Governance

FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

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Does a tracking system making laws more enforceable actually improve society? Ahmed examines how technology firms and the Chinese government build databases and information sharing procedures that monitor the behavior of individuals, corporations, legal institutions, and government representatives, with the end goal of building a society where those individuals and corporations follow the law.

Read the rest at Stanford HAI

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Does a tracking system making laws more enforceable actually improve society?

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

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/bUXHbUj5uxE

 

About the Event: While most civil wars today are fought within Muslim-majority states and, frequently, by armed groups that self-identify as Islamic, we know little about the relationships between and amongst Islamic humanitarian law, Western (treaty-based) humanitarian law, and the rhetoric and behavior of Islamic armed groups. Our legal analysis suggests that, while there is a great deal of overlap between Western and Islamic humanitarian law, this overlap is not perfect. Our empirical analysis, which focuses on both the words and behaviors of Islamic armed groups, suggests similarly mixed results. Specifically, we find that, on average, Islamic armed groups do not appear to be more or less compliant with Western or Islamic humanitarian law than non-Islamic armed groups when it comes to civilian targeting and child soldiering. While they often appeal to Islamic humanitarian law, Islamic armed groups appear to be bound by similar political and military – rather than religious or legal – constraints to non-Islamic armed groups.

 

About the Speaker: Tanisha Fazal is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict.  Fazal’s current book project analyzes the effect of improvements in medical care in conflict zones on the long-term costs of war.  She is the author of State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton University Press, 2007), and Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2018.

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Tanisha Fazal Professor of Political Science University of Minnesota
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Dr. Gil Baram is a senior lecturer (US Associate Professor) at the Political Studies Department, Bar Ilan University. She is a non-resident research scholar at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), University of California, Berkeley. She is also a senior adjunct research fellow at the Centre of Excellence for National Security, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Previously, she was a Fulbright Cybersecurity postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.

Dr. Baram’s research explores, among other areas, AI-driven cyber threats, the impact of technology on national security, the role of Intelligence agencies in cyber operations, cyber threats to space systems, cyber diplomacy and norms development, and data-based approaches to cyber conflict research.

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Ryan A. Musto is Director of the Robert M. Gates Initiative in American Statecraft at William & Mary. Previously, he served as Director of Forums and Research Initiatives with William & Mary’s Global Research Institute.

By training, Ryan is a diplomatic historian with concentrations in nuclear and Cold War international history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the international history of regional nuclear weapon free zones. With his work, Ryan seeks to better understand the geopolitical and geostrategic dynamics that led to proposals for regional denuclearization and determined their outcome. 

Ryan served as a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow with CISAC from 2020 - 2022. He has also served as a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and as a Nuclear Security Fellow with the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo, Brazil. His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Cold War History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, and Americas Quarterly, amongst other outlets. 

Ryan holds a Ph.D. in history from The George Washington University, master’s degrees in international and world history from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and a B.A. (hons.) in history from New York University (NYU).

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Sulgiye Park is a Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Previously, she was a Senior Scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where she specialized in analyzing the nuclear fuel pathways of North Korea and China. She earned her Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Stanford, focusing on the behavior of nuclear materials under extreme environments, and later conducted research at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences on fabricating nanodiamonds for technological applications. As both a Stanton Foundation and MacArthur Foundation Fellow at CISAC, her work encompassed geologic analysis of North Korea’s uranium and critical metal resources, regulatory frameworks for nuclear waste management, and the production and supply chains of rare-earth and other critical metals in the United States.

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John R. Emery is an Assistant Professor of International Security at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of International and Area Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses broadly on the intersection of ethics of war, security studies and technology. His work on 1950s nuclear wargaming at the RAND Corporation and the impact of wargames on ethical intuition has been published in Texas National Security Review. Previous work on drones, ethics, counter-terrorism, and just war is published in Critical Military Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, and Peace Review. In 2017-2018 he was awarded the NSF-funded Technology, Law and Society Fellowship to undertake an interdisciplinary study of the impact of AI, Big Data, and blockchain on law and society scholarship.

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Stephen Buono is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida, where he teaches at the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education. An historian of governance, technology, and international relations, he is the author of The Province of All Mankind: How Outer Space Became American Foreign Policy and Governing the Moon: A History. Buono was a Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC in 2020–2022, and subsequently held fellowships at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the University of Chicago. He is currently at work on a book about universities in the American Century.

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Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, sponsored by Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. His research agenda centers on technological change and international politics. His book project investigates how past technological revolutions influenced the rise and fall of great powers, with implications for U.S.-China competition in emerging technologies like AI. Other research papers tackle how states should identify strategic technologies, assessments of national scientific and technological capabilities, and interstate cooperation on nuclear safety and security technologies. Jeff's work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, The Washington Post, and other outlets. Jeff received his PhD in 2021 from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He has also worked as a researcher for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and the Centre for the Governance of AI at the University of Oxford.

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Austin R. Cooper is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed his PhD in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and SciencesPo’s Nuclear Knowledges Program.

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Herbert Lin
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What do the 2020 Doomsday Clock - you know, the calculation that tells us which technologies and conditions may annihilate us all - and the 2020 presidential election have in common?

Listen to the conversation at WNPR

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Herb Lin discusses how close we are to midnight, which is to say, human annihilation.

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