Stanford University

Science and Technology

The Politics, Ethics, and Law of Racially- Targeted Biological Weapons

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Tonya Putnam has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University in March 2005. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, but will be moving to the Center on Globalization and Governance at Princeton University for a postdoctoral fellowship next academic year. Her dissertation, Courts Without Borders? The Politics and Law of Extraterritorial Regulation, explores the extraterritorial reach of U.S. federal courts and regulatory institutions, and implications for the development of de facto international regulatory frameworks. Other research areas have included human rights in peace implementation missions, comparative legal responses to the threat of cybercrime and cyberterrorism, risk communication in the context of radiological terrorism (dirty bombs), and obstacles to military reform in Russia.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall

Tonya Putnam

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Tonya Lee Putnam

Tonya L. Putnam (J.D./Ph.D) is a Research Scholar at the Arnold A. Salzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. From 2007 to 2020 she was a member of the Political Science at Columbia University. Tonya’s work engages a variety of topics related to international relations and international law with emphasis on issues related to jurisdiction and jurisdictional overlaps in international regulatory and security matters. She is the author of Courts Without Borders: Law, Politics, and U.S. Extraterritoriality along with several articles in International Organization, International Security, and the Human Rights Review. She is also a member (inactive) of the California State Bar.

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Tonya L. Putnam
Seminars

Why Ruling Elites Play the 'Ethnic Card': State Violence and Multiparty Transitions

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Linda Kirschke is a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. She is a PhD candidate at Princeton University, in the Department of Politics, and her research focuses on state politics and ethnic violence. She published "Informal repression, zero sum politics and late third wave transitions" in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 2000. Drawing on the cases of Cameroon, Rwanda and Kenya, this article shows that transitions to multiparty politics place Sub-Saharan South Africa at high risk for civil violence. Kirschke was a Eurasia Title VIII Fellow at the Social Science Research Council in 2002-03, working on Russian language training. In 2003-04, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Pre-Dissertation Fellowship at Columbia Universityís Council for European Studies. Kirschke has a BA in French and African studies and has worked for human rights organizations in France, London and Africa.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall

Linda Kirschke Predoctoral Fellow
Seminars

Homeland Security vs. the Madisonian Impulse: State Building and Anti-Statism After September 11

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Has the Bush administration used the War on Terror to consolidate power in the executive branch? Is the United States in danger of undermining civil liberties and laying the foundation for an American police state? Arguing against conventional wisdom the authors answer these questions with an emphatic No. Drawing on evidence from the USA Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, intelligence reform, and the detention of enemy combatants, the authors argue that what is most striking about US homeland security policy in the wake of 9-11 is just how weak the response of the American state has been. This outcome is contrary to both conventional wisdom and theoretical expectation. The authors argue that this puzzle is best explained by focusing on the institutional structure of US domestic politics.

Jay Stowsky is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) and is the executive drector of UC Berkeley's Services Science Program. Previously, he directed UC Berkeley's program on Information Technology and Homeland Security at the Goldman School of Public Policy and served in the Clinton administration as senior economist for science and technology policy on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Stowsky has also served as associate dean at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and as director of research policy for the University of California system. He has authored several studies of U.S. technology policy, including "Secrets to Share or Shield: New Dilemmas for Military R&D in the Digital Age," in Research Policy (Vol. 33, No. 2, March 2004) and "The Dual-Use Dilemma," in Issues in Science and Technology (Winter 1996). He is co-author, with Wayne Sandholtz, et al., of The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the Next Security System (Cambridge Oxford University Press, 1992).

Matthew Kroenig is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley and a Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellow at the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation. Kroenig's dissertation research explains the conditions under which states provide sensitive nuclear assistance to nonnuclear weapons states. Previously, he was a research associate with the Information Technology and Homeland Security Project and has also served in government as an intelligence analyst.

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall

Matt Kroenig PhD Candidate Speaker Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Jay Stowsky Adjunct Professor Speaker School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley
Seminars

The Greedy Terrorist: Inefficiencies and Vulneralbilities in Terrorist Organizations

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Shapiro presents research he conducted with David A. Siegel, a student in Stanford's Graduate School of Business:

A review of international terrorist activity reveals a recurring pattern of financially strapped operatives working for terrorist organizations that seem to have plenty of money. This observation is hard to square with traditional accounts of terrorist financial and logistical systems, accounts that stress the efficiency with which terrorist financial networks distribute funds while operating through a variety of covert channels. In order to explain the observed inefficiencies, we present a hierarchical model of terror organizations in which leaders must delegate financial and logistical tasks to middlemen for security reasons; however, these middlemen do not always share their leaders' interests. In particular, the temptation always exists to skim funds from any financial transaction. To counteract this problem, leaders can threaten to punish the middlemen. Because logisticians in international terrorist organizations are often geographically separated from leaders, and because they can defect to the government if threatened, violence is rarely the effective threat it is for localized groups such as the IRA. Therefore leaders must rely on more prosaic strategies to solve this agency problem; we focus on leaders' ability to remove middlemen from the network, denying them the rewards of future participation. We find that when the middlemen are sufficiently greedy, and when the organization suffers from a sufficiently strong budget constraint, that leaders will choose not to fund attacks in equilibrium because the costs of skimming are too great. Further, we show there can be important non-linearities in terrorists' response to government counter-terrorism. Specifically, we find that given constrained funding for terrorists, government efforts will yield few results until they reach a certain threshold, at which point cooperation between leaders and middlemen in terrorist groups breaks down leading to a dramatic drop in the probability of terrorist success.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall

Jacob N. Shapiro
Seminars

Does Anti-Americanism Have Consequences for International Security?

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Robert O. Keohane (PhD., Harvard University), James B. Duke Professor of Political Science, has taught at Swarthmore College, Stanford University, Brandeis University, and Harvard University where he was Stanfield Professor of International Peace.

He is the author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton University Press, 1984), for which he was awarded the second annual Grawemeyer Award in 1989 for Ideas Improving World Order. He is editor or co-editor of, and contributor to, eleven other books, most recently, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge 2003), with J.L. Holzgrefe. Between 1974 and 1980 he was editor of the journal, International Organization. He was president of the International Studies Association, 1988-89, and of the American Political Science Association, 1999-2000. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the National Humanities Center. He is on leave from Duke this year, conducting research at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall

Robert Keohane
Seminars

Peacekeeping and the Peacekept: Maintaining Peace in the Aftermath of Civil War

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Page Fortna is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars. She is the author of Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton University Press, 2004), and has published articles in World Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. She is currently working on a project evaluating the effectiveness of peacekeeping in civil wars, as well as a project on long-term historical trends in war termination.

During the 2004-2005 academic year, she is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She has also been a visiting fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA (2002-2003). Before coming to Columbia, Fortna was a pre-doctoral and then a post-doctoral fellow at CISAC. Her graduate work was done in the Government Department at Harvard University (Ph.D. 1998). Before graduate school, she worked at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington DC. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall

Page Fortna Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Seminars

Regimes at Work: The Nonproliferation Regime and the Case of India

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall

Karthika Sasikumar

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karthika.sasikumar.jpg PhD

Karthika Sasikumar began her education in Hyderabad, India. She obtained her undergraduate degree from St. Francis College for Women. From 1995 to 1999, she was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where she earned Master's and M.Phil Degrees from the School of International Studies.

Dr. Sasikumar received her Ph.D. from the Government Department at Cornell University in 2006. Her dissertation explores the interaction between India and the international nuclear nonproliferation order.

Before coming to San Jose State University, where she is a Professor of Political Science, Dr. Sasikumar was a Program Associate at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Associate in the International Security Program at Harvard University’s  Kennedy School of Government, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has also been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia’s  Liu Institute for Global Issues in Vancouver, and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University.

In 2010-11, she spent a year at the Belfer Center as the first Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow. She is the Vice-Chair of the SJSU Senate, and has served as a mentor in the Preparing Future Professors Program, and as the Co-PI for the university’s Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence.

Her research and teaching interests are in International Relations theory, international regimes, global security, migration, and national identity.

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Karthika Sasikumar
Seminars

Preventing Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Terrorism: Essential Steps to Reduce the Availability of Nuclear-Explosive Materials

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This report proposes a set of initiatives aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons to more countries and to non-state terrorist and criminal organizations. The most effective way to do this is to strictly limit access to the key nuclear-explosive materials required to make nuclear weapons: high-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium. These materials must be secured and, where possible, eliminated; and the number of locations where they can be found or produced drastically reduced.

We propose measures to strengthen international security standards on the storage and transport of fissile materials; stop the spread of facilities capable of producing fissile materials (reprocessing and enrichment plants); end verifiably the production of fissile material for weapons; dispose of excess weapons and civilian fissile materials; and phase out the use of HEU as a reactor fuel.

Although the measures called for have been on the international agenda for decades, most are barely moving forward, if not completely stalled. These measures urgently need high-level attention.

Specifically, we call for the following initiatives:

  • A finding by the U.N. Security Council that a country that withdraws from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and seeks to use for weapons purposes materials and technology acquired while it was a member constitutes a threat to international security and that such country will be subject to a clearly articulated escalating set of sanctions imposed by the international community. Exporters and importers should negotiate bilateral safeguards as a backup to international safeguards to assure that, in addition to a country's obligations under the NPT, they have a bilateral agreement that any nuclear facilities, equipment, or material that is exported will not be converted to weapons use. Such backup safeguards are already mandated in some agreements for nuclear cooperation between supplier and receiver countries;
  • The establishment of internationally verified minimum standards for the physical protection of fissile materials;
  • An international agreement that countries will build new uranium enrichment plants only if they have been first reviewed and approved under agreed criteria by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or a special committee under the U.N. Security Council and are subject to an additional level of multinational oversight;
  • A moratorium on building new spent-fuel reprocessing plants until the existing plutonium stocks, including excess military stocks, are disposed of, and phase-out of plutonium separation at existing reprocessing plants if there is no compelling economic rationale to continue;
  • A Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) to end further production of fissile materials for weapons or outside international safeguards;
  • Actions by the United States and Russia to dispose of fissile materials recovered from excess weapons;
  • A phaseout of the use of HEU in reactor fuel and critical assemblies.
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Science, Technology and Security Seminars (2009-2010)

The Science, Technology and Security Seminars, which were suspended during the 2009-2010 academic year, featured advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars presenting their current research on contemporary issues in international security that intersect with science and technology. In 2009, CISAC combined the social science and science seminars into a weekly 'Research Seminar on International Security, Natural Science and Social Science' series on Thursdays from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall.

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