About the Event: At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter.   In the early nuclear age, experts anticipated that all technologically-capable states would build these powerful devices. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late-1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and across decades the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons.   Why do most states in the international system adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements.  The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap.

About the Speaker: Rebecca Davis Gibbons is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine. She previously served as a fellow and associate of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs after receiving her PhD from Georgetown University in 2016. Her research focuses on the nuclear nonproliferation regime, arms control, disarmament, norms, public opinion, and global order. Her academic writing has been published in journals including Journal of Politics, Contemporary Security Policy, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Washington Quarterly, and Nonproliferation Review. Her public affairs commentary has been featured in Arms Control Today, The Hill, U.S. News & World Report, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage. Before becoming an academic, Dr. Gibbons taught elementary school among the Bikini community in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and served as a national security policy analyst at SAIC providing research and analytic support on arms control and nonproliferation issues to Headquarters Air Force Strategic Stability and Countering WMD Division (AF/A10-S). Her book The Hegemon’s Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.

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About the Event: The nature of evolving risks in life sciences research, a brief history of risk governance, and the case for the use of so-called “red lines” in the governance of life sciences research will be presented. The goals of this presentation are to elicit discussion about the benefits and pitfalls of red lines, or guardrails, in general, including a historical perspective, and options for public policy recommendations to address concerns about the present and future risks arising from life sciences research.

About the Speaker: David A. Relman is the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in Medicine, and a Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford University, and Chief of Infectious Diseases at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. He is also Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, and served as the Center’s Science Co-Director from 2013-2017. Relman was an early pioneer in the identification of previously-unrecognized microbial pathogens and in the modern study of the human microbiome. He served as President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and currently serves on the Defense Science Board at the Department of Defense and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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About the Event: Why and how do small and medium states create multilateral agreements to regulate or ban weapons, especially when they lack the support of great powers? This presentation develops a theory of why and how small and medium states pursue multilateral weapons governance and demonstrates it through the case of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It contends that multilateral weapons governance is a strategic tool for small and medium states in their efforts to reshape international relations. Specifically, these states develop these agreements to reduce their vulnerability to great powers and to exercise greater agency and influence in world politics. To create agreements that reflect their objectives, they frame weapons in humanitarian terms, build broad coalitions of support, and carefully choose institutional formats that deny great powers special rights and privileges. In doing so, they seek to challenge great powers' privileged position in world politics. The case study examines these dynamics drawing on elite interviews conducted with diplomats, international bureaucrats, and members of civil society in Geneva, Switzerland. In examining how relatively weak actors use weapons governance—an area in which relations among states are particularly asymmetric—to advance their goals, this article contributes to scholarship focused on small states’ contributions to other areas of global governance. Understanding why and how small and medium states pursue multilateral weapons governance is central to understanding how they seek to order relations among states and who benefits from these agreements.

About the Speaker: Naomi Egel is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. Her research examines the politics of arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament agreements, including why and how such agreements vary in their design, lessons from past agreements for future arms control, the implications of framing weapons in different ways, and public opinion regarding nuclear weapons. Her research has been published in the Journal of Politics, the European Journal of International Relations, and Research & Politics. Her commentaries have been published in War on the Rocks, Just Security, the Washington Post, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Foreign Affairs. 

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About the Speaker: Dr. Beth Van Schaack was sworn in as the State Department’s sixth Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice (GCJ) on March 17, 2022. In this role, she advises the Secretary of State and other Department leadership on issues related to the prevention of and response to atrocity crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Ambassador Van Schaack served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large in GCJ from 2012 to 2013. Prior to returning to public service in 2022, Ambassador Van Schaack was the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, where she taught international criminal law, human rights, human trafficking, and a policy lab on Legal & Policy Tools forPreventing Atrocities. In addition, she directed Stanford’s International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic. Ambassador Van Schaack began her academic career at Santa Clara University School of Law, where, in addition to teaching and writing on international human rights issues, she served as the Academic Adviser to the United States interagency delegation to the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda. Earlier in her career, she was a practicing lawyer at Morrison & Foerster, LLP; the Center for Justice & Accountability, a human rights law firm; and the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Ambassador Van Schaack has published numerous articles and papers on international human rights and justice issues, including her 2020 thesis, Imagining Justice for Syria (Oxford University Press). From 2014 to 2022, she served as Executive Editor for Just Security, an online forum fort he analysis of national security, foreign policy, and rights. She is a graduate of Stanford (BA), Yale (JD) and Leiden (PhD) Universities.

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About the Event: On August 15, 2021, a spokesperson of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s self-proclaimed state, declared on Twitter: “With the help of God, and the support of the nation, we are now in control of all parts of the country. We would like to congratulate our nation on this big achievement.” Written in English, this tweet was the culmination of the Taliban’s two-decade long campaign - both online and on the battlefield - to win the hearts, minds, and territories of Afghanistan. 

Employing a quantitative descriptive methods approach, this talk will offer the most comprehensive review of the Taliban’s use of social media to date, analyzing 112,354 tweets sourced from a network of key accounts linked to the Taliban’s leadership, over a period of five and half months, before, during, and after the takeover. It will provide a detailed analysis of the Taliban’s social media repertoire and tactics, preliminary documentation of the Taliban’s use of social media to complement on-the-ground military operations, and introduce a novel dataset. In this talk, Dr. Courchesne argues that during the summer takeover, the Taliban invested considerable time and organizational resources developing and amplifying a sophisticated online information campaign in real-time. She also argues that the Taliban made use Twitter’s platform features to amplify their messaging and engage in both domestic and international outreach, including developing specialized hashtags to push specific propaganda narratives and leveraging mentions to attempt to garner a response from humanitarian organizations, key political players, and journalists. This analysis contributes to ongoing discourse on the role of social media in conflict, provides additional insight on how non-state armed groups approach weaponizing social media to further political and military goals, and offers a greater understanding of how the Taliban used the online environment during the 2021 takeover.

About the Speaker: Dr. Laura Courchesne is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Her work focuses on the role of the online environment in shaping and augmenting conflict dynamics. Her research spans topics including state-sponsored influence operations, non-state armed groups’ weaponization of social media, the economics of disinformation, and patterns of technology adoption by militaries. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Conflict.

Previously, Laura was a Research Fellow at the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University. Since 2020, she’s taught on armed group use of social media with the UN Systems Staff College. She was formerly a Strategic Advisor at Google’s Jigsaw, conducting fieldwork in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2018. She completed her Ph.D. in International Relations at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

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This event is free and open to the public. Please join us afterward for refreshments in the Dwight Living Room in the Alumni Center.

About the Event: On a daily basis, hospitals are being attacked in conflict zones. Is it time to rethink our global protection systems for civilians and health facilities in war?  A testimony on the current reality on the ground.

About the Speakers: 

Dr. Joanne Liu is a Canadian pediatric emergency room physician and former International President of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). A graduate of the McGill Medicine class of 1991, Liu first joined MSF in 1996, working with Malian refugees in Mauritania. Since then, she has provided and coordinated emergency medical aid across the globe, whether it be resulting from natural disasters like tsunamis or earthquakes or viral outbreaks such as Ebola in 2014. As a member of the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response, Liu has been contributing to a set of comprehensive recommendations to protect people from future outbreaks. In 2021 she was conferred an Honorary Fellowship by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the most prestigious honor the School awards. Dr. Liu is currently a professor focusing on pandemic and health emergencies at McGill University’s School of Population and Global Health (SPGH).

Dr. Paul H. Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society and Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine.  Dr. Wise is also a Senior Fellow in the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. He is also co-Director of the March of Dimes Center for Prematurity Research at Stanford University.

Dr. Wise received his A.B. degree summa cum laude in Latin American Studies and his M.D. degree from Cornell University, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and did his pediatric training at the Children’s Hospital in Boston.  His former positions include Director of Emergency and Primary Care Services at Boston Children’s Hospital, Director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health, and Vice-Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.  He served as Special Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General, Chair of the Steering Committee of the NIH Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health Research, and currently is a member of the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH. 

Dr. Wise’s research focuses on health inequalities, child health policy, and global child health.   He leads a multidisciplinary initiative, Children in Crisis, which is directed at integrating expertise in political science, security, and health services in areas of civil conflict and unstable governance.

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About the Event: Online ‘fake news’ and disinformation have been widely (and rightly) attributed to polarisation, uncertainty, and violence – including, in extreme cases, mass atrocity crimes. What has not received much scholarly attention, however, is whether it might be permissible, or even required, to deceive potential perpetrators of atrocities via online disinformation campaigns to prevent genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansings. In other words: Does the responsibility to protect trump our responsibility not to deceive? Or, more concretely: might there be a ‘Responsibility to Deceive’ (R2D) via online disinformation to fulfil the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine? In this presentation, Rhiannon Neilsen will introduce a typology of ‘Atrocity Suppressing Disinformation Campaigns’ (ASDCs). She defines ASDCs as the use of targeted online disinformation and ‘fake news’, based on analyses of individuals’ big data, to deter individuals from committing mass atrocities by rendering them epistemically worse off. In the talk, Neilsen will then consider the ethical arguments for and against the use of ASDCs, concluding that such online campaigns of deception and disinformation are – like armed humanitarian interventions to protect populations – sometimes justified. According to Cian O’Driscoll: although the Ancient Greeks “conced[ed] that deception might be necessary in certain circumstances… such activities should be a last resort.” However, Neilsen submits that spreading disinformation to prevent atrocities is not even a ‘last resort’. The last resort for human protection rightfully remains armed humanitarian interventions – with its bullets, bombs, and bodybags. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Rhiannon Neilsen is currently the Cyber Security Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her research focuses on new technologies in conflict, cyberspace operations, atrocity prevention, dis/misinformation on social media, and the ethics of algorithms. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University, a Research Consultant for the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence. Rhiannon has briefed the United Kingdom Foreign Office and the Armenian Foreign Ministry. At CISAC, she is developing her monograph, “On Algorithms and Atrocities”.

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About the Event: What effects will emerging technologies such as cyber, hypersonic strike, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing have on nuclear stability in wartime? It is hard to know, because studying the effect of new technology on the propensity for nuclear war amounts to examining the impact of something that does not yet exist on the likelihood of something that almost never happens. This presentation, based on work in progress, will offer a research strategy for addressing these twin methodological difficulties. It first generates an original typology of nuclear escalation risks, distinguishing among different mechanisms that could link new technologies to heightened instability. It then examines the impact of emerging technologies in past eras on the propensity for wartime escalation, using carefully chosen cases from past conflicts that witnessed the debut of new capabilities. Preliminarily, the evidence suggests that although new technologies could certainly contribute to escalatory dangers in war, they have rarely been the primary driver of such pressure in the past. Furthermore, the relationship between new technologies and escalation, where it exists, has usually been deliberated engineered by policymakers, and not arisen as a result of mistakes or accidents. This finding holds important implications for reducing nuclear risk in future conflicts.

About the Speaker: Caitlin Talmadge is Associate Professor of Security Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, as well as Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Research Affiliate in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines nuclear deterrence and escalation, civil-military relations, military strategy and operations, and defense policy, with a particular focus on security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell University Press, 2015), as well as co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, now in its fourth edition (Routledge, 2021). She is currently on research leave from Georgetown University as the Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress.

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About the Event: As governments, corporations, and citizens have become critically dependent on cyberspace, a transnational field of expertise has emerged to protect them from cyberattack. But unlike engineers whose goals are more quantifiably demonstrated—a missile hits its target with a particular probability, computer chips fail at a known rate—cybersecurity experts cannot prove that a system is “secure.”  In fact, experts paradoxically demonstrate skills in cybersecurity by demonstrating insecurities—for example, hacking systems to reveal their vulnerabilities. So how can these experts offer any authoritative assurance of security? What does growing reliance on cybersecurity experts—and the multinational industry in which they often work--mean for national sovereignty and international relations? Conversely, how have the distinctive interests of various private and government actors shaped the development of this relatively new field of expertise? And what does all this mean for our understanding of the relationships between expertise, transnationalism, and power in an age of global interdependence and vulnerability? These questions are addressed by Rebecca Slayton's book in progress, Shadowing Cybersecurity. The working hypothesis is that cybersecurity experts established themselves as authorities by developing ways of making risks visible and apparently controllable—a process Slayton calls shadowing cybersecurity. In this talk Slayton will present early findings and invite feedback.

About the Speaker: Rebecca Slayton is Associate Professor, jointly in the Science & Technology Studies Department and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, both at Cornell University. She is also a 2022-23 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her research examines the relationships between and among risk, governance, and expertise, with a focus on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count, shows how the rise of computing reshaped perceptions of the promise and risks of missile defense, and won the 2015 Computer History Museum Prize. Slayton’s second book, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair.

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About the Event: Anna Weichselbraun interrogates how trust is constituted as a cultural norm and becomes mediated through future-building technologies. She probes the effort to “engineer” trust in Web3—a movement of software engineers, designers, and artists to resist centralized authorities through decentralization based on blockchain—a tamper-proof digital ledger. Web3’s advocates imagine themselves “builders and owners” of radically inclusive and participatory online worlds and alternative economies. Participants deploy blockchains and tokenization to build virtual communities—often in the form of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations)—that run on carefully considered social values. These values are encoded in algorithmic processes, the “smart contracts” by which participants’ behavior is governed along presumably universal incentives. Web3 proponents envision networked organizations of technologically-mediated trust that can supplant “untrustworthy” institutions like the state and the corporation. Web3 seeks to transform the future through technology and Weichselbraun's research follows projects and approaches that seek to democratize and decentralize work, community, and politics.

About the Speaker: Anna Weichselbraun is an anthropologist of knowledge, technology, and governance. She holds a postdoc at the University of Vienna and is currently a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She received her Ph.D. in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology from the University of Chicago, and has previously worked at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her book manuscript on the knowledge practices of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency is under review with Cornell University Press. Her newest research project examines novel forms of governance in Web3.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.