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.

About the event: Studies have found that voters in democratic countries are far more reluctant to use military force against democracies than against nondemocracies. This pattern may help explain why democracies almost never wage war against other democracies. In an important contribution, Rathbun, Parker, and Pomeroy (2024) propose that the apparent democratic peace in public opinion is an artifact of failing to account for race. Rather than democracy itself influencing support for war, they argue, the term “democracy” cues assumptions about the adversary’s racial composition, and those racialized assumptions are the true drivers of support for war. We reevaluate RPP’s evidence, concluding that their data do not support their predictions. In fact, their novel experiments provide powerful evidence that democracy affects support for war, independent of race. Our findings contribute to major debates about both regime type and race in international relations, as well as the design and interpretation of survey experiments.

About the speaker: Jessica L. P. Weeks is Professor of Political Science and H. Douglas Weaver Chair in Diplomacy and International Relations in the Department of Political Science at UW-Madison. Her research has appeared in journals including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, International Organization, and World Politics. Her book, Dictators at War and Peace, explores the domestic politics of international conflict in dictatorships. Weeks was the 2018 recipient of the International Studies Association Karl Deutsch Award, recognizing the scholar under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations. Professor Weeks received a B.A. in political science from The Ohio State University in 2001, a Master’s degree in international history from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in 2003, and a PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2009.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: What explains the current US arsenal of unmanned systems? Why, for example, is the contemporary arsenal dominated by aerial unmanned systems versus the munitions that dominated earlier developments? This book challenges traditional explanations for the proliferation of unmanned systems that focus on capacity or structure. Instead, this book argues that beliefs and identities shape the structures and capacities chosen when the United States invests in weapon systems. In particular, it traces beliefs about technological determinism and military revolutions, force protection and casualty aversion, and service identities to explain why the United States has invested so heavily in remote-controlled unmanned aerial platforms over the last three decades. In doing so, the book illustrates how ideas become influential to ultimately manifest in budget lines, detailing the policy entrepreneurs, critical junctures, and path dependencies that shape the lifecycle of beliefs about unmanned weapon systems. The book begins by providing a historical overview of US unmanned systems investments, taking an expansive view of unmanned technologies from land mines to missiles and drones from the Revolutionary War to contemporary investments. It then leans on theories of norms, ideas, and influence to detail the role of the Office of Net Assessment, Vietnam, 9/11, and armed service identity in building the United States’ current unmanned arsenal. Finally, it concludes with what this case of unmanned technologies reveals about US support to Ukraine as well as contemporary weapons debates about cyber, information technology, space, and hypersonic missiles.

About the speaker: Jacquelyn Schneider is the Hargrove Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and an affiliate with Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology, national security, and political psychology with a special interest in cybersecurity, autonomous technologies, wargames, and Northeast Asia. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the Naval War College as well as a senior policy advisor to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

Dr. Schneider is an active member of the defense policy community with previous positions at the Center for a New American Security and the RAND Corporation. Before beginning her academic career, she spent six years as an Air Force officer in South Korea and Japan and is currently a reservist assigned to US Space Systems Command. She has a BA from Columbia University, MA from Arizona State University, and PhD from George Washington University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the Event: Our speaker, Ambassador Juan Carlos Pinzón, will explore the intricate intersections of geopolitics, national security, and organized crime in the context of a rapidly evolving global landscape. He will examine the shift toward global power competition, the growing influence of the Global South, and the implications for national security in areas such as geoeconomics, trade, and technological rivalry. His discussion will delve into the socio-economic roots of organized crime, its entanglement with transnational networks, and its role in fueling proxy wars and political instability.

Key themes that Ambassador Pinzón will develop in this talk include the transformation of criminal organizations into national security threats, their influence over communities, and their capacity to undermine democratic institutions. He will also analyze when organized crime expands into or allies with terrorist networks and armed non-state actors. Ambassador Pinzón will conclude by considering policy options for confronting transnational organized crime through international cooperation.

About the Speaker: Juan Carlos Pinzón is currently a John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. visiting professor at Princeton University. He was previously Colombia's Minister of Defense and ambassador to the United States on two occasions. He served as ambassador to the United States between 2021 and 2022, celebrating 200 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries and between 2015 and 2017 strengthening the bilateral relationship. Previously, during 2018 and 2021 he was president of ProBogotá, a private non-profit entity for the promotion of public policies and long-term strategic projects for Colombia's capital region. During the period from 2011 to 2015 he served as Colombia's youngest Minister of Defense at a critical moment in the country's history.

In addition to these positions, he has also held other positions such as Chief of Staff to the President of Colombia from 2010 to 2011, Vice Minister of Defense from 2006 to 2009, Senior Advisor to the Executive Director of the World Bank from 2004 to 2006, Vice President of the Colombian Banking Association from 2003 to 2004, Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Finance from 2000 to 2002. In the 2018 national elections he served as presidential and vice-presidential candidate.

Juan Carlos Pinzón is an Economist from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, with a master's degree in economics from the same institution, and a master degree in Public Policy from Princeton University and Honoris Causa in National Security and Defense from the Colombian War College. Pinzón has also taken advanced courses in strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, science and technology policy at Harvard University, and smart cities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Finally, he has several awards and over 60 decorations such as the Grand Cross of the Order of Boyacá and the Distinguished Public Service Medal from the U.S. Department of Defense.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the event: How AI might be used in nuclear command and control is the subject of much discussion in national security circles.  But this debate—important though it has been—obscures many other ways that AI could be used or should not be used across the entire nuclear weapons enterprise.  (In this talk, the nuclear weapons enterprise also encompasses nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, the associated command and control and the links of these entities to AI in systems not usually associated with nuclear weapons.)  Key attributes of AI and the nuclear weapons enterprise will be reviewed, principles for thinking about AI in the nuclear weapons enterprise discussed, and specific guidelines for assessing the wisdom of AI in any given nuclear application proposed.

About the speaker: Herbert Lin is senior research scholar and Hank J. Holland Fellow at Stanford University whose research interests are at the intersection of national security and emerging technologies. He is Chief Scientist Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies and serves on the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Lin was a member of President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity (2016) and the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder (2020).  He was also a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee, where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has cast a spotlight on Russia’s burgeoning partnership with Iran. Moscow looked to Tehran for drones and ammunition to fuel its so-called ‘special military operation’, and Iran’s support for Russia’s war reflected a decade-long strengthening of Russo-Iranian ties, beginning with the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.

Despite a relationship historically marred by mistrust and unmet expectations, the two regimes have worked together to promote their common interests in Syria, where battlefield coordination soon developed into much deeper political alignment. Nicole Grajewski uncovers the drivers of ever-closer cooperation between the Kremlin and the Islamic Republic. Detailing the internal structures, shared anxieties and broader ambitions underpinning this alignment, she explores the genesis of Russia and Iran’s mutual antagonism towards the Western-led global order; the impact of deep-seated leadership concerns over regime security and domestic protests; and the future trajectory of the partnership within the larger world order.

About the speaker: Nicole Grajewski is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Oxford and is the author of Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance from Syria to Ukraine.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: When states go to war, they must devise a strategy that anticipates how their use of military force will achieve national objectives. But that choice is heavily constrained. This book project shows how wartime strategy is a function of both dispositional and situational factors - that is, the military’s abiding organizational preferences, and the government’s contingency-specific decisions, respectively. This presentation focuses on one of the book’s key theoretical contributions: how a military’s structure and processes reveal its unwritten warfighting preferences. In the Indian case, official doctrine pronouncements suggest a military that is postured to fight state of the art maneuver warfare. But, in reality, its entrenched preferences have not changed in over half a century, and heavily favor attritional combat. Doctrine, of course, is not destiny - states like India can and have fought differently under certain extraordinary conditions. But absent those rare conditions, the Indian Army’s attritional preferences dominate the state’s strategic options, which has implications for conventional deterrence and strategic stability.

About the speaker: Arzan Tarapore is a Research Scholar whose research focuses on Indian military strategy and regional security issues in the Indo-Pacific. In academic year 2024-25, he is also a part-time Visiting Research Professor at the China Landpower Studies Center, at the U.S. Army War College. Prior to his scholarly career, he served for 13 years in the Australian Defence Department in various analytic, management, and liaison positions, including operational deployments and a diplomatic posting to the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC.

His academic work has been published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, International Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, Asia Policy, and Joint Force Quarterly, among others, and his policy commentary frequently appears on platforms such as Foreign Affairs, the Hindu, the Indian Express, The National Interest, the Lowy Institute's Interpreter, the Brookings Institution’s Lawfare, and War on the Rocks.

He previously held research and teaching positions at Georgetown University, the East-West Center in Washington, the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, and the RAND Corporation.

He earned a PhD in war studies from King's College London, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA (Hons) from the University of New South Wales. Follow his commentary on Twitter @arzandc and his website at arzantarapore.com.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the event: Why do some leaders reposition themselves on salient foreign policy issues in ways that may contradict their earlier behavior or rhetoric? I argue that expectations of how leaders ought to behave are tied to their reputations; however, leaders are also both strategic actors and reputationally mindful. In other words, leaders have strategic incentives to either maintain or moderate their reputations on salient foreign policy issues – a phenomenon I term reputation management. Using controlled case comparisons of eight cases of foreign policy position-taking across India, Israel, South Korea and the United States, I argue that two variables -- the salience of a moderation imperative, and the degree of electoral constraint circumscribing leader behavior -- determine the opportunity costs for leaders to either maintain or moderate their reputations, which outwardly manifests as behavioral consistency or inconsistency respectively.

About the speaker: Fahd Humayun is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He completed his PhD in Political Science from Yale University in 2022 before joining Tufts University as an Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research looks at the domestic sources of interstate conflict and crisis behavior, expanding on existing theories of democratic accountability and political representation as they pertain to domestic decision-making and crisis signaling. His book project, “Leaders, Reputation & War” uses case studies of foreign policy position-taking India, Israel, South Korea and the United States to explain why domestic politics compels some leaders to commit to unanticipated national security pathways. He also holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in International History from the London School of Economics.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.