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

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

View Written Draft Paper

About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

Please note: the start time for this event has been moved from 3:00 to 3:15pm.

Join FSI Director Michael McFaul in conversation with Richard Stengel, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. They will address the role of entrepreneurship in creating stable, prosperous societies around the world.

About the Event: This talk will look at the experience of India in terms of its security, identity, and the command of nuclear weapons since 1998.

About the Speaker: Professor Amitabh Mattoo is Professor of Disarmament Studies at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. He has been an Advisor of Cabinet-Rank to the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, and a Vice Chancellor of the University of Jammu. He has been a member of India’s National Security Council’s Advisory Board and a member of the Prime Minister’s National Knowledge Commission. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the President of India for his contribution to public life.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Lunch will be served at the William J. Perry Conference Room from 12:00 PM-12:30 PM

About the Event: What is happening in Ukraine? The free world is fighting a war against dictatorship. And good news...the free world is winning.

About the Speaker: Oleksiy Goncharenko is a Ukrainian politician, member of the Ukrainian parliament, member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and Vice President of the PACE Committee on Migration, Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons. He is a member of the "European Solidarity" group in Parliament, and head of the caucuses "For Democratic Belarus," and "For Free Caucasus." 

After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Oleksiy Goncharenko joined the country’s civilian Territorial Defense Forces for the first month. Не has fought against Russian propaganda, and he also publishes widely in international media in order to bring the truth to the world about Ukraine. He was included in the sanctioned persons lists of the Russian Federation. 

Oleksiy is a founder of Ukraine’s largest network of educational-cultural centers, the Goncharenko Centers, which since February 2022 have become volunteer hubs.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Systemic risks derive from a mix of economic, technological, socio political, and ecological factors. Inherently interdisciplinary, the study of systemic risk draws on financial shock models, operations research, global health, foresight, management, military strategy, risk assessment, risk sociology, disaster research, security studies, science and technology studies, existential risk research, as well as the AI risk and biorisk communities. Pulling together core insights from those fields, the talk presents the argument that even mid-range (meso level) risks may become systemic, and so might contribute to catastrophic or even existential outcomes, depending on the order and magnitude of the interaction effects between them. However, the study of systemic risk requires developing transdisciplinary tools that can better integrate the insights drawn from these disparate fields despite high uncertainty. Nevertheless, apart from a tiny literature on risk assessment of rare events (black/grey swans), and embryonic efforts at the the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) at a high level of abstraction, there is still no overarching framework specifically formulated for systemic risks beyond economics.

This talk seeks to promote the integrated study of systemic risk by offering a snapshot of five risk scenarios for 2075 (in video format), a custom-created board game, a transdisciplinary approach, conceptual clarifications, risk factor identification heuristics, and early results from an ongoing survey. The talk includes a novel attempt to structure and visualize systemic risk factors. It also sketches a notation that enables a simple way to annotate relationships between systemic risks and the cascading effects and relationships between them. Lastly, the case is made that we need a dual notation (scientific and lay) for any scenario models used in scientific results meant to also be consumed by the public.

About the Speaker: Dr. Trond Arne Undheim (see his Stanford profile), Ph.D is a Research Scholar in Global Systemic Risk, Innovation, and Policy at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford. He leads a research project on Global Systemic Risk Scenarios for 2075, addressing the fact that humanity faces a myriad of existential risks of technological, sociopolitical, and ecological origin. The project involves developing a set of audiovisual scenarios, quantitative online surveys, technology reviews (generative AI, immersive AR/VR, quantum tech, synthetic biology platforms), and regional case studies (Nigeria, Mexico, USA, Scandinavia, India). He is also developing a framework to analyze cascading risks, assembling a set of risk factors and associated mitigation strategies, which is intended as a resource towards transdisciplinary collaboration. At Stanford, he teaches STS 156 The Future Of Global Systemic Risk (EARTHSYS 156, SOC 128) and is working on a 2024 course (STS X) tentatively called From Regenerative Entrepreneurship to Giga Projects. His next book, Eco Tech: Investing in Regenerative Futures comes out in the fall and will be on pre-order starting Aug 2, 2023 from Routledge.

Trond Arne Undheim is a futurist, scholar, podcaster, and venture partner and an expert on the evolution of technology and society. He is a Research Scholar in Global Systemic Risk, Innovation, and Policy at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University. He is also a venture partner at Antler, and a co-founder of technology foresight consulting firm Yegii. Formerly with Tulip Interfaces, Hitachi Ventures, MIT, WPP, Oracle, and the EU, he’s a co-author (with Natan Linder) of Augmented Lean (Wiley 2022), and is the author of Health Tech (Routledge 2021), Future Tech (Kogan Page 2021), Pandemic Aftermath (Atmosphere Press 2020), Disruption Games (Atmosphere Press 2020), and Leadership From Below (Lulu Press 2008). In addition, he hosts the Futurized podcast, and is a Forbes columnist. Trond's work has featured in a variety of business, industrial, and mainstream media, including in The Boston Globe, NPR's Cognoscenti, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, IndustryWeek, and MIT News. He holds a Ph.D. on the future of work and artificial intelligence. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The U.S. Foreign Service faces one of the most difficult times in its history while dealing with a growing array of challenges around the world. In order to more effectively advance U.S. political, economic and security interests in a time of rapid change, America’s diplomats require additional resources, better training and stronger leadership.

Ambassadors Marc Grossman and Marcie B. Ries, working with a team of career diplomats on the American Diplomacy Project, have produced blueprints for modernizing the U.S. diplomatic service, focusing on four key areas:  a renewed and revised mission and mandate for America’s diplomats; expanded opportunities for professional education and training; a modernized and more flexible personnel system; and a Diplomatic Reserve Corps. 

Ambassadors Grossman and Ries will discuss this important report and its key recommendations on Wednesday, March 29 from 10:00-11:15 am in the Perry Conference Room at Encina Hall at Stanford University.

About the Speakers:

Ambassador Marc Grossman served as the under secretary of state for political affairs, the State Department's third highest position, until his retirement in 2005 after 29 years in the Foreign Service.  As under secretary, he helped marshal diplomatic support for the international response to the September 11 attacks.  He also managed U.S. policies in the Balkans and Colombia and promoted a key expansion of the NATO alliance.  As assistant secretary of state for European affairs, he helped direct NATO's military campaign in Kosovo and an earlier round of NATO expansion.  Ambassador Grossman served as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey 1994–1997.

Ambassador Marcie B. Ries retired after more than 35 years of diplomatic experience in Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East.  She is a three-time chief of mission, serving as head of the U.S. mission in Kosovo (2003–2004), U.S. ambassador to Albania (2004–2007) and U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria (2012–2015).  She also played a key role in the negotiation of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Co-Sponsored by CISAC and the Stanford Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

The 3rd annual Stanford Existential Risks Conference aims to take stock of global catastrophic and existential risk studies. A special focus of this year's conference will be risk intersections, reinforcements, and cascades: how one risk may amplify (or diminish) another, and how multiple risks interact to create new concerns that may be larger than the sum of their parts. The conference will also feature discussions of the ethics of radical longtermism. 

The conference will take place at Stanford University in a hybrid format. It begins with a welcome dinner on April 20 for in-person participants. All of April 21 will be in-person, with all events broadcast online for remote participants. The morning of April 22 will feature remote presentations and participation, available to the in-person audience as well. For the remainder of April 22, we will close with in-person (and remotely available) events.

Space is limited and registration is required.  For more information visit https://sericonference.stanford.edu/

About SERI

Founded in 2019, the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative is a collaboration between Stanford faculty and students dedicated to mitigating existential risks, such as extreme climate change, nuclear winter, global pandemics (and other risks from synthetic biology), and risks from advanced artificial intelligence. Our goal is to foster engagement from both within and beyond the Stanford community to produce meaningful work aiming to preserve the future of humanity. We aim to provide skill-building, networking, professional pathways, and community for students and faculty interested in pursuing existential risk reduction.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Sponsored by CISAC and Stanford Health Policy

About the Event: Dean Winslow describes the challenges facing the US during the COVID-19 pandemic emphasizing the importance of diagnostic testing in responding to the pandemic.  He discusses the critical role of the US government in procuring and stockpiling  tests and providing them to areas experiencing hot spots and to schools, communities of high social vulnerability and other congregate settings.  In the second part of the talk Winslow describes how the CDC supported the care and resettlement in the US of more than 124,000 Afghan refugees who fled the country in August 2021 following the fall of Afghanistan to Taliban forces.  He also describes the CDC response and support of undocumented immigrants arriving at the Southwest Border.

About the Speaker: Dean Winslow, MD is Professor of Medicine with appointments in the Divisions of Hospital Medicine and Infectious Diseases and is a Senior Fellow (courtesy) at CISAC/Freeman Spogli Institute. He has served on the Stanford faculty since 1998 and served from 2003-2008 as Co-Director of Stanford's Infectious Diseases Fellowship Training Program. He was in private practice in Wilmington, Delaware where he started the state’s first multidisciplinary clinic for HIV patients in 1985. In 1988 he joined the DuPont Company where he worked both as a bench scientist on HIV drug resistance then later designed the clinical trials supporting FDA approval of efavirenz. In 1999 he became Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Visible Genetics Inc. and led the FDA clearance of the TRUGENE HIV-1 drug resistance test. Dr. Winslow joined the staff at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in 2003, where he served as Chief of the Division of AIDS Medicine and later as Chair of the Department of Medicine. In 2015 he was appointed Academic Physician-In-Chief at Stanford/ValleyCare and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine. He was a Resident Fellow in Robinson House 2013-2017 and was visiting faculty at Oxford University in 2017. He was Lead Physician for the US Antarctic Program of the National Science Foundation 2019-2020 based at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. In 2021 he took leave from Stanford to lead the US COVID-19 Testing and Diagnostic Working Group. He served as CDC Senior Advisor to Operation ALLIES WELCOME and Chief Medical Officer for the Southwest Border Migrant Health Task Force before returning to Stanford in July 2022.

Dr. Winslow is a Master of the American College of Physicians, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. He is the author of 87 papers. He is,a member of the IDSA Sepsis Task Force, and previously served as Chair of the Standards and Practice Guidelines Committee.

Colonel Winslow entered the Air National Guard in 1980 and was a Distinguished Graduate of the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine. He served as Commander of the 159th Medical Group 1992-1995 and was State Air Surgeon, Delaware Air National Guard 1995-2011. He served as ANG Assistant to the Commander, 59th Medical Wing, Joint Base San Antonio 2011-2014. Colonel Winslow deployed to the Middle East six times from 2003-2011 as a flight surgeon supporting combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Jan-April 2003 Colonel Winslow was the flight surgeon responsible for combat rescue operations from Tikrit to northern Iraq. In 2005 he coordinated military public health in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2006 Colonel Winslow served as an ER physician at the United States Air Force 447th EMEDS (combat hospital) in Baghdad and in 2008 he served as hospital commander during the Iraq surge. He is a 2007 graduate of Air War College. He served as an infectious disease consultant to the USAF Surgeon General. In 2017 Dr. Winslow was nominated by the President to serve as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. He has 1150 military flying hours including 431 combat hours and 263 combat sorties. He has extensive operational experience in fighter, tactical airlift, and combat rescue missions. He holds an FAA Airline Transport Pilot license.

Since 2006 Dr. Winslow has arranged medical care in the U.S. for 28 Iraqi children who have complicated medical conditions for which care is not available in Iraq. In 2015, Dr. Winslow and his wife, Dr. Julie Parsonnet, created The Eagle Fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which provides aid to middle eastern and central American refugees. In 2018 he co-founded Scrubs Addressing the Firearms Epidemic (SAFE), which unites health care professionals to address gun violence in the US as a public health issue and to advocate for education, research, and evidence-backed policy to reduce gun violence.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Hecker will discuss his new book, Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program, in which he describes how North Korea—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progressed from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of likely more than 50 such weapons today. He will also touch on how CISAC inspired his work on North Korea and what it was like in that environment to write the book. 

About the Speaker: Siegfried Hecker is professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and professor of practice in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University. He was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including serving as its fifth director from 1986 through 1997. He was at Stanford University for 17 years in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and CISAC, including serving as co-director from 2007 to 2012. Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea. Hecker is the editor of Doomed to Cooperate (2016), two volumes documenting the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation and Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program (2023) written with Elliot Serbin.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The talk will feature the 2022 volume, Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima (Routledge), and its three co-editors, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (U. Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne), Soraya Boudia (U. Paris Cité), and Kyoko Sato (Stanford). The book provides unique post-Fukushima reflections on nuclear history and politics from a long-term and transnational perspective, asking how nuclear technology has shaped the world we live in and how we have come to live with it and the peril it presents. A product of sustained, multi-year and interdisciplinary intellectual exchange among scholars on nuclear technology from different disciplinary (e.g., history, anthropology, STS, philosophy, nuclear sciences) and national (e.g., US, Japan, France) backgrounds, the volume tackles the global nuclear history backwards: how Fukushima shed new light on past efforts to spread and control nuclear technology. Through examining the politics of knowledge, technical innovation, and narratives, as well as the development of international standards and governance frameworks, it explores how we have managed nuclear violence and disasters, envisioned a bright future with the nuclear technology, and trivialized and normalized threats from the nuclear. The volume covers a variety of empirical cases, including the relationships between the expertise on radiation’s health effects and aids for a-bomb survivors in Japan; the development of films to capture nuclear tests and exposures; colonialist and imperialist contexts that dictated the legal status of Micronesia as a test site; rhetoric of “nuclear apartheid”; the constitutive roles of institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and networks to monitor radioactive contamination; a conceptual shift in transnational nuclear waste management; different paradigms in global governance of nuclear hazards; implications of the influx of Western medicine for child survivors of Chernobyl; the tension and co-existence of catastrophic and optimistic visions of nuclear future; and emerging practices to memorialize Fukushima and other nuclear disasters. Chapter authors include leading scholars of nuclear history and politics such as Joseph Masco (Chicago), Kate Brown (MIT), John Krige (Georgia Tech), Angela Creager (Princeton), and Maria Rentetzi (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), and up-and-coming new researchers.

We believe that the volume contributes new insights on how we have come to where we are with nuclear technology, and this event will offer an opportunity for promising and meaningful discussion relevant to the preservation of human future — especially given the current energy crisis and the global nuclear order destabilized by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

About the Speakers:

Kyoko Sato is Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Her research examines technoscientific governance in Japan and the United States. She is currently working on a manuscript to examine Japan’s nuclear history through the dynamics among global and national governance approaches, transnational development of expertise on radiation, and civil society mobilization. She is also part of a project that compares Covid-19 policy responses in East Asia. She has published in journals including Science, Technology and Human Values; East Asian Science, Technology and Society; Theory and Society; and Journal of Science and Technology Studies (in Japanese) and book chapters on the Fukushima disaster in English and Japanese.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, philosopher and historian of science is emeritus professor at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She is a member of the French Academy of Technology and of several ethics committees. She was the 2021 Sarton Medalist of the History of Science Society and the recipient of the Dexter Award for outstanding achievements in the History of Chemistry from ACS in 1994.  Her most recent publications include Temps-paysage. Pour une écologie des crises (2021) and Between Nature and Society. Biographies of Materials (2022).

Soraya Boudia is an STS scholar and professor of sociology at the Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and politics in the global environmental issues. She has extensively worked on the history of nuclear risks and toxicants governance. She has published with N. Jas, Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World (Berghann, 2014), and with A. N. H. Creager, S. Frickel, E. Henry, N. Jas, C. Reinhardt, J. A. Roberts, Residues, Rethinking Chemical Environment (Rutgers University Press, 2021). She is currently co-leading a national French research initiative on risk and crisis initiative on risk and crisis.

About the Discussants:

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

Dan Zimmer completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on the implications that anthropogenic existential risk (x-risk) poses for some of the foundational categories of Western political thought, paying particular attention to the historical dimension of ongoing engagement and avoidance with the subject. His doctoral dissertation examined how the political debates inspired by the thermonuclear fallout crisis of the 1950s came to be reformulated in light of the growing public preoccupation with ecological x-risks such as global warming and nuclear winter beginning in the 1980s. His research at Stanford seeks to bring this historical analysis up to the present by tracking how the contemporary study of x-risk came to be formalized in the early 2000s in response to growing concerns about the prospect of machine superintelligence. Previously, Dan spent a year as a Boren Fellow studying the tactics used by the Gezi Park protestors in Istanbul, Turkey.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.