About the event: Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) have sparked significant debate in international politics and research, especially regarding their ‘critical functions’ of target selection and engagement without human intervention or control. As a response to potential ethical and legal concerns, as well as security-related risks, AWS have been subject to an ongoing international regulation process at the United Nations since 2014. The primary focus of this process has been on maintaining human control over the use of force. However, since its initiation more than a decade ago, no regulatory framework has been agreed upon and core concepts, such as human control, are still highly contested.

Anna's research investigates why the regulation of AWS have not been successful (so far) by analyzing the co-production of weapons technology and arms control politics. In this talk, she shows that it is not solely determined by state interests. Rather, it is influenced by a complex interplay of knowledge production practices and discourses both within and outside of these processes. Moreover, with recent developments in and applications of artificial intelligence (AI), new questions about the nature of human-machine relations in war come to the fore, further complicating the regulatory landscape.

About the speaker: Anna-Katharina Ferl is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the regulation of artificial intelligence and autonomy as well as the practices of knowledge production in international security. Anna received her PhD from the University of Frankfurt in 2024 and previously worked as a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). In addition to academic publications, she has also contributed to several policy reports on topics such as German arms control policies and gender-specific aspects of new technologies in international security.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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About the event: Research shows that women are less likely to protest and have less cellphone access than men. Since studies indicate that cellphones can boost protest participation, we ask whether the gender gap in mobile ownership influences gender disparities in protest turnout. We find that the growing gender digital divide in cellphone ownership exacerbates the participation gap. We use survey data from Africa to show that where women systematically own fewer cellphones than men, they protest less frequently than men. We use a variety of methodological techniques to address concerns of endogeneity. We also probe one mechanism underpinning this relationship; we demonstrate that women who do not own cellphones face a political information disadvantage that limits their engagement. We conclude that unequal cellphone access further entrenches women’s position on the political margins.

This paper was co-authored with Tiffany Barnes, Emily Rains and Jingwen Wu.

About the speaker: Jakana Thomas is Associate Professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy and Department of Political Science at University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on political violence and conflict processes with an emphasis on understanding women’s participation in and experiences with contentious politics. Her work has been published at the leading Political Science and International Relations journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics and International Organization, among other outlets. She is PI on a Blue Shield Foundation funded project examining Californians’ experiences with violence across their lifespans (CalVEX).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: In this talk, Elena Kempf shares material from her forthcoming book on the history of weapons prohibitions in international law from the 1860s to the 1970s.

She argues that weapons prohibitions during this period emerged as a central site of contestation about the limits of the legitimate application of new technologies to war. These debates involved diplomats and international lawyers, but also medical professionals, scientists, and journalists. From their efforts, two ways of justifying a prohibition on a weapon emerged. The first repurposed the old legal concept of unnecessary suffering to newly weigh wounding against the abilities of military surgeons. The second was based on the specter of injury to global systems like shipping lines or the obliteration of major cities.

To revisit the early history of weapons prohibitions under international law is to uncover an expansive vocabulary that might animate future efforts at prohibition or control. This history also reveals the limits of outlawing weapons under international law. Law and technology changed at different velocities, leading to persistent distortions between moral-legal expectations and technical realities. In addition, the project of weapons prohibitions remained fragile, contested by techno-optimist, militarist, and pacifist critics.

About the speaker: Elena Kempf is the Old Dominion Career Development Assistant Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the legal regulation of modern weapons of war. She is currently completing a manuscript on the history of weapons prohibitions in international law from the 1860s to the 1970s. She is also drafting a paper on the history of the concept of unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury. Prior to joining MIT, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at UC Berkeley Law School, and a lecturer with the Department of History at Stanford University. Professor Kempf earned her PhD in History from UC Berkeley in 2021.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Studying the social construction of norms has been a fashionable way to approach understanding European Union politics. Indeed, following the outbreak of the Ukrainian war (2022- present day), scholars of the EU have published a large number of articles exploring norm-driven politics. Many scholars of the EU have seen its engagement with Ukraine as driven by common norms and/or a shared identity. However, this talk will argue that self-interest in the form of the balance of threat assessments of individual countries remains the most crucial factor in understanding patterns of support for Ukraine, as well as explaining the percentage of GDP spent on the military by EU member states. Moreover, defense priorities are driven by a broader set of threats than just that posed by Russia. This talk will further explore how free riding and defense spending are determined by states’ interests in survival rather than shared norms or solidarity. This talk will suggest that scholars should pay greater attention to smaller ad hoc alliances between states that share specific threats, a neglected dimension of the current security environment in Europe.

About the speaker: Stig Jarle Hansen was a Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) before joining Stanford in 2024. At NMBU, he led Norway’s only master's program in International Relations. In 2016-2017, he was a Renee Belfer fellow at Harvard University. He is also a senior nonresident associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. His work is at the intersection of crime, security, and great power politics.

Professor Hansen’s books have received good reviews in Foreign Policy (the best book of the year) and The Economist, and Newsweek published a chapter of one of them. He has contributed to Jane’s Intelligence Review, the MES Insights of the United States Marine Corps, and West Point’s CTC Sentinel. He has commented for CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, CCTV 4, and many other international media outlets.

Professor Hansen has also given presentations to various defense and governance institutions, including the NATO Intelligence Fusion Center, NATO Defense College in Rome, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), has testified in hearings in the British House of Commons, and has been invited to give presentations to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He is a board member of the RAAD institute in Mogadishu, the Abaad center in Aden, and a member of the editorial board of Small Wars and insurgencies.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Weaponized conspiracy theories and social media disinformation have increased exponentially since Facebook’s Frances Haugen testified before the Senate in 2021. Since January 6, 2021, QAnon has been portrayed by government agencies (DHS 2021, FBI 2019), think tanks (Moonshot CVE 2020, Soufan Group 2021) and the mainstream media as dangerous with the “potential for terrorist violence.” This talk will explore the origins of the conspiracy theory, discuss how foreign adversaries of the US weaponize and leverage QAnon to exacerbate polarization and how the conspiracy theory targets LGBTQ+ community and revives racist stereotypes from the period of reconstruction and antisemitic tropes.

Latest article: LGBTQ+ Victimization by Extremist Organizations: Charting a New Path for Research

About the speaker: Mia Bloom is an International Security Fellow at the New America and Professor at Georgia State University. Bloom conducts research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. Bloom is the author of six books and over 80 articles on violent extremism including Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (Columbia 2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing (Routledge 2007) Bombshell: Women and Terror (UPenn 2011) and Small Arms: Children and Terror (Cornell 2019) and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon with Sophia Moskalenko (Stanford 2021). Her next book, Veiled Threats: Women and Jihad was published by Cornell University Press in January 2025. Bloom is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held appointments at Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and McGill Universities. She serves on the Counter-Radicalization boards of the Anti-Defamation League, the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (UNCTED), Women Without Borders and several working groups for the Global Internet Forum for Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). Bloom has a PhD in political science from Columbia University, Masters in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and Bachelors in Russian, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill, and her Pre-Doctorate from Harvard’s Center for International Studies and a Post-Doctorate from Princeton.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Limited number of lunches available for registered guests on day of event.

About the event: How and why do nuclear delivery vehicles proliferate? This talk identifies a permissive environment for the proliferation of nuclear delivery systems in the international nuclear non-proliferation regime. There are three drivers of this dynamic: First, the multipurpose/dual-use nature of the technology to deliver nuclear weapons; second, the definitional obscurity in the non-proliferation regime about what constitutes a ‘nuclear weapon’; and third, the exclusion of legally-enforceable legislation on delivery systems in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. I identify the different pathways of proliferation that both supplier and recipient states use to take advantage of these enabling factors to acquire/disseminate nuclear delivery vehicles. Using qualitative historical evidence from archives across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and India, I use an international history approach to trace the trajectory of the nuclear non-proliferation regime’s regulation of nuclear delivery vehicles. Additionally, I conduct in-depth case studies of the United Kingdom, France, and India’s acquisition of nuclear delivery vehicles. At a time of increasing nuclear concerns in the Indo-Pacific, South Asia, and the Middle East, with states expanding their nuclear and missile arsenals, this talk highlights the different ways in which potential proliferators might acquire nuclear delivery systems and use the nuclear non-proliferation regime to do so.

About the speaker: Debak Das is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. His research interests lie at the intersection of international security, nuclear proliferation, crises, and international history. His research and writing have been published (or are forthcoming) in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Global Studies Quarterly, H-Diplo Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum, International Studies Review, Lawfare, Political Science Quarterly, Research and Politics, Security Studies, Texas National Security Review, The Washington Post, and War on the Rocks. Debak earned his PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2021. He was the MacArthur Nuclear Security Pre-Doctoral Fellow in 2019-2020, and a Stanton Nuclear Security Post-Doctoral Fellow in 2021-2022, at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Debak holds an M.Phil in Diplomacy and Disarmament, and an M.A. in Politics (with specialization in International Relations) from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Debak is also an affiliate at CISAC at Stanford University, the Centre de Recherche Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, Paris, and at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi.

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About the event: What are the prospects for arms control agreements between the United States and China? Conventional wisdom is pessimistic, pointing to recent tensions between great powers. Yet we still lack a comprehensive review of the history of arms control negotiations, placing the current context in perspective. This presentation presents some initial findings of a data collection effort, conducted jointly with Matthew Fuhrmann (Texas A&M). We identify close to 200 arms control agreements from 1816 to 2017. We conclude that arms control agreements have served very different purposes. Some have been symmetric, imposing restrictions on all parties involved, while others have been asymmetric, cementing a balance of power after a global shock or excluding third parties from a technology. These agreements follow different logics and symmetric agreements, which the United States would be pursuing with China, have been rare. Even setting aside recent tensions, arms control agreements would be challenging.

About the speaker: Alexandre Debs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where he is also the Faculty Director of the Nuclear Security Program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

Alexandre’s research focuses on the causes of war and nuclear politics. His work has appeared in top political science and international relations journals. He is the author of the book Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (with Nuno Monteiro), published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Since June 2024, Alexandre has been serving as Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review.

Alexandre received a Ph.D. degree in Economics from M.I.T., an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and a B.Sc. in Economics and Mathematics from Universite de Montreal.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Harmful content on social media is a growing challenge with global consequences. Despite ongoing efforts to regulate major platforms, extremist groups continue to exploit gaps in content moderation to incite violence, recruit followers, and coordinate attacks.

In this talk, Tamar Mitts will present insights from her forthcoming book, Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism, which examines how militant and hate groups adapt their strategies in response to platform policies. Drawing on multi-platform data from over a hundred extremist organizations, Mitts reveals how inconsistent moderation across platforms creates safe havens where these actors evade detection, rebrand, and sustain their movements.

Mitts will argue that effectively addressing these challenges requires a paradigm shift -- moving beyond single "fixes" to recognize content moderation as a public policy challenge rather than a series of isolated platform decisions. Join us to explore how current efforts to combat harmful content often fall short, why extremist and hate groups remain so resilient online, and the questions we need to ask as we strive to better protect the digital public sphere from hate and violence.

About the speaker: Tamar Mitts is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Faculty Member at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, the Institute of Global Politics, and the Data Science Institute. Her research examines how digital platforms and emerging technologies shape conflict, security, and democracy. Her forthcoming book, Safe Havens for Hate (Princeton University Press), explores how gaps in content moderation allow extremist and hate groups to evade enforcement, adapt, and mobilize across platforms. Her work has been published in leading journals, including American Political Science Review, International Organization, and Journal of Politics.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Reception to follow panel

About the event: This January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock one second forward to 89 seconds to midnight - the closest it has been in its nearly 80-year history. The experts that set the Doomsday Clock each year look at a variety issues such as climate change, the misuse of biological science, and a variety of emerging technologies. But central to the decision on how to set the Clock is nuclear risk, where the threats continue to grow.

Arms control structures and measures, built over the course of the last half-century, are crumbling and major powers have refused to engage in sustained, substantive dialogue on reducing nuclear risk. Proliferation risks are on the rise and it seems as if the world is poised at the starting line of a full-fledged multi-state nuclear arms race. Adding to the complication, emerging and disruptive technologies threaten to upend longstanding theories on deterrence and stability.

The outlook seems bleak, but with signals from President Trump and others about the need to talk or even "denuclearize," is there hope for a new era of arms control?

Join four leading experts from the Bulletin to discuss the panoply of current nuclear risks, as well as the methods and tools for reducing them.

About the speakers: 

Jerry Brown was sworn in as governor of California on January 3, 2011, and was reelected in 2014. Brown previously was elected governor in 1974 and served two terms, during which time he established the first agricultural labor relations law in the country, started the California Conservation Corp and promoted renewable energy. In 1970, he was elected California secretary of state. Brown began his career as a clerk at the California Supreme Court. In 1998, he reentered politics and was elected mayor of Oakland, serving two terms from 1999 to 2007. Brown founded the Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute, which serve students from the 6th grade through the 12th grade. He was also elected California attorney general in 2006. Brown graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his bachelor’s degree in classics and earned his law degree from Yale Law School in 1964.

Alexandra Bell is the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. A noted policy expert and former diplomat, she oversees the Bulletin's publishing programs, management of the Doomsday Clock, and a growing set of activities around nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies.  Before joining the Bulletin, Alexandra Bell served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Affairs in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability (ADS) at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, she has worked at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and the Council for a Livable World, Ploughshares Fund, and the Center for American Progress. Bell received a Master’s degree in International Affairs from the New School and a Bachelor’s degree in Peace, War and Defense from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2001-2003, she was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica. Bell is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Herb Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.  His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy and in the security dimensions of information warfare and influence operations on national security.  In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In 2016, he served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.  Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

Rose Gottemoeller is the William J. Perry Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute. 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. Prior to her government service, she was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with joint appointments to the Nonproliferation and Russia programs. She served as the Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from 2006 to 2008, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program. At Stanford, Gottemoeller teaches and mentors students in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program and the CISAC Honors program; contributes to policy research and outreach activities; and convenes workshops, seminars and other events relating to her areas of expertise, including nuclear security, Russian relations, the NATO alliance, EU cooperation and non-proliferation. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Limited number of lunches available for registered guests on day of event.

About the event: Climate change has been deemed the greatest threat to global public health, yet critical gaps remain in understanding how this anthropogenic phenomenon impacts health-relevant infrastructure and decision-making. My research leverages ecological principles and data science to address a subset of these gaps at the intersection of extreme environmental change and adaptive interventions for planetary and human health. In this talk, I present work evaluating how rising temperatures affect the design and deployment of vector-borne disease prevention strategies, using Aedes aegypti mosquitoes as a case study. I discuss the methodological challenge of predicting how unprecedented ecological perturbations drive disease persistence and transmission, leveraging historical dengue outbreaks to interrogate the capacity of data-driven methods for forecasting explosive, environmentally sensitive epidemiological events. Finally, I outline how economic forces contribute to and can mitigate anthropogenic change, focusing on the role of targeted investments in antibiotic research and development to reduce ecological contamination and address the growing crisis of antimicrobial resistance. Throughout, I highlight the utility of scientific software for advancing equity and efficiency in human and planetary health management. 

About the speaker: Dr. Váleri Vásquez is a Biotechnology Innovation and International Security Fellow at Stanford University, with appointments in the Department of Biology and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research develops mathematical frameworks to render infectious disease management more robust to environmental uncertainty, as well as scientific software to guide strategic policymaking in public health. Dr. Vásquez completed her PhD at the University of California Berkeley in August 2023, with an emphasis in Computational Data Science and Engineering. Prior to her doctorate she specialized in international climate policy at the U.S. Department of State, serving on the senior team shaping the 2015 Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Dr. Vásquez holds an MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an MS in Energy and Resources, both from UC Berkeley. She earned her BA from the College of William and Mary.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.