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

About this Event: Are we still in the Nuclear Age? Is this the Age of AI? Are we entering the Age of Synthetic Biology? Technologies such as nuclear power, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology are “epochal,” as in epoch-making: They redefine the world in which we live, introducing new uncertainties and risks, as well as new responsibilities—but for whom? World-changing technologies are inextricably political entities, affecting distribution of power and resources throughout and between societies. However, despite decades of academic and practical experience with the political dimensions of technology, contemporary societies appear to be inadequately prepared to cope skillfully with the new worlds that their scientists and technologists are creating. Why? What lessons can be learned from existing epochal technologies that might help societies understand, evaluate, and direct their technical potentials and trajectories into the future? Within the context of growing concern about national security threats that may emerge from germline genetic engineering, Greene will consider the cultivation of a “culture of responsibility” in synthetic biology labs. Polleri will examine a set of public controversies surrounding the role of nuclear power and the threat of radioactive contamination in a post-Fukushima Japan. Garvey will map out the risk landscape surrounding AI systems and discuss strategic approaches to coping with uncertainty and disagreement in protecting against catastrophic technological risk.

About the Speakers:

Colin Garvey is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He studies the history and political economy of artificial intelligence (AI), among other things, with a comparative focus on Japan. He is currently a PhD Candidate and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Fellow in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). His dissertation “Averting AI Catastrophe, Together: On the Democratic Governance of Epochal Technologies,” challenges utopian/dystopian thinking about AI by explaining how more democratic governance of the technology is not only necessary to avert catastrophe, but also to steer AI R&D more safely, fairly, and wisely. He won Best Early Career Paper at the 2017 meeting of the Society for the History of Technology for “Broken Promises & Empty Threats: The Evolution of AI in America, 1956-1996.” His research article on the history and political economy of Japanese AI, “An Alternative to Neoliberal Modernity: The ‘Threat’ of the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project,” will be published in a forthcoming special issue of Pacific Historical Review. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). In addition to an MS in STS from RPI, Colin double-majored in Japanese and Media Studies at Vassar College. Before starting graduate school, Colin spent several years teaching in Japan, where he became a Zen Buddhist monk. Colin is fluent in Japanese and freelances as a translator of Japanese books and scientific articles.

Daniel Greene is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC, where he works with Dr. Megan Palmer on strategies for risk governance in biotechnology. He uses computational social science methods to identify factors that influence the decisions of biology labs to engage in potentially risky research. Daniel completed a PhD at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, where he worked with Prof. Carol Dweck to develop and test social-psychological interventions to improve student motivation at scale. His dissertation identified and influenced novel psychological constructs for motivating unemployed and underemployed adults to pursue job-skill training. Outside of academia, Daniel worked for five years as a data scientist and product developer at the Project for Education Research That Scales, a nonprofit that develops resources and infrastructure for disseminating best practices from education research. He also holds a BA in Cognitive Science (Honors) from Rutgers University. Daniel's work has been supported by the Open Philanthropy Project, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Gates Foundation, the Stanford Digital Learning Forum, and an Amir Lopatin Fellowship.

Dr. Maxime Polleri is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. As an anthropologist of science and technology, his work examines the governance of risk in the aftermath of technological disasters implying environmental contamination. His current research focuses on Japanese public and state responses to the release of radioactive contamination after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. He has published articles and op-ed in Social Studies of Science, American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, Anthropology Now, Medical Anthropology Quarterly Second Spear, Somatosphere, Bulleting  of the Atomic Scientists, and The Diplomat. 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/BGjRsO0fKds

About this Event: Germany plays a key role in shaping European and Western policy toward Russia.  Berlin is a leading voice within the European Union on Russian issues, and Chancellor Angela Merkel co-chairs with the French president the "Normandy" effort that seeks to broker a setttlement between Ukraine and Russia to the conflict in Donbas.  Emily Haber, the German ambassador to the United States, will join us for a conversation on how Berlin sees the Russian challenge and how the West should respond.

About the Speaker: Emily Margarethe Haber has been German Ambassador to the United States since June 2018. 

Immediately prior to this, Haber, a career foreign service officer, was deployed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, serving as State Secretary overseeing security and migration at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe. In this capacity, she worked closely with the US administration on topics ranging from the fight against international terrorism to global cyberattacks and cybersecurity. In 2009, she was appointed Political Director and, in 2011, State Secretary at the Foreign Office, the first woman to hold either post. 

Emily Haber is married to Hansjörg Haber. The couple has two sons. 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/YQU4cuywdK8

About this Event: What sort of narrative defines the American experience with nuclear weapons? National security expert Joe Cirincione argues that it is not a triumph, but a tragedy - one ripe with themes the ancient Greeks would have recognized. He will guide us through the paradoxes and pitfalls of U.S. nuclear policy and expose the costs - political, financial, and moral - of our search for an all-too illusory security in the atomic age.

About the Speaker: Joseph Cirincione is president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. He is also the host of Press The Button, a weekly podcast from Ploughshares Fund dedicated to nuclear policy and national security. A new episode is available every Tuesday.

Cirincione is the author of the books Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons and Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats. He has worked on nuclear weapons policy in Washington for over 35 years and is considered one of the top experts in the field. He served previously as vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress, director for non-proliferation at Carnegie Endowment, and senior associate at Stimson. He worked for nine years as professional staff on the U.S. House of Representatives Committees on Armed Services and Government Operations. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former member of the International Security Advisory Board for Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. He also teaches at the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service.

Cirincione's commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, CNN, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Financial Times, Kyodo News, Moscow Times, Foreign Policy, The Hill, Daily Beast, and Huffington Post.

Open to Stanford affiliates only. 
Stanford identification will be checked at doors. 

This event is co-sponsored with Stanford’s Center for South Asia

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/Wc3mFRw9an8

About the Speaker:

Hina Rabbani Khar is the 26th Foreign Minister of Pakistan. Twice elected Member of Parliament. She is currently serving as Member of Parliament in the National Assembly of Pakistan. Hina Rabbani Khar’s term as Foreign Minister is best remembered for the ‘Regional Pivot’ to Pakistan’s foreign policy. As the 26th Foreign Minister of Pakistan, she concentrated on building ties with Pakistan’s immediate neighbours. A major policy shift was taken by starting the journey of normalization of trade relations with India. Similarly, with Afghanistan, Pakistan pursued a policy of reaching out to all political parties, and ethnicities. Pakistan also pursued an active role in an Afghan led and Afghan owned process of reconciliation. In a difficult time of increasing economic sanctions Pakistan pursued to cement ties with Iran. 

Hina Rabbani Khar has also served as Minister of State for Economic Affairs for 4 years and Minister of State for Finance & Economic Affairs for another 2 Years. During these years, she was the lead person in Pakistan’s economic diplomacy, both bilateral and multilateral. 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/yIthWPC99bI

About this Event: Since the United States left the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, the Trump administration has pursued a maximum economic pressure campaign toward Iran. The U.S. use of sanctions has gone far beyond what previous administrations have done to try to change Iran's policies, targeting large swathes of the Iranian economy, high-ranking Iranian government officials, and threatening other countries if they do not curtail their own private sector's activities with Iran. The economic consequences of these measures, particularly for Iran's domestic economy, Iran's ability to procure food and medicine from abroad, and for Iran's flagship energy industry, have been profoundly disruptive. The U.S. economic pressure strategy has also had direct impacts on the global shipping and energy industries. To better understand the impacts of the current U.S. strategy toward Iran, Elizabeth Rosenberg will discuss how the Trump administration has used unprecedented economic coercion, and how U.S. partners and adversaries have responded. She will focus on what role sanctions are likely to play going forward and whether they will be used now as a form of deescalation or escalation in U.S.-Iran tensions, which are particularly heightened following the U.S. killing of Qods Force commander Qasem Soleimani. 

About the Speaker: Elizabeth Rosenberg is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Energy, Economics, and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. In this capacity, she publishes and speaks on the national security and foreign policy implications of the use of sanctions and economic statecraft as well as energy market shifts. Current geographic areas of focus include Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and Venezuela. She has testified before Congress on an array of banking and trade issues, and on energy geopolitics and markets topics. She is widely quoted by leading media outlets in the United States and abroad.

From May 2009 through September 2013, Ms. Rosenberg served as a Senior Advisor at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, to the Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, and then to the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. In these senior roles, she helped to develop and implement financial and energy sanctions. Key initiatives she helped to oversee include the tightening of global sanctions on Iran, the launching of new, comprehensive sanctions against Libya and Syria and modification of Burma sanctions in step with normalization of diplomatic relations. She also helped to formulate anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist and counter-proliferation financing policy and oversee financial regulatory enforcement activities.

Prior to her service in the U.S. government Ms. Rosenberg was an energy policy correspondent at Argus Media in Washington D.C., analyzing U.S and Middle Eastern energy policy, regulation and trading. She spoke and published extensively on OPEC, strategic reserves, energy sanctions and national security policy, oil and natural gas investment and production, and renewable fuels.

Ms. Rosenberg received an MA in Near Eastern Studies from New York University and a BA in Politics and Religion from Oberlin College.

Outside CNAS, Elizabeth Rosenberg is providing exclusive advice on foreign policy and national security as an informal advisor to the Elizabeth Warren campaign.

This event is co-sponsored by the European Security Initiative

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/1rkTwxnf2Fg

About this Event: Russia has employed the semi-state Wagner Group security company in Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic, Libya, Mozambique, and Mali (so far). Wagner is tightly connected to Russia's military intelligence organization (the GRU), and partially funded by one of Vladimir Putin's cronies, Evgeny Prigozhin, who also uses it for private duties. So why is Wagner technically illegal (and even unconstitutional) in Russia? Its use is less costly in budgetary and political terms than using the uniformed military, and it provides (limited) plausible deniability for Russian actions. But it is also unclear what Russia wants from impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Using the best available evidence, this presentation explores these mysteries.

About the Speaker: Kimberly Marten is a professor of political science (and the department chair) at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a faculty member of Columbia’s Harriman Institute and Saltzman Institute. She has written four books, including Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States (Cornell, 2012), and Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (Princeton, 1993) which received the Marshall Shulman Prize. The Council on Foreign Relations (where she is a member) published her special report, Reducing Tensions between Russia and NATO (2017). She is a frequent media commentator, and appeared on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. She earned her A.B. at Harvard and Ph.D. at Stanford, and was a CISAC post-doc.

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

About this Event: In Do Morals Matter?, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., one of the world's leading scholars of international relations, provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in US foreign policy during the post-1945 era.

Working through each presidency from Truman to Trump, Nye scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions: their intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which ones do not.

Since we so often apply moral reasoning to foreign policy, Nye suggests how to do it better. Crucially, presidents must factor in both the political context and the availability of resources when deciding how to implement an ethical policy--especially in a future international system that presents not only great power competition from China and Russia, but transnational threats as borders become porous to everything from drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism to cyber criminals and climate change.

About the Speaker: Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus and former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and a Deputy Under Secretary of State, and won distinguished service awards from all three agencies. His books include The Future of Power,  The Power Game: A Washington Novel, and (forthcoming) Do Morals Matter? He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, he was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers. In 2014, Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/AJxhy6pf95U

About this Event: Rampant disinformation threatens democracy, security, and even public health worldwide. As malicious actors weaponize social media, societies worldwide are being challenged to find solutions. Technology and regulatory measures must be part of the solution but, especially in free societies, these solutions often fail to keep pace with rapidly evolving and escalating threats. Dr. Kristin Lord, President and CEO of IREX, an international non-profit organization focused on education and development, will argue that at a time when the cost of producing disinformation is effectively zero, building citizen resilience to misinformation and disinformation must also be part of the solution.

Dr. Lord will discuss concrete approaches to building citizen resilience to disinformation, and present and review data showing its impact. She will also highlight the research agenda needed to advance the field of media literacy if its interventions are to be effective. IREX’s own flagship media literacy program, “Learn to Discern” is currently operational in more than a dozen countries, including the US, and has demonstrated lasting behavior change in a rigorous evaluation. Such approaches can be an effective part of a counter-disinformation strategy – but only if they are urgently brought to scale.

About the Speaker: Kristin Lord is President and CEO of IREX, a global non-profit organization that promotes more just, prosperous, and inclusive societies by developing leaders, extending access to quality education and information, empowering youth, and supporting accountable governance and civic participation. She brings more than twenty years of experience in the fields of education, foreign policy, global development, and security and peacebuilding to this role. Prior to joining IREX in 2014, Dr. Lord served in leadership roles at the United States Institute of Peace, Center for a New American Security, Brookings Institution, and The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. She also served at the U.S. Department of State and is currently a board member of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

CISAC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 5th due to the ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

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About this Event: Just a few years ago, people spoke of the US as a hyperpower-a titan stalking the world stage with more relative power than any empire in history. Yet as early as 1993, newly-appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although Western powers had "slain a large dragon" by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a "bewildering variety of poisonous snakes."

In The Dragons and the Snakes, the eminent soldier-scholar David Kilcullen asks how, and what, opponents of the West have learned during the last quarter-century of conflict. Applying a combination of evolutionary theory and detailed field observation, he explains what happened to the "snakes"-non-state threats including terrorists and guerrillas-and the "dragons"-state-based competitors such as Russia and China. He explores how enemies learn under conditions of conflict, and examines how Western dominance over a very particular, narrowly-defined form of warfare since the Cold War has created a fitness landscape that forces adversaries to adapt in ways that present serious new challenges to America and its allies. Within the world's contemporary conflict zones, Kilcullen argues, state and non-state threats have increasingly come to resemble each other, with states adopting non-state techniques and non-state actors now able to access levels of precision and lethal weapon systems once only available to governments.

A counterintuitive look at this new, vastly more complex environment, The Dragons and the Snakes will not only reshape our understanding of the West's enemies' capabilities, but will also show how we can respond given the increasing limits on US power.

About the Speaker: 

David Kilcullen is a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales and a professor of practice in global security at Arizona State University. He heads the strategic research firm Cordillera Applications Group. A former soldier and diplomat, he served as a counterinsurgency advisor during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years he has supported aid agencies, non-government organizations, and local communities in conflict and disaster-affected regions, and developed new ways to think about highly networked urban environments. Dr. Kilcullen was named one of the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009 and is the author of the highly acclaimed The Accidental Guerrilla, Out of the Mountains, and Blood Year.

Livestream: Registration is required and will close 24 hours before the event. Click here to register.

This event is available only to CISAC faculty, fellows, staff, and honors students.

About this Event: Jeopardizing U.S. research enterprises, provoking regional nationalism, and building a technological panopticon to rate every citizen's behavior: these assumptions about China fuel US foreign policy shadow-boxing with misplaced concerns. Our panel challenges prevalent narratives on China, providing informed, nuanced investigations that cut across a range of research methods. Julien de Troullioud's argues that the rise of China in science and technology is not a threat to the US but instead an opportunity to jointly work to solve global issues. Data shows that the current policies to protect the US research enterprise in science is hurting American and international scientific research. Xinru Ma finds that nationalism in China and in Southeast Asia are not necessarily all anti-foreign, and is more of a liability rather than an asset for domestic regimes, according to evidences from formal modeling and social media data. Shazeda Ahmed's interviews with Chinese government officials, tech firm representatives, and legal scholars reveal that the Chinese social credit system is more limited in its data collection and fragmented in its on-the-ground implementation than the dystopic institution its foreign critics presume it to be. Our research presents new data and fresh perspectives for rethinking US-China dynamics.

About the Speakers:

Shazeda Ahmed is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley who researches how tech firms and the Chinese government are collaboratively constructing the country's social credit system. She will be joining CISAC and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in Fall 2019 as a pre-doctoral Fellow. Shazeda has worked as a researcher for the Citizen Lab, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, and the Ranking Digital Rights corporate transparency review by New America. In the 2018-19 academic year she was a Fulbright fellow at Peking University's law school.

Xinru Ma is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Political Science and International Relations (POIR) program at University of Southern California, and will join CISAC as a Postdoctoral Fellow for 2019-2020. Originally from China, Xinru is interested in combining formal modeling and computational social science with research on nationalist protests and maritime disputes, with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia. Her research is informed by extensive field research in Vietnam, Philippines and China, during which she interviewed protestors, think tanks, diplomats, government officials, and foreign business owners that were impacted by nationalist protests. In addition to informing her of the complicated strategic interaction between mass mobilization, government repression and foreign policy-making, the field research further motivated her to focus on the methodological challenges for causal inference that stem from strategic conflict behavior. More broadly, Xinru is interested in public opinion and new methods of measuring it, foreign policy formation, alliance politics, East Asian security dynamics, and the historical relations of East Asia. 

Julien de Troullioud de Lanversin will be joining CISAC as a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow. Julien is finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He is interested in how to verify and reconstruct past fissile material production programs with scientific tools. To that end, he developed innovative methods that use isotopic analysis from nuclear reactors to gain information on their past operation (nuclear archeology) and designed an open source software that can compute the istopic composition of fissile materials from nuclear reactors. His current research looks at the various modalities of the production of plutonium and tritium in production reactors and how transparency on tritium could be used to improve estimates on plutonium stockpiles. Julien also studies security questions related to civil and military nuclear programs in Northeast Asia through the lens of fissile material, with a focus on China and North Korea. Julien visited the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technologies at Tsinghua University for one semester in 2018 to collaborate with Chinese experts on work related to nuclear engineering and arms control. Julien’s work on nuclear archaeology has been published in the Journal of Science and Global Security. He received his Diplôme d’Ingénieur (M.Sc. And B.Sc.Eng.) from Ecole Centrale de Marseille in 2014. The same year he also obtained a M.Sc. in Nuclear Science and Engineering from the University of Tsinghua where he was a recipient of the Chinese Government Scholarship. Julien speaks and uses Chinese in his research and is a native French speaker.