Abstract: Ambassador Koster will address the following political-military issues during his lecture. How has the security environment in Europe evolved since 2014, with growing instability and insecurity in the North Africa and the Middle East, and an assertive Russia in the East? How has Europe and NATO reacted to these challenges? Policies, structures and capabilities have been adapted, but will it be enough to restore peace and stability in Europe ? How will the demise of the arms control architecture affect all of this in the years to come?

Speaker's Biography: Ambassador Timo S. Koster is a career diplomat at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As of November 2018, Mr. Koster assumed his position as Ambassador-at-large for Security Policy & Cyber. Prior to this, since 2012, he was Director for Defence Policy and Capabilities at NATO HQ in Brussels.

After finishing his law degree at the University of Amsterdam, Ambassador Koster joined the diplomatic academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands in 1991. His first appointment was at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Back in The Hague from 1994, he served in several positions within the Ministry, including a stint as Private Secretary to the Minister for European Affairs, before moving to the Royal Netherlands Embassy in London, as Head of Economic Department, between 1998 and 2001.

In 2001, Ambassador Koster became Acting Director for European Integration at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, after which he served as a Project Director at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. In 2003 Mr. Koster was appointed Deputy Ambassador at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Athens, Greece. In 2008 he moved to Brussels where he served as Defence Advisor at the Netherlands Permanent Representation to NATO until 2012 when he moved to the position of Director Defence Policy & Capabilities in the NATO International Staff.

Ambassador Koster is affiliated to the Atlantic Council Washington DC as a non-resident Ambassadorial Fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Centre for International Strategy and Security.

Timo S. Koster is married with two sons and two daughters.

Abstract: Successful use of bots and trolls as tools of its expansionist foreign policy demonstrated the Russian government's superior capability in computational propaganda. Yet the main area of application for these tools remains inside Russia: to prop up Vladimir Putin's approval ratings and deny his opponents an opportunity to reach potential voters. In this paper, we use supervised machine learning algorithms for bot detection and sentiment analysis to do a first systematic survey of bot activity in the Russian segment of Twitter. We discover a high yet fluctuating volume of bot communication and presence of both pro- and anti-government as well as neutral bots. We also identify sources of information they spread and formulate testable hypotheses about the political strategy behind bots deployment. Finally, we discuss the implications of autocrats' reliance on domestic computational propaganda for the response to their activities abroad.

Speaker's Biography: Sergey Sanovich received his Ph.D. in Politics at NYU. He studies how autocrats use the power of persuasion to come to, and stay in, office. His ongoing research is focused on online censorship and propaganda by authoritarian regimes; elections and partisanship in electoral autocracies; and personalization of politics in both autocratic and democratic countries. To conduct his research, Sergey collects big data from social media, digitalizes archival documents, and runs field and survey experiments both online and offline.

Abstract: My research investigates the formal institutionalization of inter-governmental cooperation among the three major Northeast Asian powers – China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea—in the face of a continued North Korean threat. How much of a shadow, if any, has North Korea’s nuclear weapons cast over the development of multilateralism in the region? Since 1999, the Northeast Asian region has seen intensifying institutionalization of cooperation among its major powers. In a region where the realist logic of state-centric nationalism, sovereignty, and balance of power still prevails, this new development of trilateral cooperation among the former and potential adversaries deserves serious scholarly investigation. What started as economic and functional cooperation, trilateral cooperation has since been substantially expanded to include political and security agendas at the highest level of government. What explains the emergence and endurance of trilateral cooperation and to what extent has containing the North Korean nuclear crisis shaped its institutional trajectory and outcomes? By examining the evolution of trilateral cooperation, I address some critical gaps in our understanding of formal institution building and the economic-security nexus in one of the most dynamic regions in the world.

Speaker's Biography: Yeajin Yoon is a 2018-2019 MacArthur Nuclear Security Pre-doctoral Fellow at CISAC and a doctoral candidate in the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Her dissertation examines the evolution of trilateral cooperation among the most militarily and economically dominant states in Northeast Asia, namely, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea, and considers when and how their relations become implicated in the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Prior to entering academia, Yeajin travelled extensively across Asia and worked with national governments, international organisations, and NGOs in the region. She led the development of the inaugural issue of the 'Oxford Government Review’ and helped facilitate a Track II dialogue on wartime history issues in Asia at Stanford University. Previously, she worked as a founding member of the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat, the official intergovernmental organisation for China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea and managed a development fund focused on the ASEAN region at the Korean Foreign Ministry.

Yeajin received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with Honors from Stanford University and a Master of Public Policy degree from Oxford University.

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Abstract:  As Russian President Vladimir Putin pursues a more assertive policy toward the West, one of his primary grievances is that NATO enlarged despite 1990 assurances to the contrary.  At the end of the Cold War, did Washington in fact promise Moscow that it would refrain from expanding NATO eastward?  Russia says yes; the US says no; what does the evidence say?  Professor Sarotte, a historian, has conducted archival research and interviews on this topic in the US, Russia, Germany, Britain, and France. In this lecture, she will draw on both her previous publications and on newer declassifications to re-examine this controversy and its legacy for NATO expansion – even as President Donald Trump raises the possibility of a NATO contraction through US withdrawal.

Speaker's Biography:  Mary Elise Sarotte is the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.  Her five books include The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, both of which were named Financial Times Books of the Year, along with receiving other awards and commendations.  Sarotte earned her AB in History and Science at Harvard University and her PhD in History at Yale University.  After graduate school, she served as a White House Fellow and subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Cambridge.  Sarotte received tenure at Cambridge in 2004 and returned to the United States to teach at University of Southern California as the Dean's Professor of History before moving to Hopkins.  Sarotte is a former Humboldt Scholar, a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a research associate of Harvard's Center for European Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  She is currently writing a book on NATO expansion; it is based (among other sources) on formerly secret Defense Department, State Department, and White House documents which she has declassified though Freedom of Information appeals.

Abstract: How do nuclear-armed states coerce their adversaries in wars with limited aims without using nuclear weapons? I develop a theory of strategic substitution to explain why states use space, cyber and conventional missile weapons instead of nuclear weapons to maximize leverage against their adversaries. I also explain how they select space, cyber, and conventional missile force postures, defined as weapons and plans for using them. Threats to use space, cyber and conventional missile weapons are more credible sources of strategic leverage against adversaries in wars that do not threaten a state’s survival. I demonstrate the plausibility of the theory using China’s cyber force posture. China developed space, cyber and conventional missile weapons to solve a common problem: giving Beijing the leverage it could not gain from its nuclear weapons in a future war over Taiwanese independence involving the United States. Using original Chinese-language written sources and interviews conducted during extensive fieldwork, I show that Chinese leaders pursued cyber weapons to maximize their strategic leverage after the United States bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. As China’s vulnerability to cyber attacks grew during the 2000s, its appetite for risk in using cyber weapons declined, resulting in a change to its military cyber force posture in 2014.

Speaker Bio: Fiona Cunningham is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at CISAC. Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology and conflict, with an empirical focus on China. She received her PhD in September 2018 from the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a member of the Security Studies Program. Her dissertation explained China’s development of space, cyber and conventional missile force postures as substitutes for using nuclear weapons to coerce adversaries. Her research is based on extensive fieldwork, including a year-long dissertation research fellowship at the Renmin University of China, Beijing, in 2015-6. She was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the Cyber Security Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in 2017-8. Fiona’s research has been supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation, China Confucius Studies Program, and the MIT Center for International Studies. Her research on China's nuclear strategy has been published in the quarterly journal, International Security. Fiona holds a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and International Relations from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney, both with first-class honors. She was a research associate at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney from 2009 until 2012, where she focused on extended nuclear deterrence in East Asia and nuclear nonproliferation. Fiona speaks Mandarin Chinese and French.