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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/yyZ54SgGuz4

About the Event: We are beginning to understand that globalization has strategic consequences. Countries are using their position in globalized networks to "weaponize interdependence," through their dominance of information and financial networks. In this talk, Henry Farrell will discuss the research and policy agenda of weaponized interdependence, addressing such questions as: What areas of the global economy are most vulnerable to unilateral control of information and financial networks? How sustainable is the use of weaponized interdependence? What are the possible responses from targeted actors? And how sustainable is the open global economy if weaponized interdependence becomes a default tool for managing international relations?

Book Purchase:   https://amzn.to/3d29F4a

About the Speaker: Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology, and Editor in Chief of the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post. His book (with Abraham Newman) Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security, was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press, and has been awarded the 2019 Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize and the ISA-ICOMM Best Book Award. In addition he has authored or co-authored 34 academic articles, as well as several book chapters and numerous non-academic publications. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/iqrz3Y3VmZ8

About the Event: Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it? 

Central and Eastern European states, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading. 

How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments' responses to Russian information warfare tactics - all of which have failed. She journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them. Above all, this book shows what is at stake: the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.

Book Purchase:  https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-lose-the-information-war-9781838607685/

Discount Code: NINAJ30

About the Speaker: Nina Jankowicz studies the intersection of democracy and technology in Central and Eastern Europe. She is the author of How To Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict (Bloomsbury/IBTauris). Ms. Jankowicz has advised the Ukrainian government on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others. She has testified before Congress on multiple occasions and is a frequent television and radio commentator on disinformation and Russian and Eastern European affairs. Prior to her Fulbright grant in Ukraine, Ms. Jankowicz managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. She received her MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and her BA from Bryn Mawr

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

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/lxMWuFvq2NU

About the Event: It has become increasingly clear that the Kremlin poses a security challenge to the West, with relations between the United States and Europe, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, having fallen to their lowest point since the end of the 1980s.  In particular, Moscow seeks to overturn the post-Cold War European security order, which it believes disadvantages Russian interests.  The Russian challenge includes both foreign and domestic policy aspects, as the Kremlin augments traditional political and military tools with more sophisticated efforts to exploit and widen divides within Western societies.

Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, will discuss the challenge posed by Russia and the motives behind it.

About the Speaker: 

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She recently served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at The National Intelligence Council. She is co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).

Prior to joining Brookings, Hill was director of strategic planning at The Eurasia Foundation in Washington, D.C. From 1991 to 1999, she held a number of positions directing technical assistance and research projects at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, including associate director of the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, director of the Project on Ethnic Conflict in the Former Soviet Union, and coordinator of the Trilateral Study on Japanese-Russian-U.S. Relations.

Hill has researched and published extensively on issues related to Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, regional conflicts, energy, and strategic issues. Her book with Brookings Senior Fellow Clifford Gaddy,“The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold,” was published by Brookings Institution Press in December 2003, and her monograph, “Energy Empire: Oil, Gas and Russia’s Revival,” was published by the London Foreign Policy Centre in 2004. The first edition of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” was published by Brookings Institution Press in December 2013, also with Clifford Gaddy.

Hill holds a master’s in Soviet studies and a doctorate in history from Harvard University where she was a Frank Knox Fellow. She also holds a master’s in Russian and modern history from St. Andrews University in Scotland, and has pursued studies at Moscow’s Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages. Hill is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/UOHyKJR5d1w

About the Event: 

In 2017, former diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford wrote a pointed resignation letter to her then boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. She had watched as the State Department was gutted, and now she urged him to stem the bleeding by showing leadership and commitment to his diplomats and the country. If he couldn’t do that, she said, “I humbly recommend that you follow me out the door.” In The Dissent Channel, Shackelford chronicles how the challenges facing the State Department under the current administration, while extreme, are not new. In this live-streamed conversation, Shackelford will discuss the costs of a government unwilling to face mistakes or correct its course. She will also discuss how to build a more accountable foreign policy, through greater public engagement, more effective congressional oversight, and a State Department culture more open to dissent. In her book, The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age, she shares her personal experience as a diplomat trying to push back against the status quo and offers insight into the State Department’s long history of overlooking others who have tried to do the same. 

Moderating the discussion will be Rose Gottemoeller, Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and CISAC. Gottemoeller served as Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019 and prior to that as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State for nearly five years. 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.

Book Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Dissent-Channel-American-Diplomacy-Dishonest/dp/1541724488

About the Speakers: 

Elizabeth Shackelford was a career diplomat in the U.S. State Department until December 2017, when she resigned in protest of the Trump administration. During her tenure with the Foreign Service, Shackelford served in the U.S. embassies in Warsaw, Poland, and Juba, South Sudan; the U.S. Mission to Somalia; and Washington, D.C. For her work in South Sudan during the outbreak of civil war, Shackelford received the Barbara Watson Award for Consular Excellence, the State Department's highest honor for consular work. Shackelford is a non-resident fellow with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Moderated by: Rose Gottemoeller is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Gottemoeller was Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019. Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. Gottemoeller was also the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation in 2009 and 2010.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/ryBtzvLI0QQ

About the Event: Despite the importance of understanding how refugee crises end, we know little about when and why refugees, who were forced to emigrate, return home. We study the drivers of refugees’ decision-making using original observational and experimental survey data from a representative sample of approximately 3,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that conditions in a refugee’s home country are much more important than the situation in the host country in shaping return intentions. Specifically, our findings suggest that refugees’ decisions are influenced primarily by safety and security in their place of origin, their economic prospects, the availability of public services, and their personal networks. Confidence in information is also important: we find that several drivers of return---safety, services, and networks---only impact intentions among people who have high confidence in their information. By contrast, the conditions in hosting countries–so-called “push'” factors–play a negligible role in the process of refugee return. Even in the face of outright hostility and poor living conditions, refugees are unlikely to return unless the situation at home improves significantly.

About the Speakers: 

Ala’ Alrababa’h is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University, a graduate fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab, and a junior scholar at the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network. His research combines fieldwork, machine learning, and experimental methods to study issues related to authoritarian media, political violence, and migration and refugees. His research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Research and Methods, and International Studies Quarterly. Prior to arriving at Stanford University, Ala’ was a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Jeremy Weinstein is Professor of Political Science, Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He also is faculty co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab and the Data for Development Initiative. In addition, he is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.

His research focuses on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics; the political economy of development; democracy and accountability; and migration. He is the author of Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge University Press), which received the William Riker Prize for the best book on political economy. He is also the co-author of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage Foundation), which received the Gregory Luebbert Award for the best book in comparative politics.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/4X0CfpgDSoQ

About the Event: This ambitious and incisive book presents a new vision for American foreign policy and international order at a time of historic upheaval. The United States global leadership crisis is not a passing shock created by the Trump presidency or COVID-19, but the product of forces that will endure for decades. Amidst political polarization, technological transformation, and major global power shifts, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper convincingly argue, only a grand strategy of openness can protect American security and prosperity despite diminished national strength. Disciplined and forward-looking, an openness strategy would counter authoritarian competitors by preventing the emergence of closed spheres of influence, maintaining access to the global commons, supporting democracies without promoting regime change, and preserving economic interdependence. The authors provide a roadmap for the next president, who must rebuild strength at home while preparing for novel forms of international competition. Lucid, trenchant, and practical,An Open World is an essential guide to the future of geopolitics.

Book Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Open-World-America-Contest-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0300250320/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=an+open+world&qid=1588687676&sr=8-4

About the Speaker: Rebecca Lissner is an Assistant Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College and a Non-Resident Scholar at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies. Previously, Dr. Lissner held research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security Studies at Yale University. Dr. Lissner’s research and writing focuses on international security and American foreign policy. She is the co-author of An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order (Yale University Press, 2020) and is working on a second book examining the effects of military interventions on American grand strategy. Her scholarship has been published in Political Science Quarterly, the Texas National Security Review, Survival, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and International Peacekeeping. Her policy writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Quarterly, among other publications. Dr. Lissner received an AB in Social Studies from Harvard University and an MA and PhD in Government from Georgetown University.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/bUXHbUj5uxE

About the Event: While most civil wars today are fought within Muslim-majority states and, frequently, by armed groups that self-identify as Islamic, we know little about the relationships between and amongst Islamic humanitarian law, Western (treaty-based) humanitarian law, and the rhetoric and behavior of Islamic armed groups. Our legal analysis suggests that, while there is a great deal of overlap between Western and Islamic humanitarian law, this overlap is not perfect. Our empirical analysis, which focuses on both the words and behaviors of Islamic armed groups, suggests similarly mixed results. Specifically, we find that, on average, Islamic armed groups do not appear to be more or less compliant with Western or Islamic humanitarian law than non-Islamic armed groups when it comes to civilian targeting and child soldiering. While they often appeal to Islamic humanitarian law, Islamic armed groups appear to be bound by similar political and military – rather than religious or legal – constraints to non-Islamic armed groups.

About the Speaker: Tanisha Fazal is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict.  Fazal’s current book project analyzes the effect of improvements in medical care in conflict zones on the long-term costs of war.  She is the author of State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton University Press, 2007), and Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2018.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/C6FVf4CoowM

About the Event: U.S. Strategy in the Asian Century presents a new vision for the United States to navigate a region of immense consequence that is in the midst of profound change. As competition between China and the United States intensifies and questions about the sustainability and reliability of American power deepen, Washington must adapt its approach in order revitalize its power, reestablish its leadership, and rebuild the liberal order for the 21st century.

Book Purchase:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231197659/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_9sClFb5GYPYCM

About the Speaker: Abraham M. Denmark is Director of the Asia Program and a Senior Fellow at the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Denmark previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia, for which he received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. He has been named as an Honorary Rear Admiral in the Navy of the Republic of Korea and received the Order of the Resplendent Banner from the Republic of China (Taiwan).

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

Livestream: Please click here to join the livestream webinar via Zoom or log-in with webinar ID 924 4971 4330.

About the Event: International statebuilding aims to transform weak, conflict-affected states into stable modern states, grounded in rule of law, market economies, and liberal democracies (Barnett 2006, Mann 2012). International organizations (IOs) play a central role in this effort. By deploying country-level statebuilding missions in conflict-affected states, IOs aim to co-govern with the conflict-affected state for a defined period of time, helping to strengthen the capacity of the state to govern itself. International relations scholarship assumes that once IOs exercise, possess, and assert their authority to intervene on a country’s domestic territory they do not have to renegotiate this authority. We argue, in contrast, that most agreements between IOs and the host government are incomplete contracts that give weak states substantial authority over the intervening IO. We demonstrate that in a context of changing sovereignty norms, weak states have consistently used their authority to resist the influence of IOs and reduce the effectiveness of international statebuilding efforts. To test the observable implications of these claims, we employ a mixed method research design that integrates text-as-data analysis with in-depth case studies.

About the Speakers:

Susanna P. Campbell is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Service and Director of the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab (RIPIL) at American University. Her research examines the sub-national behavior of international actors in fragile and conflict-affected states, addressing debates in the statebuilding, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, international aid, and global governance literatures. She uses mixed-method research designs and has conducted extensive fieldwork in conflict-affected countries, including Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Sudan, South Sudan, and East Timor. She has received grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Network for International Studies, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Swedish and Dutch governments, among others. In 2018, she won the School of International Service Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award and the Excellence in PhD Mentoring Award.

Prof. Campbell’s first book, Global Governance and Local Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2018), argues that because global governance actors are accountable to external stakeholders, seemingly “bad behavior” by country-based staff is necessary for local peacebuilding performance. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize and featured as one of the 2018 top picks for engaged scholarship by Political Violence @ a Glance. She is finishing a co-authored second book, Aid in Conflict, that explains the aid allocation behavior of international donors in war-torn countries. Her work has also been published by Columbia University Press, International Studies Review, International Peacekeeping, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Political Research Quarterly, among others. Prior to graduate school, she worked for the United Nations, International Crisis Group, and the Council on Foreign Relations and recently served as a senior advisor for the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, mandated by the US Congress. She received her PhD from Tufts University and was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and The Graduate Institute in Geneva.

Aila M. Matanock is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research addresses the ways in which international and other outside actors engage in fragile states. She uses case studies, survey experiments, and cross-national data in this work. She has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Central America, Europe, Melanesia, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. She has received funding for these projects from many sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Minerva Research Initiative, the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START), and the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her 2017 book, Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation, was published by Cambridge University Press. It won the 2018 Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize and was a runner up for the 2018 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize. It is based on her dissertation research at Stanford University, which won the 2013 Helen Dwight Reid award from the American Political Science Association. Her work has also been published by the Annual Review of Political Science, Governance, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and elsewhere. She worked at the RAND Corporation before graduate school, and, since then, she has held fellowships at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UCSD. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University.

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

Livestream: Please click here to join the livestream webinar via Zoom or log-in with webinar ID 913 4480 9317.

About the Event: How do states build lasting international order? Existing explanations of order formation argue that leading states are incentivized to create binding institutions with robust rules and strong enforcement mechanisms. The stability resulting from such institutionalized orders, scholars argue, allows leading states to geopolitically punch above their weight after they have declined in power. I argue, however, that such explanations overlook the trade-off between stability and flexibility, that leading states are faced with. Flexibility calls for short-term agreements that can be renegotiated when the strategic situation changes. And it allows the leading state to take advantage of relative power increases.Whereas states face significant incentives to err on the side of stability if they predict irreversible decline in power, states face incentives to err on the side of flexibility if they predict relative rise in power.  

About the Speaker: Mariya Grinberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 2019. Her primary research examines why states trade with their enemies, investigating the product level and temporal variation in wartime commercial policies of states vis-a-vis enemy belligerents. Her broader research interests include international relations theory focusing on order formation and questions of state sovereignty. Prior to coming to CISAC, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Belfer Center’s International Security Program. She holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago's Committee on International Relations and a B.A. from the University of Southern California.