Abstract: Over the past decade, fears about the decline of the United States relative to other countries (especially China) have become a prominent feature of American political discourse. While anxiety about losing power on the world stage has been a recurrent phenomenon in the United States since the 1950s, the present bout of pessimism – combining reactions to the disastrous Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and most recently the rise of Donald Trump – makes this the deepest and most serious crisis of confidence in postwar American history. This project explores the domestic political and strategic consequences of anxiety about lost or eroding national status by combining insights from social theory and social psychology. I use evidence from historical cases of decline (including Spain after 1898, France after 1945 and the United Kingdom after 1945) as well as survey experiments to investigate hypotheses about the heterogenous ways in which different individuals and groups react to relative national decline, and how these responses combine to influence the declining state’s politics and foreign policy. 

Speaker bio: Steven Ward is a Junior Faculty Fellow at CISAC for the year 2017-2018 and an Assistant Professor in the Government Department at Cornell University. He holds an MA in Security Studies and a PhD in Government from Georgetown University. He is the author of Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His work has appeared in Security Studies and International Studies Quarterly.

Abstract: In crisis management operations, strategic errors can cost lives. Some international organizations (IOs) learn from these failures whereas others tend to repeat them. Given that they have high rates of turnover, how is it possible that any IO retains knowledge about the past? The book NATO's Lessons in Crisis introduces an argument for how and why IOs develop institutional memory from their efforts to manage crises. Findings indicate that the design of an IO’s learning infrastructure (e.g. lessons learned offices and databases) can inadvertently disincentivize IO elites from using it to share knowledge about strategic errors. Elites – high-level officials in IOs - perceive reporting to be a risky endeavour. In response, they develop institutional memory by creating and using informal processes, including transnational interpersonal networks, private documentation and conversations during crisis management exercises. The result is an institutional memory that is highly dependent on only a handful of individuals. The book draws on the author’s interviews and a survey experiment with 120 NATO elites across four countries. Cases of NATO crisis management in Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine further illustrate the development of institutional memory. Findings challenge existing research on organizational learning by suggesting that formal learning processes alone are insufficient for ensuring that learning happens. The book also offers recommendations to policymakers for strengthening the learning capacity of IOs.

Abstract: The West has no peer competitors in conventional military power.  But its adversaries are increasingly turning to asymmetric methods for engaging in conflict.  Cyber-enabled information warfare (CEIW) leverages the features of modern information and communications technology to age-old techniques of propaganda, deception, and chaos production to confuse, mislead, and to influence the choices and decisions that the adversary makes—and a recent example of CEIW can be seen in the Russian hacks on the U.S. presidential election in 2016.  CEIW is a hostile activity, or at least an activity that is conducted between two parties whose interests are not well-aligned, but it does not constitute warfare in the sense that international law or domestic institutions construe it.  Nor is it cyber war or cyber conflict as we have come to understand those ideas.  Some approaches to counter CEIW show some promise of having some modest but valuable defensive effect.  If better solutions for countering CEIW waged against free and democratic societies are not forthcoming, societal discourse will no longer be grounded in reason and objective reality—an outcome that can fairly be called the end of the Enlightenment.

Speaker bios: Dr. Herb Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.  His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in and knowledgeable about the use of offensive operations in cyberspace, especially as instruments of national policy.  In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. He recently served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.  Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

To read more about Herb Lin's interests, please read "An Evolving Research Agenda in Cyber Policy and Security."

Jackie Kerr is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Her research examines cybersecurity and information security strategy, Internet governance, and the Internet policies of non-democratic regimes.  She was a 2015-2016 Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) Pre-Doctoral Fellow with the Cyber Security Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a Cybersecurity Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation in 2014-2015.  Jackie holds a PhD and MA in Government from Georgetown University, and an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and BAS in Mathematics and Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University.  She has held research fellowships in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Qatar, and has previous professional experience as a software engineer.

Abstract: Recently, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Reddit, Etsy, SoundCloud, and The New York Times were knocked out by a botnet driven by the Mirai malware. Mirai is a contemporary case of a more general phenomenon: the illegitimate appropriation of online resources for prestige, economic, and/or political gain. Historically participants in the anti-abuse regime have used reputation indicators to characterize subsets of this illegitimate activity as abuse: any traffic---spam, malware communications, DDOS traffic---that is not explicitly consensual, is abusive. Participants in this regime use decentralized, transnational monitoring to aggregate and vet credible reputation indicators, then redistribute these indicators to participants enforcing anti-abuse norms. This work explains how these reputation indicators have functioned over the course of their evolution within this regime, from products of supposedly “vigilante blacklists” into credible mechanisms based on graduated sanction as a remediative signaling mechanism rather than a punitive sanction. Returning to Mirai, this work concludes by evaluating the potential for this regime to tackle contemporary IoT security challenges. In particular, can the anti-abuse regime discipline a market projected to grow from $900M in 2015 to $3.7B in 2020, or will it need help from conventional authorities?

About the Speaker: Jesse is the 2016-2017 Cybersecurity Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and holds a PhD in Technology, Management, and Policy from MIT.  Jesse focuses on understanding the institutions and political economy of Internet operations vis a vis conventional modes of domestic and inter-state governance mechanisms. This work includes studies on infrastructure resource management and policy, infrastructure security, credible knowledge assessment, and operational epistemic communities’ role informing public policy. Jesse’s dissertation evaluates the common resource management institutions that sustain the integrity and security of the Internet’s numbers and routing system. The dissertation documents how the roles of these institutions, comprising diverse transnational operator communities, managing the complex of physical and information resources supporting the integrity of global Internet connectivity. Concluding analyses narrow the focus from operational authority to the character of political authority in these communities, rooted in the family of consensus processes used to adapt resource policy and institutions apace with Internet growth and development.  Jesse is currently working on a number of papers from his dissertation: reputation and security in the numbers and routing system, contrasting consensus as a decision-making process with conventional mechanisms for credible knowledge assessment, and the challenges in comity between substantive-purposive authority in operational institutions with governments’ conventional, formal-legalistic modes of authority. Ongoing work is developing a theory of epistemic constructivism and case work on developing joint capabilities between operational security regimes and law enforcement/national security actors.

Abstract: Both the academic and policy making worlds have been dominated by three explanations for development, understood broadly as democratization and rising levels of per capita income. The first argument is modernization theory which assumes that if polities are provided with adequate resources, especially investment, they will develop. The second argument is institutional capacity approaches which focus on the ability of the state to maintain order. The third argument is rational choice institutionalism which sees deveopment as a rare event resulting from the self interested calculations of elites.  Happenstance and path-dependence play major roles for rational choice instititoinalism. All three of these approaches suffer from major gaps. All three, however, are consistent with the view that external state-building efforts will only be successful if the objectives of external and internal elites are complmentary. This suggests that for most polities the best that external actors can accomplish is Good Enough Governance: security, some service provision, some economic growth.

About the Speaker: Stephen Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, the Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, School of Humanities & Sciences, and the deputy director of FSI. A former director of CDDRL, Krasner is also an FSI senior fellow, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution.

From February 2005 to April 2007 he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department. While at the State Department, Krasner was a driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He was also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world.

At CDDRL, Krasner was the coordinator of the Program on Sovereignty. His work has dealt primarily with sovereignty, American foreign policy, and the political determinants of international economic relations. Before coming to Stanford in 1981 he taught at Harvard University and UCLA. At Stanford, he was chair of the political science department from 1984 to 1991, and he served as the editor of International Organization from 1986 to 1992.

He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1987-88) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000-2001). In 2002 he served as director for governance and development at the National Security Council. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

 - This talk is co-sponsored by the Program in International Relations at Stanford University -

Abstract: Debates about how the United States’ should behave rarely address the central problem. Global challenges – from violent extremism to migration, inequality, climate change, epidemics, and economic or technological disruptions – unfold alongside governments that are increasingly ill fit to meet them. Global connections have generated concerns on scales that do not match the scale of the nation state. Analysts at the National Intelligence Council understand this and claim that the key to global power in the future will be the ability to marry national power and technological advantage with the ability to connect across a broad array of stakeholders. Arguments about engagement and retrenchment focus American strategy only on traditional relationships with other states. The growing body on new or networked governance forms rarely link their claims to a strategy for action. A slate of recent suggestions about how pragmatism might offer useful advice for United States action are built on assumptions that pragmatic action is inherently incremental (and thus of questionable use for meeting global challenges) and that US preferences are clear and fixed (something notably undermined by the fundamentally different visions of “the US” evident in the 2016 presidential campaign). I concur that pragmatism is useful, but it is not purely incremental, nor does it work through fixed preferences. Pragmatic thinkers like William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams saw the potential for great transformation not simply incremental change. And transformation was possible precisely because they saw preferences as mutable and shaped through social interaction in relation to available means. Building more firmly on these philosophical roots suggests a pragmatic framework that both refocuses analysis of past American success and offers a more productive way to think about the future. 

About the Speaker: Deborah Avant is the Sié Chéou-Kang Chair for International Security and Diplomacy and Director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver.  Her research (funded by the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation, among others) has focused on civil-military relations, military change, and the politics of controlling violence.  She is author/editor of The New Power Politics: Networks and Transnational Security Governance with Oliver Westerwinter (Oxford University Press, 2016); Who Governs the Globe? with Martha Finnemore and Susan Sell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), The Market for Force: the Consequences of Privatizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons From Peripheral Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) , along with articles in such journals as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Perspectives on Politics, and Foreign Policy.  Under her leadership the Sié Chéou-Kang Center launched the Private Security Monitor (http://psm.du.edu/), an annotated guide to regulation, data and analyses of global private military and security services, in 2012 and in 2013 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from University of St. Gallen for her research and contribution toward regulating private military and security companies. Professor Avant serves on numerous governing and editorial boards, and is editor in chief of the International Studies Association’s newly launched journal: the Journal of Global Security Studies.  

Abstract:  In recent decades, social scientists have begun to employ the rigorous research methods that used to be the province of the natural sciences. This evidence-based approach has revolutionized how academic work is judged, how policies are created and evaluated and, now, how war is viewed. At the forefront of this movement, the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) has developed a large body of evidence on conflict that enables a new perspective on the causes and effects of violence. Information and War presents a new framework to understand the conflicts that have prevailed since World War II and the kind in which the US was so recently embroiled: asymmetric contests where a greater power struggles to contain an insurgency.

About the Speakers: Dr. Joseph Felter joined CISAC as a senior research scholar in September 2011.

Felter retired from the US Army as a Colonel following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer with distinguished service in a variety of special operations and diplomatic assignments. He has conducted foreign internal defense and security assistance missions across East and Southeast Asia and has participated in combat deployments to Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Prior to arriving at CISAC, he led the International Security and Assistance Force, Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) in Afghanistan reporting directly to Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus and advising them on counterinsurgency strategy. Felter held leadership positions in the US Army Rangers and Special Forces and directed the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point from 2005-2008. He is Co-Director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He has published many scholarly articles on the topic of  counterinsurgency and has focused on the study of how to address the root causes of terrorism and political violence. Some highlights include: “Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict” with Benjamin Crost and Patrick Johnston (American Economic Review), "Can Hearts and Minds be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq," with Eli Berman and Jacob N. Shapiro (Journal of Political Economy), and "Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines," with Eli Berman, Michael Callen, and Jacob N. Shapiro (Journal of Conflict Resolution).

Felter holds a BS from West Point, an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University.

Dr. Jacob N. Shapiro is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and co-directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. His active research projects study political violence, economic and political development in conflict zones, security policy, and urban conflict. He is author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations. His research has been published or is forthcoming in broad range of academic and policy journals including American Journal of Political Science, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Political Economy, and World Politics as well as a number of edited volumes. Shapiro is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an Associate Editor of World Politics, a Faculty Fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and served in the U.S. Navy and Naval Reserve. Ph.D. Political Science, M.A. Economics, Stanford University. B.A. Political Science, University of Michigan.