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.

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About the event: In nearly every country with sizable armed forces, debates persist about the relative effectiveness of military recruitment systems. Conventional wisdom asserts that volunteer armies fight more effectively in battle than conscript armies due to higher levels of training and motivation. I argue instead that conscript forces outperform their volunteer counterparts for several reasons. First, higher domestic political costs of sending draftees into combat incentivize leaders to vet military operations more carefully. Second, the leaders restrict conflicts to those that involve broadly recognized national interests, for which individual conscripts are highly motivated to bear real costs. Third, the average demographic makeup of conscript armies is superior to that of volunteer armies, which translates into advantages in battlefield skill acquisition. Democratic regime type and longer enlistment terms further bolster the battlefield effectiveness of conscript armies. I provide support for these propositions by analyzing cross-national battle-level data as well as American battlefield performance during the Vietnam War. My findings contribute to debates about military recruitment policy and civil–military relations.

About the speaker: Changwook Ju is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He specializes in International Relations and security studies, with a focus on military recruitment and effectiveness, China and global politics, and conflict-related sexual violence.

Changwook earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2024. Before Yale, he received an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy in 2018. In 2015, he graduated from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea, with dual undergraduate degrees in public policy and political science.

From 2011 to 2013, Changwook served in the Republic of Korea Marine Corps, attaining the rank of sergeant.

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About the event: Scholars have long debated why some conflicts spiral into prolonged cycles of hostility, while others fizzle out. Conventional wisdom suggests that states, when challenged, can demonstrate their resolve by retaliating militarily, thereby deterring future challenges. I argue that the desire for revenge, rather than deterrence concerns, shapes when individuals prefer military retaliation and why such actions provoke cyclical conflicts. Public support for military retaliation is primarily driven by a human desire to balance the suffering inflicted upon one's own ingroup, often without regard for the consequences. Consequently, instead of achieving deterrence, imposing costs on an adversary through military retaliation tends to provoke reciprocal retaliation. I test my theory using a preregistered survey experiment in which China attempts to deter U.S. intervention in a hypothetical Taiwan Strait crisis through retaliation. The results align with the logic of revenge. Rather than deterring the U.S., China's retaliation, which imposes greater suffering on the U.S., increases public support for further escalation, even in scenarios of secret U.S. retaliation with no deterrent benefit. This study contributes to the deterrence versus spiral model debate in two ways. First, it challenges the deterrence model, particularly theories of reputation for resolve. Second, it complements the spiral model by providing an alternative psychological microfoundation for the endogenous emergence of conflict spirals.

About the speaker: X Zhang is a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Zhang's research interests include the political psychology of interstate conflict, public opinion, and the domestic politics of foreign policy.

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About the event: Modern survey experiments indicate that in the event of a limited nuclear strike, the public in the targeted country, including a great democracy, would demand a decisive response. The implications for crisis stability are dire. Just at the moment when democratic decision makers would struggle to formulate a proportional response, they would also have to contend with an enraged populace shouting for vengeance. Public opinion as recently characterized is anathema to sound crisis management. The same mass sentiment that bolstered democratic resolve in the triumphal years after the Cold War now abandons presidents in the age of nuclear multipolarity to foredoomed strategies that overplay their hand. This, however, is not the whole story. Public opinion in real life also prevents leaders from throwing it all away or allowing crises to slip out of control. The Missiles of October in 1962 threatened international peace under different geopolitical circumstances, but the role of public opinion then has lessons for today. What might be called the Robert McNamara-Brent Scowcroft school still reigns. Rather than preclude crisis management, public opinion on net enables it: amplifying popular demand for peace and motivating extraordinary leader performance to preserve it.

About the speaker: Dr. Damon Coletta served as the endowed Scowcroft Professor of Political Science (2020-2021) at the United States Air Force Academy and director of the department’s Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies (2022-2023).  Damon edits the peer-reviewed e-journal, Space & Defense (2012-2024) and serves as social sciences liaison to USAFA’s nationally recognized Nuclear Weapons & Strategy minor program.  He completed a book on science & technology policy and international security, Courting Science: Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century (Stanford, 2016), and coedited NATO’s Return to Europe (Georgetown, 2017).

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About the event: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been invoked over one hundred times since its formal endorsement by the UN General Assembly in 2005. Although R2P was designed to protect populations around the world from mass atrocity, it is selectively applied to societies outside of the North. Cases of inaction are also observed over atrocities in the South that would otherwise qualify for intervention by UN standards. Why does the international community intervene in some cases and not others? I argue that R2P betrays a racialized bias whereby the legal principle of sovereignty is transformed into a conditional privilege withheld from most non-European countries all else equal. Debates over a peoples’ capacity for self-rule are historically framed or even justified by racism. Since R2P restores a similar debate wherein state sovereignty becomes contingent, it can affirm prevailing beliefs about race and capacity for self-governance as a means to political ends. I examine R2P cross-nationally by matching countries on characteristics that likely drive intervention. Using UN resolutions and original data on mass atrocity events, I measure the relationship between country racial majority and the decision to intervene. The results suggest that R2P is disproportionately invoked over societies racialized as non-white. To address variation in R2P invocation over countries in the South, I examine a set of cases qualitatively and show that inaction by the international community is racial as it is strategic. A theory of race deepens understanding of the contradictory values that cohere to shape international law and intervention. 

About the speaker: Bianca Freeman is a 2024-2026 UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD from UC San Diego Political Science in the summer of 2024. Bianca’s research focuses on the politics of race and racism in international law. In her dissertation and book project, she examines norms and agreements between states as legal outcomes of racial hierarchy in world politics. Bianca has published or has work forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science, Security Studies, International Studies Review, International Politics, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. 

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About the event: Questions about the likelihood of conflict between the United States and China have dominated international policy discussion for years. But the leading theory of power transitions between a declining hegemon and a rising rival is based exclusively on European examples, such as the Peloponnesian War, as well as the rise of Germany under Bismarck and the Anglo-German rivalry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What lessons does East Asian history offer, for both the power transitions debate and the future of U.S.-China relations?
Examining the rise and fall of East Asian powers over 1,500 years, we point out that East Asia historically has functioned very differently than did Europe; and even today the region has dynamics that are not leading to balancing or competitive behavior. In fact, the East Asian experience underscores domestic risks and constraints on great powers, not relative rise and decline in international competition. The threat of a US-China war from power transition is lower than often recognized, and the East Asian region is more stable than normally recognized.

About the speaker: Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods. Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

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About the Event: Kim Jong Un’s recent remarks highlighting the goal of exponentially increasing North Korea’s nuclear arsenal underscore the regime’s aggressive pursuit of advanced nuclear capabilities. This growing threat poses a critical concern for global security, particularly amid escalating geopolitical tensions and the burgeoning military cooperation between Russia and North Korea. This study utilizes an integrated methodology, combining satellite imagery, geological analysis, and technical assessments, to evaluate North Korea’s fissile material production capacity and strategic resources availability necessary to fulfill its nuclear ambitions. By examining the evolving state of North Korea's plutonium production and uranium enrichment capacities, as well as its efficiency of mining operations and critical metal reserves, this research provides key insights into the country’s potential for sustained nuclear development, highlighting how control over strategic resources remains a pivotal factor in North Korea’s pursuit of military development and geopolitical leverage.

About the Speaker: Sulgiye Park is a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where she specializes in North Korea and China’s nuclear fuel pathway. She received her Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Stanford University, focusing on nuclear materials in extreme environments. She later worked at the Stanford Institute of Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), fabricating nanodiamonds for technological applications, which granted her a Jamieson Award. As a Stanton and MacArthur Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Dr. Park focused on the critical nexus between natural resource management, strategic supply chains, and nuclear security. Her work highlighted the foundational role of geologic resources in enabling nuclear ambitions, including geologic analyses of North Korea’s uranium and critical metal reserves. She utilized open-source intelligence to monitor nuclear activities, providing insights into nonproliferation challenges. Dr. Park also examined regulatory frameworks for U.S. nuclear waste management and studied rare-earth metal production and critical metal supply chain vulnerabilities, emphasizing their strategic importance for national security and technological innovation.

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About the Event: When and how do nationalist protests at home affect crisis bargaining at the international level? Though plausible, the overall effect and the scope conditions for nationalist protests to influence international crisis bargaining remain unspecified, particularly due to two uncertainties: the host government, which is uncertain whether a protest will escalate into an anti-government mobilization, and the foreign government, which is uncertain whether the observed protest constitutes a genuinely credible constraint or just a strategic misrepresentation of the host government’s preference over the disputed issue. The lack of ex-ante theoretical expectations has led to the proliferation of ad hoc ex-post justifications for nationalist protests’ determinant or indeterminate roles during international crises. Using a two-step modeling approach, this paper shows that the threat to the host government posed by the nationalist protests is a prerequisite for them to exert influence on international crisis bargaining. Moreover, the relationship between the threats to the host government from nationalist protests and the likelihood of bargaining failure is non-monotonic - that is, first decreasing and then increasing in the magnitude of the threat. This result is tested with an in-depth case study of the (in)effective signaling with the 2014 anti-China protest in Vietnam.

About the Speaker: Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods.

More broadly, Xinru’s research encompasses three main objectives: Substantively, she aims to better theorize and enhance cross-country perspectives on critical phenomena such as nationalism and its impact on international security; Methodologically, she strives to improve measurement and causal inference based on careful methodologies, including formal modeling and computational methods; Empirically, she challenges prevailing assumptions that inflate the perceived risk of militarized conflicts in East Asia, by providing original data and analysis rooted in local knowledge and regional perceptions.

Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

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About the Event: In response to Hamas’s deadly attack against Israel and its citizens on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a significant ground invasion into Gaza in self-defense, aimed at eliminating Hamas’s military capabilities and removing it from political power. Israel’s military operations have generated extensive commentary about its compliance with international humanitarian law, particularly concerning the jus in bello principles of distinction and proportionality. However, there has been much less scrutiny of Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality, a well-established principle under international law that considers the overall scope of a state’s use of force and dictates that a war’s means must not be excessive in relation to its aims. Our paper assesses Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality. After providing an overview of the jus ad bellum proportionality principle, we rely on novel radar satellite imagery analysis to document the widespread destruction that has resulted from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Based on these data, we argue that Israel’s use of force is excessive, and that the war Israel is currently waging in Gaza is not in compliance with the principle of jus ad bellum proportionality.

About the Speakers:

Bailey Ulbricht is the founding Executive Director at the Stanford Humanitarian Program, where she works on legal research projects aimed at reducing harm in conflict settings and other insecure environments. She has a particular interest in how technology exacerbates harms, or conversely, how it can be used to document or reduce harms. Before coming to Stanford, she founded the humanitarian ed-tech nonprofit Paper-Airplanes, was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Turkey, and was a humanitarian worker with refugee communities on the Turkish-Syrian border. Bailey has two masters' degrees in Islamic Law and Islamic Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her B.A. in International Relations magna cum laude from Carleton College and her J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Allen S. Weiner, Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, is an international legal scholar who focuses primarily on international security and international conflict resolution. He also studies the challenges of online misinformation and disinformation. Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, the Stanford Humanitarian Program, and the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.  His scholarship is deeply informed by practice; he served as an international lawyer in the U.S. State Department for more than a decade before joining the Stanford faculty.  He earned his A.B. at Harvard and his J.D. at Stanford.

Jamon Van Den Hoek is an Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University where he directs the Conflict Ecology lab. Jamon's research focuses on using satellite and geospatial data to gauge the direct and indirect consequences of armed conflict on vulnerable people and landscapes. Before coming to Oregon State, Jamon was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Corey Scher is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Corey studies physical impacts of war and conflict using Earth observation data, geostatistics, and theory from the geosciences. His mapping of damage to urban areas in geographies including Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon has been featured in journalistic and humanitarian publications worldwide. He holds a master's degree in geology from the City College of New York and a bachelor's degree in geology from the University of California, Berkeley.

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