For winter quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)

About the Event: In Nigeria today, frequent conflicts, disappearances and mass violence, especially in the Northern region of the country, have amounted to large-scale destruction of human life and the displacement of large populations as unarmed civilians are caught in the crossfire. The effects of climate change on the Lake Chad basin are key triggers of conflict as herders migrate to other parts of the region to find fodder and water for their cattle. Existing responses to conflict and mass violence in Nigeria have been beset by challenges. The migration patterns of nomadic communities have begun to signal security concerns beyond the immediately impacted regions. In late 2017, state governments within the western and southern parts of the country began to set up community policing strategies to address growing security challenges around their states, including those relating to the (perceived) threats associated with the movement of cattle herders. Complicating this situation, the presence of large groups of cattle has incentivized “conflict entrepreneurship” as armed groups of young men across north-central, north-west and southern parts of the country engage in cattle rustling. Government efforts at various levels, ranging from the creation of legal and policy frameworks to programs on-the-ground, have been inadequate to protect civilians and have led to the development new mechanisms for human protection.  For example, interventions by the Nigerian Federal Government have, at times, accelerated conflict, as with the passage of an anti-grazing law that has fueled controversy over implementation at state and local levels of government. Local civil society initiatives have continued to emerge to address the gap and attempt to mitigate ever growing security concerns in the region. One such strategy has involved the development of Early Warning and Early Response Systems (EWER) using geospatial technologies and other forms of crowd sourcing imagery to enhance local resilience in the face of security threats and strengthen the ability of communities to protect themselves in a sustainable way. However, the potential of such technologies depends on the ability to “see” particular phenomena and render other phenomena illegible. This paper will argue that such geospatial technology’s interpretive power is concerned with assigning to future violence an interpretive code based on its baseline values.  As an act of decoding that is anticipatory, the power of EWER processes lies in its decoding potential. These interpretive code processes provide participants with the potential to engage in analyses that involve mapping patterns and potential risk that have the ability to produce indicators that have material effects. It is these material effects, drawn from visual codes, that are used to justify action that is life preserving as well as render other relations illegible and therefore invisible to intervention.  This paper explores the emergence of EWER strategies used to address widespread violence and the challenge of illegibility that is central to it.

About the Speaker: M. Kamari Clarke is the Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto where she teaches in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Over her career she has worked at The University of California Los Angeles (2018-2021), Carleton University (2015-2018), The University of Pennsylvania (2013-2015) Yale University (1999-2013), and at Yale she was the former chair of the Council on African Studies from 2007- 2010 and the co-founder of the Yale Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis.  For more than twenty years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of globalization. For more than 20 years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism, and the politics of globalization and race. She  is the author of nine books and over fifty peer reviewed articles and book chapters, including her 2009 publication of Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Affective Justice (with Duke University Press, 2019), which won the finalist prize for the American Anthropological Association’s 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Award for the Association for Africanist Anthropology.  Clarke has also been the recipient of other research and teaching awards, including Carleton University’s 2018 Research Excellence Award.  During her academic career she has held numerous prestigious fellowships, grants and awards, including multiple grant awards from the National Science Foundation and from The Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and, very recently, the 2021 Guggenhiem Award for Career Excellence.

For winter quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

For winter quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

For winter quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

For winter quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

For winter quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

About the Event: How do states communicate internally about foreign policy and how does this change over time? Applying concepts from linguistics to a novel corpus of all President’s Daily Briefs from 1961 to 1977, we analyze change over time in the variety of terms used in national security writing (“lexical diversity”). We find a consistently declining level of lexical diversity across presidential administrations and despite variation in exogenous changes in foreign affairs. We argue that this increasingly homogenized language reflects a larger process of bureaucratization in American national security institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. We build on the concept of “organizational sensemaking” and argue that bureaucratization directly and indirectly compresses the terminological range used by individual bureaucrats and homogenizes the language of its outputs. One key payoff is shedding light on what is “lost in translation” when bureaucratic experts communicate with leaders and the foreign policy mistakes and misperceptions that may follow. Our research contributes to work on bureaucracy and perceptions in IR by identifying a subtle shift in the spectrum of terms with which the state interprets the world – a finding that is only tractable by combining computational and linguistic techniques with a large corpus of formerly classified intelligence materials.

About the Speaker: Eric Min is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, where he was the Zukerman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation for the 2017-2018 academic year. He is a 2020 Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Scholar. His research interests focus on the application of machine learning, text, and statistical methods to the analysis of interstate war, diplomacy, decision-making, and conflict management. His research has been published or is forthcoming in American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and Journal of Strategic Studies.

This event has been cancelled.  It will be rescheduled  at a later date.

About the Event: “Strategic planning,” so-called, is a practice into which states, firms, universities, and many other large organizations regularly invest substantial resources. The study of strategic planning is, however, mostly absent in the academy. Strategic planning had its heyday as a field of study in the three or four decades following World War II, mostly in the discipline of strategic management, but research on the subject has steadily declined in volume since the mid-1980s. Much of the contemporary literature on strategy, including on states’ grand strategies, has focused on strategy content – explaining its causes, effects, or the relative merits of competing proposals – rather than on strategy process. This book project undertakes an intellectual history that aims to explain the apparent disconnect between the on-going, widespread, real-world practice of strategic planning and the decline in scholarly research on the subject. Based on this history, this book proposes a new conceptual framework and methodology for multidisciplinary research on strategic planning, and discusses its particular application to the study of grand strategy in the discipline of international relations. These concepts and methods are applied two cases of US strategic planning: The planning of the so-called “pivot to Asia” and the planning of the Air-Sea Battle operational concept.

About the Speaker: Dr. Nina Silove is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on grand strategy, strategic planning, and US policy toward the Asia-​Pacific.

Nina holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a degree in law with first class honors from the University of Technology, Sydney. Previously, she was the Tutor for International Politics in Diplomatic Studies at the University of Oxford, a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, a Research Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, and Assistant Professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University, where she remains a Non-​Resident Fellow.

For winter quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.