how this process occurs. The standard explanation emphasizes a country’s ability to dominate innovation in leading sectors, seizing monopoly profits in new, fast-growing industries centered around major technological breakthroughs. Investigating historical cases of industrial revolutions followed by economic power transitions, Ding will present an alternative mechanism based on the diffusion of general-purpose technologies. The findings have direct implications for how recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could affect the U.S.-China power balance.

 

About the Speakers: 

Jeffrey Ding is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Jeffrey’s current research is centered on how technological change affects the rise and fall of great powers. Through investigating historical cases of industrial revolutions, Jeffrey traces causal mechanisms that connect significant technical breakthroughs and economic power transitions — with an eye toward the implications of advances in AI for a possible U.S.-China power transition. Jeffrey’s previous research covered related topics, including China's development of AI, identifying strategic goods and technologies, and technical standards as a vehicle of AI governance.

 

Josh A. Goldstein is a PhD Candidate and Clarendon Scholar in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. For the 2020-2021 year, he is a pre-doctoral fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory and part of the inaugural class of non-resident Hans J. Morgenthau Fellows at the Notre Dame International Security Center. Josh’s 3-paper doctoral dissertation takes a multi-method approach to studying the challenges that democracies face from influence operations. His broader research interests lie in international security, political psychology, and foreign policy-decision making.

 

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Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, sponsored by Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. His research agenda centers on technological change and international politics. His book project investigates how past technological revolutions influenced the rise and fall of great powers, with implications for U.S.-China competition in emerging technologies like AI. Other research papers tackle how states should identify strategic technologies, assessments of national scientific and technological capabilities, and interstate cooperation on nuclear safety and security technologies. Jeff's work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, The Washington Post, and other outlets. Jeff received his PhD in 2021 from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He has also worked as a researcher for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and the Centre for the Governance of AI at the University of Oxford.

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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/Mwjn39S48rE

 

About the Event: NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg will speak about how the transatlantic alliance is adapting to change in this turbulent period.  President Biden has clearly signaled that he is resolved to reach out to the NATO allies, working to repair the trans-Atlantic bond. To strengthen the bond between America and Europe and prepare the alliance for the future, the Secretary General has launched the NATO 2030 initiative.  This includes proposals on how NATO can better harness technology and innovation, tackle the security implications of climate change, and help make our societies more resilient. While NATO must continue to deter and defend against Russia, it is also keeping channels open to Moscow. The rise of China presents both challenges and opportunities that NATO has started to address. And missions in Afghanistan and Iraq are on the cusp of change, with decisions underway about what role NATO will play in the future. All in all, an exciting time to hear from NATO’s Secretary General.

This event is co-sponsored with The Europe Center.

 

About the Speaker: 

Jens Stoltenberg became NATO Secretary General in October 2014, following a distinguished international and domestic career. As a former Prime Minister of Norway and UN Special Envoy, Mr. Stoltenberg has been a strong supporter of greater global and transatlantic cooperation. Mr. Stoltenberg’s mandate as NATO Secretary General has been extended until the end of September 2022.

Under Mr. Stoltenberg’s leadership, NATO has responded to a more challenging security environment by implementing the biggest reinforcement of its collective defence since the Cold War, increasing the readiness of its forces and deploying combat troops in the eastern part of the Alliance. He believes in credible deterrence and defence while maintaining dialogue with Russia. He has also advocated for increased defence spending and better burden sharing within the Alliance, and a greater focus on innovation. NATO has also stepped up its efforts in the fight against terrorism. He strongly supports a partnership approach, with cooperation between NATO and the European Union reaching unprecedented levels.

Before coming to NATO, he was the UN Special Envoy on Climate Change from 2013 to 2014. He has also chaired UN High-level Panels on climate financing and the coherence between development, humanitarian assistance and environmental policies.

As Prime Minister of Norway, Mr. Stoltenberg increased the defence spending and transformed the Norwegian armed forces with new high-end capabilities and investments. He also signed an agreement with Russia on establishing maritime borders in the Barents and Polar Sea, ending a 30-years dispute.

Mr. Stoltenberg was also Prime Minister during the deadly terrorist attacks, which killed 77 people in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011, urging in response, “more democracy, more openness, and more humanity, but never naïvete”.

Mr Stoltenberg holds a postgraduate degree in Economics from the University of Oslo. After graduating in 1987, he held a research post at the National Statistical Institute of Norway, before embarking on a career in Norwegian politics.

  • 2005-2013: Prime Minister of Norway
  • 2002-2014: Leader of the Norwegian Labor Party
  • 2000-2001: Prime Minister of Norway
  • 1996-1997: Minister of Finance
  • 1993-1996: Minister of Industry and Energy
  • 1991-2014: Member of Parliament
  • 1990-1991: State Secretary at the Ministry of the Environment
  • 1985-1989: Leader of the Norwegian Labour Youth

Jens Stoltenberg was born in Oslo on 16 March 1959. He is married to Ingrid Schulerud. They have two grown-up children.

Virtual Seminar

Jens Stoltenberg Secretary General NATO
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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/aK8_FjQtlKc

 

About the Event: The US administration has pivoted 180°. So, what does that mean for Europe?

The last four years have shaped the way European media relate to world powers, security and Europe’s increasing push for sovereignty and strategic autonomy. We will discuss European and national media in Europe, as well as how media differ in Western and Eastern Europe. We will also look at how the narrative will change now that the US is once again striving for global leadership and transatlantic cooperation.

A key issue is how US-based media coverage is influencing the narrative. Increasing media output from Washington about the rest of the world is also shaping the narrative. Big Tech and digital media investments are pushing into national markets and will shape the way that news is made and consumed. Finally, we will dive into the role that media will play in rebalancing the power players in international security, and most importantly, fostering cooperation.

 

About the Speaker: Shéhérazade Semsar-de Boisséson is CEO of POLITICO in Europe, a joint venture between POLITICO and Axel Springer.

Shéhérazade was previously owner and publisher of European Voice, the leading media in Brussels covering EU policy, which she acquired from the Economist Group in 2013. In December 2014, POLITICO and Axel Springer jointly acquired European Voice and Paris-based Development Institute International (Dii), France’s leading event promoter in the public affairs space, a business Shéhérazade co-founded in 1993.

A native of Tehran, Iran and a French national, Shéhérazade graduated from the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in 1990 with a B.A. and a M.S. in International Finance.

Shéhérazade served as a member of the Board of Directors of Georgetown University, Washington D.C. from 2013 to 2019. She is currently serving on the Advisory Board of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and on the Board of Directors of the French-American Foundation.

From 2008 to 2010, Shéhérazade served on the Board of Directors of Femmes Forums, a leading women’s club in Paris, France. She represents DII at the French think tank: Institut Montaigne.

Shéhérazade lives in Brussels with her husband Laurent de Boisséson and their three children: Inès, Louise and Cyrus.

Virtual Seminar

Sheherazade Semsar-de Boisséson CEO POLITICO Europe
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Attend Webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/j/93236889762?pwd=eVFtbVJDME95MU9wNU1scFNWTDUxdz09

 

About the Event: Synthetic Biology (SB) is one of the most promising fields of research for the 21st century. SB offers powerful new ways to improve human health, build the global economy, manufacture sustainable materials, and address climate change. However, current access to SBenabled breakthroughs is unequal, largely due to bottlenecks in infrastructure and education. Here, I describe our efforts to re-think the way we engineer biology using cell-free systems to address these bottlenecks. We show how the ability to readily store, distribute, and activate low-cost, freeze-dried cell-free systems by simply adding water has opened new opportunities for on-demand biomanufacturing of vaccines for global health, point-of-care diagnostics for environmental safety, and education for SB literacy and citizenship. By integrating cell-free systems with AI, we also show the ability to accelerate the production of carbon-negative platform chemicals. Looking forward, advances in engineering tools and new knowledge underpinning the fundamental science of living matter will ensure that SB helps solve humanity’s most pressing challenges.

 

About the Speaker: Michael Jewett is the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern University. Dr. Jewett received his PhD in 2005 at Stanford University, completed postdoctoral studies at the Center for Microbial Biotechnology in Denmark and the Harvard Medical School, and was a guest professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). He is the recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and a Finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, among others. He is the co-founder of SwiftScale Biologics, Stemloop, Inc., Pearl Bio, Induro Therapeutics, and Design Pharmaceuticals. Jewett is a Fellow of AIMBE, AAAS, and NAI.

 

For more information please contact Drew Endy (endy@stanford.edu) or Paul McIntyre (pcm1@slac.stanford.edu).

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Michael Jewett Professor Northwestern University
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