* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

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About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

About the Event: Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted in arms control talks with Russia that a follow-on agreement to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) should cover all nuclear weapons and that such an agreement should focus on the nuclear warheads themselves. This would represent a significant change from previous agreements, which focused on delivery vehicles, such as missiles. The United States has been particularly interested in potential limits on nonstrategic nuclear warheads (NSNW). Such weapons have never been subject to an arms control agreement. Because Russia possesses an advantage in the number of such weapons, the US Senate has insisted that negotiators include them in a future agreement, making their inclusion necessary if such an accord is to win Senate approval and ultimately be ratified by Washington. In the wake of Russian nuclear threats in the Ukraine conflict, such demands can only be expected to grow if and when US and Russian negotiators return to the negotiating table.

Such an agreement will face major negotiating and implementation challenges—not only between Washington and Moscow, but also between Washington and NATO European allies. That is because the US side of such an agreement would primarily affect an estimated 100 US B61 gravity bombs deployed at European bases in NATO countries. Yet, these allies have not played a substantive role in US-Russian arms control negotiations since the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was completed in the 1980s; inspections under the treaty ended in 2001.1 As a result, many of these allies and NATO officials have recognized the need to “do their homework” so they can be prepared to engage in substantive consultations with the United States during negotiation of such a treaty and to implement it once it enters into force.

To stimulate this process, four NATO allies (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway) and one NATO partner (Sweden) funded a research team led by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and former NATO Deputy Secretary General and New START lead negotiator Rose Gottemoeller. The research focused on the negotiating, policy, legal, and technical issues that allies will likely have to address to reach such an accord. The research team also carried out a series of interviews to understand the views in NATO states on such an agreement and to gauge the constraints they could be expected to face in the process. The interviews and the primary drafting of the report occurred before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the report was first presented at a conference on “Maintaining Strategic Stability amid a Detoriorating European Security Environment” in Copenhagen in May. Mr. Pomper will discuss the paper and ongoing efforts to build Allied capacity to tackle these issues. 

In addition, prior to this paper US and allied research on verification measures for NSNW had largely focused on scientific and technical tools to conduct on-site inspections. The research team developed an original and unique methodology for a data exchange employing historic stockpile data and taking advantage of past US-Russian cooperation and cryptography. This data exchange would serve as the critical backbone for other verification measures, no matter the type of warhead or the type of agreement (freeze, limitation, or reduction). As Mr Moon will explain, his technical team with support from colleagues at Stanford and the State Department Verification Fund is now preparing a proof-of-concept demonstration of this approach and then will develop the framework for a full verification protocol. 

About the Speakers: 

Miles A. Pomper is currently leading a project to build NATO capacity for addressing deterrence, arms, control and verification issues, supported by Denmark, Germany, and Sweden as well as a parallel technical project funded by the U.S. State Department.  He is the lead author of Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe co-authored by Rose Gottemoeller, Bill Moon, and other leading experts. Miles is a Senior Fellow at the Washington, DC, office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He has authored or co-authored several other reports and book chapters on nonstrategic nuclear warheads, arms control, and deterrence in Europe, including Ensuring Deterrence Against Russia: The View from NATO States (2015). He is also the author or co-author of dozens of other reports and book chapters on nuclear arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, and nuclear and radiological terrorism. He is the former editor of Arms Control Today, the former lead foreign-policy reporter for the Capitol Hill publication CQ Weekly, and a former diplomat with the US Information Agency. He holds master's degrees in international affairs from Columbia University and in journalism from Northwestern University and a B.A. in history from Columbia. 

William M. Moon is currently the technical lead on a project to build NATO capacity for addressing deterrence, arms, control and verification issues, supported by Denmark, Germany, and Sweden as well as a parallel technical project funded by the U.S. State Department.  He is a co-author of Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe co-authored by Miles Pomper, Rose Gottemoeller, and other leading experts. Bill is a Non-resident Fellow at the Stimson Center and an Independent Consultant.  He has authored a series of reports on nuclear security and the Cooperative Threat Reduction program based on his experiences leading the CTR Global Nuclear Security program for over 25 years at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.  He holds master's degrees in international affairs from Columbia University and in Resourcing National Security from the National Defense University, and a B.A. in Government and Russian Studies from Hamilton College.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: A panel discussion convened in partnership with the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, University of San Francisco, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, and the World House Project, Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, Stanford University.

About the Speakers:

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as Chairman of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

Clayborne Carson, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History, emeritus, at Stanford University, has devoted his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the human rights movements inspired by King, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and other visionaries. His award-winning first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, was published in 1981 and remains the definitive study of the courageous activists and organizers who challenged the strongholds of segregation. In 1985, Mrs. Coretta Scott King chose Dr. Carson to edit and publish a definitive, multi-volume edition of her late husband’s speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. In addition to publishing numerous other books and scholarly articles, Carson has also reached broader audiences as a senior advisor to the Eyes on the Prize series and his contributions to more than two dozen subsequent documentaries. After launching the online Liberation Curriculum for K-12 students, Carson founded Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute in 2005 to disseminate King-related educational resources to a global audience. After retiring as the King Institute’s Director, Carson has continued his online educational efforts by establishing The World House Project to collaborate with other human rights advocates to realize King's vision of a global community in which all people can "learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining Stanford Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO’s adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism.  Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation.

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In the wake of natural disasters, humanitarian aid can make the difference between life and death for people in harm’s way. But despite the suffering of their citizens, leaders sometimes fail to secure international humanitarian aid or conceal the existence of an emergency. Their actions can prevent or delay the delivery of all humanitarian aid. This paper answers the question: under what conditions do recipient governments seek or refuse humanitarian aid after natural disasters?  I argue that leaders act strategically, based on the understanding that their response to natural disasters will influence powerful donor states’ perceptions of the regime’s competence. Donors reward competent leader are rewarded with more advantageous resources while incompetent leaders face greater conditionality. Consequently, state leaders seek humanitarian when doing so will lead powerful donors to perceive the recipient as competent, and they fail to seek aid and conceal the existence of emergencies when doing so would signal incompetence. Seeking aid signals competence when the natural disaster is exogenous to government policy choices and it is implausible that the government could respond adequately alone. When donors can blame event on the government's failure to prevent, even providing emergency relief without donor support makes the government look incompetent, which creates incentives for governments to conceal such events. I use new data on of government policy decisions in response to droughts and floods and a survey of government officials in a poor aid-dependent state to test this argument.

About the Speaker: Allison Grossman is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University and an Affiliated Researcher at Stanford's King Center on Global Development. Her research investigates how so-called "fragile" states cooperate with (0r contest) international efforts to mitigate suffering and improve the welfare of their residents. She investigates these issues of global concern in West African states, including Niger, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 2021. Her research has been published in the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and PS: Political Science & Politics.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: To manage the risks of potential dual use research of concern (DURC), US government policy and biorisk management professionals recommend tailoring mitigation strategies to an assessment of a given project’s risk. However, there is little empirical research on how different reviewers assess risks and recommend mitigation strategies for the same set of life sciences projects. If reviewers cannot agree on risk assessments, or if the choice of mitigation strategies does not heavily depend on risk assessments, then the purpose of assessment becomes less clear.

Using a modified version of the US government’s Companion Guide for DURC assessment, we elicited detailed reviews of the risks, benefits, and recommended risk management strategies for four real-world synthetic biology projects from 18 experienced DURC reviewers and 49 synthetic biology students. We find significant variation within and between reviewer groups and projects in both assessed DURC risk and recommended strategies for managing it. This empirical variation raises questions about the role of DURC assessment, challenges conventional conceptions of DURC assessment “expertise”, and highlights the need for experimentation in DURC management.

About the Speaker: Dr. Daniel Greene is a Senior Analyst at Gryphon Scientific, a biosecurity and public health research consultancy. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he worked with Drs. Megan Palmer and David Relman to study the societal risks and potential of life-science research. His primary research focus was on measuring and cultivating a culture of responsibility in the life sciences by using a combination of survey experiments, qualitative methods, data science, and policy analysis. Daniel has a PhD in Education from Stanford University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In this talk, Dr. Kassenova will share highlights from her recently released book Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb. She will share the history of Soviet nuclear tests in the Kazakh steppe, their harm to the people and the environment, and the story of the public anti-nuclear movement that led to the closure of the nuclear testing site. She will also explain why Kazakhstan decided to give up its nuclear inheritance, including more than a thousand nuclear weapons, more than a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, tons of nuclear materials, and critical nuclear infrastructure. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize access of proliferators to the global financial system. Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds and is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS). From 2011 to 2015 Kassenova served on the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.