About the Event: How does artificial intelligence shift power in international security? A burgeoning literature in international politics and security studies has documented its effects on the balance of power, strategic stability, and the future of warfare. In this work, power is largely material, if not kinetic, and the specifics of technologies are treated mostly as peripheral. By recovering classical International Relations theory in the form of Hans Morgenthau’s work on the role of scientific rationalism in guiding political decision-making and combining it with insights from Science and Technologies Studies, this paper investigates the role of so-called intelligent technologies, in particular machine learning, in the knowledge production for conflict prevention. Such technologies are met with enthusiasm in the policy sphere, prompting a wide range of actors in the field of conflict prevention to integrate them into their analyses. Leveraging original elite interviews with conflict modelers, practitioners, and policymakers, this paper tentatively argues the rush towards integrating AI and ML is not primarily about improving predictive analytics in terms of scale, speed, and cost, but about creating options and justifications for (in)action. Due to the internal opacity (‘black-boxing’) of machine learning, policymakers can delegate the responsibility of the analysis from the human to the machine, thus transforming problems of politics and power into problems of process and technology. This research has implications for appreciating the internal mechanisms and characteristics of emerging technologies, as well as their  underlying rationalities, to understand how they shape actors’ options for decision-making.
 
About the Speaker: Johanna Rodehau-Noack is an International Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her current work investigates the role of (emerging) technologies in conflict prevention and anticipation, and in particular how the use and promise of artificial intelligence shapes conceptions of armed conflict. Previously, she was a Global Innovation Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House. She received her doctorate in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She also holds an MA in Political Science and a BA in International Development from the University of Vienna, Austria.

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About the Event: One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders’ Game sheds light on this enduring puzzle, arguing that the primary constraints on decisions about war and peace come from elites, not the public. Elizabeth Saunders focuses on three groups of elites—presidential advisers, legislators, and military officials—to show how the dynamics of this insiders’ game are key to understanding the use of force in American foreign policy. She explores how elite preferences differ from those of ordinary voters, and how leaders must bargain with elites to secure their support for war. Saunders provides insights into why leaders start and prolong conflicts the public does not want, but also demonstrates how elites can force leaders to change course and end wars. Tracing presidential decisions about the use of force from the Cold War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saunders reveals how the elite politics of war are a central feature of democracy. The Insiders’ Game shifts the focus of democratic accountability from the voting booth to the halls of power. 

The Insiders' Game by Elizabeth N. Saunders: 30% off with code P325 at press.princeton.edu

About the Speaker: Elizabeth N. Saunders is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  Her research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics of international security and U.S. foreign policy.  She is the author of Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2011) and The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press, 2024). She holds an A.B. in physics and astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard College; an M.Phil. in international relations from the University of Cambridge; and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

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This event has reached capacity. Please email Kate Ter Wee at katecole@stanford.edu or register to attend online using the link above. 

About the Event: Russia’s war on Ukraine, Iran’s Proxy Wars in the Middle East as well as the support Russia and Iran receive from each other, China, and other states such as North Korea, have clarified the nature of geopolitical competition. It is important to understand both the history of how crucial challenges to international security developed and of the ideology, emotions and aspirations that drive the axis of aggressors if we are to prevent conflicts from cascading further and restore peace. 

Lunch to be provided for registered attendees.

About the Speaker:  LTG (ret.) H. R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Upon graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1984, McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years. He retired as a Lieutenant General in June 2018 after serving as the 25th assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. He holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. McMaster is the host of Battlegrounds: International Perspectives on Crucial Challenges and Opportunities and is a regular on Goodfellows. He is a Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University.

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About the Event: When a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure and urging reform. Yet many of the most egregious violations appear to go unpunished. In many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but also incites a backlash, provoking resistance and worsening human rights practices. The Geopolitics of Shaming presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.

Drawing on a wide range of evidence—from large-scale cross-national data to original survey experiments and detailed case studies—Rochelle Terman shows how human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relationships. Arguing that preexisting geopolitical relationships condition both the causes and consequences of shaming in world politics, she shows how adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response, while friends and allies are the most effective shamers but can be reluctant to impose meaningful sanctions.

Upending conventional wisdom on the role of norms in world affairs, The Geopolitics of Shaming demonstrates that politicization is integral to—not a corruption of—the success of the global human rights project.

About the Speaker: Rochelle Terman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She specializes in international relations, with an emphasis on international norms, human rights, and the Muslim world. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press.

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About the Event: Naming the Russo-Ukraine War has been controversial since 2014.  Why did Russian diplomats deploy the term “civil war” as a preferred descriptor until 2022 — and why did Ukrainians insist that the phrase be taboo?  We assess four complementary logics for the use of the “civil war” descriptor by Russian diplomats before Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022.  First, calling the war “civil” implies military non-involvement by Russia.  Second, explanations putting causal weight on Ukrainian domestic variables allow Russia to blame the violence on Western intervention (e.g., the CIA coup, color revolutions, NATO expansion, etc.) or well-rehearsed tropes about Ukraine’s unfitness as a state (e.g., a “fascist coup,” east-west cleavages in the pre-2014 Ukrainian state, stereotypes of Ukraine as a corrupt/“weak”/non-democratic polity, etc.).  Third, the narrative accesses legal precedents, especially Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and self determination as justifications authorizing Russia’s use of force. Fourth, favored internationalist mechanisms developed for settling civil wars privilege the United Nations Security Council, the OSCE, and other consensus forums, thus redirecting energy to forums where Russians enjoy a veto.  This not only functionally de-linked Crimea (“peaceful self-determination”) from the war in the Donbas (“violent and tragic, requiring costly/sustained collective action…”), but also reified Russia as a great power with UNSC veto.

About the Speaker: Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015), Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021), and Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before The Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge, 2023, with Dominique Arel).  He received his PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2009.

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About the Event: What are the political effects of nuclear weapons? What are the dynamics of territorial disputes and militarized crises between nuclear-armed states? As China continues with its unprecedented nuclear modernization program and U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreements are cast aside, these questions have taken on new urgency. We address these questions through a detailed reexamination of the 1969 border crisis between China and the Soviet Union. This crisis is a crucial case for both Cold War history and international relations theory. However, until recently, much of the evidence on this incidence remained either unused or inaccessible. Using hundreds of newly available and previously unused archival and primary sources from Albania, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and elsewhere, we shed light on new and important dynamics in the crisis including the role of psychological factors in interstate bargaining, elite politics in authoritarian states, and the impact of the strategic nuclear balance. The work has important implications for our understanding of the history of the Cold War, crisis escalation dynamics, state signaling and perception, and the political effects of nuclear weapons.
 
About the Speakers:

David Logan is Assistant Professor of Security Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He researches nuclear weapons, arms control, deterrence, and U.S.-China relations. He has conducted research for the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National Defense University, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He has published in International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Georgetown University Press, National Defense University Press, Foreign Affairs, and Los Angeles Times, among other venues. He holds a B.A. from Grinnell College and an M.P.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a global fellow in the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center, and a Center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. His book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was published in 2022 by Yale University Press, and he has a forthcoming biography on Xi Jinping’s father with Stanford University Press. He studies Chinese and Russian politics and foreign policy.

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This event is open only to Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, and students.

Bio:

Allison Macfarlane is Professor and Director, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Faculty of Arts, the University of British Columbia.  Dr. Macfarlane has held both academic and government positions in the field of energy and environmental policy, especially nuclear policy.  The first geologist (and the third woman) to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012-2014, Dr. Macfarlane holds a doctorate in earth science from MIT and a bachelor's of science from the University of Rochester.  She has held fellowships at Radcliffe College, MIT, Stanford, and Harvard Universities, and she has been on the faculty at Georgia Tech in Earth Science and International Affairs, at George Mason University in Environmental Science and Policy, and in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.  From 2010 to 2012 Dr. Macfarlane served on the White House Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. Dr. Macfarlane’s research has focused on technical, social, and policy aspects of nuclear energy production and nuclear waste management and disposal as well as regulation, nuclear nonproliferation, and energy policy.  

Abstract:

New nuclear reactors, including small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced reactors, have been touted in the media recently as the best way to transition off fossil fuels. Reactor proponents claim that they will be cheaper, safer, and produce less waste than existing large light water reactors.   But are these claims realistic? This talk will examine the challenges facing these new nuclear technologies and will attempt to address whether new nuclear power will help us move quickly to a low-carbon future.

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This event is open only to Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, and students.

Bio:

Tom Dannenbaum is Associate Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, where he is Co-Director of the Center for International Law & Governance. Prior to joining the Fletcher School, he taught at University College London and Yale Law School. Dannenbaum writes on the law of armed conflict, the law governing the use of force, international criminal law, human rights, shared responsibility, and international judging. His articles have appeared in a range of leading journals and have received multiple awards, including the American Society of International Law’s (ASIL) International Legal Theory Scholarship Prize in 2022 for his work on siege starvation and ASIL’s Lieber Prize in 2017 for his work on the crime of aggression. His writing on peacekeeping has been cited by the Hague Court of Appeal and the International Law Commission. His book, The Crime of Aggression, Humanity, and the Soldier, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Dannenbaum has testified or presented before U.S. congressional and U.N. bodies and has appeared or been quoted in leading media outlets, including the New York Times, the Economist, National Public Radio, PBS Frontline, the BBC World Service, MSNBC, Deutsche Welle, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others. He has received teaching awards at both the Fletcher School and UCL, as well as the faculty research award at Fletcher. He holds a PhD from Princeton, a JD from Yale, and a BA from Stanford.

Abstract:

A recent amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has drawn unprecedented attention to the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. It comes at a time when mass starvation in war is resurgent, devastating populations in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Palestine, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere. The practice has also drawn the scrutiny of the United Nations Security Council. And yet, what precisely is criminally wrongful about starvation methods remains underspecified.

A common way of thinking about the criminal wrong is as a form of killing or harming civilians. Although its differentiating particularities matter, the basic wrongfulness of the crime inheres, on this view, in it being an attack on those who ought not be attacked. For some, this supports a broad interpretation of the starvation ban. However, for others, the graduality of starvation preserves the continuous possibility of the avoidance or minimization of civilian death or harm in a way that direct kinetic attacks do not. In combination with the method’s purported military utility, this distinctive incrementalism has underpinned arguments for the permissibility of certain forms of siege and other deprivation and a narrow interpretation of the starvation crime.

Drawing on the moral philosophy of torture, this Article offers a different normative theory of the crime. Starvation, like torture, is peculiarly wrongful in its distortion of victims’ biological imperatives against their capacities to formulate and act on higher-order desires, political commitments, and even love. This process does not merely raise the cost of fulfilling those commitments. Instead, starvation tears gradually at the very capacity of those affected to prioritize their most fundamental commitments, regardless of whether they would choose to do so under the conditions necessary to evaluate matters with a “contemplative attitude.” Rather than palliating, the slowness of starvation methods is at the crux of this torturous wrong. Recognizing this redefines the meaning and place of the crime in the framework of international criminal law.

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This event is open only to Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, and students.

Bio:

Marc Lipsitch is Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics and the Interdisciplinary Program on Infectious Disease Epidemiology. He is an honorary faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. He is currently on part-time secondment to the US CDC as Senior Advisor for the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, for which he was the founding co-director (though this talk is in his personal and academic capacity). His scientific research concerns the effect of naturally acquired host immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, and other public health interventions on the population biology of pathogens and the consequences for human health. In the area of  biosafety and biosecurity, he co-founded the Cambridge Working Group, whose efforts led to the US government funding pause on gain-of-function research to enhance potential pandemic pathogens, and he has been writing and speaking on policy issues in this area in both popular and peer-reviewed forums for over a decade. He has authored 400 peer-reviewed publications on antimicrobial resistance, epidemiologic methods, mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission, pathogen population genomics, research ethics, biosafety/security, and immunoepidemiology of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Dr. Lipsitch is a leader in research and scientific communication on COVID-19. Dr. Lipsitch received his BA in philosophy from Yale and his DPhil in zoology from Oxford. He did postdoctoral work at Emory University and CDC. He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology and the National Academy of Medicine.

Abstract:

The growing ability of researchers to enhance potential pandemic pathogens' transmissibility or virulence has raised concerns about the risk that such research could lead to a pandemic through accidental or inadvertent release, or that the products of the research, including the knowledge it creates, could facilitate deliberate acts of bioterrorism. An incipient policy process to address these concerns in the mid-late 2010s was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and attention has recently returned to the topic especially in the US but also internationally. While the White House has been constructing guidance (not released as of this writing in January 2024), the scientific and wider community have reached a state of polarization, with many calling for an outright ban, and others claiming that scientific self-regulation is sufficient. This talk will describe the components of a middle way that acknowledges a legitimate public interest in restricting experiments that could heighten pandemic risks, in the absence of compelling and offsetting public health benefits. It will begin with a historical overview of the issue, consider informative and misleading parallels to the notion of restricting research with pandemic risks, and suggest ways forward to break this deadlock. 

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About the Event: While rebels' electoral participation has become a focal point of scholarship on post-conflict development, the drivers and process of rebels' organizational transformation into political parties have remained elusive. Organizational theory provides a novel, yet critical, point of entry to understanding rebel-to-party transformation and the actors at the heart of it. I look inside rebels' wartime organizations and identify a set of subdivisions (in some groups) that mirror the key structures of political parties: governance wings, political-messaging wings, and social service wings. I argue that variation in rebels' wartime organizational structures gives rise to different party-building mechanisms with distinct prospects for success.  To test this theory, I use intra-organizational comparative process tracing of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, I create sub-organizational biographies and trace their evolution from inception to transformation.  This approach allows me to exploit systematic differences in the organizational structures of the FMLN's subgroups—while holding equal other key variables like ideology, prewar networks, and state context—to demonstrate how the construction of proto-party structures during wartime facilitates party-building at the war's end. 

About the Speaker: Sherry Zaks is a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as an assistant professor of Comparative Politics and Methodology at the University of Southern California. Her substantive work examines the conditions under which rebel groups are able to transform into political parties in the aftermath of civil wars. She draws on organizational sociology to develop a comprehensive model of militant groups and trace how wartime structures either facilitate or inhibit rebel-to-party transformations. On the methods side, Sherry’s work focuses on conceptualization, measurement, and process tracing. 

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