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.

Abstract: In 2004, al-Qaeda’s security chief smuggled 42 handwritten pages out of Iran, where he was confined under a loose form of house arrest. The notes written by Sayf al-Adl were each folded into a bundle the size of a cigarette, and they included two seminal documents: a history of ISIS Godfather Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi's original engagement with al-Qaeda in 2000, and a high-level plan to re-establish the Caliphate between 2013 and 2016. 

Abstract: To what extent will multipolar institution building undermine the US-led international order? Recent Chinese initiatives like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and similar efforts by Russia and even Venezuela, might be seen as attempts to build alternatives to American hegemony. We suggest that we can learn from past rival hierarchies to understand contemporary politics. Some scholars highlight international hierarchy, in which a dominant state exerts a limited degree of political control over one or more subordinate states. We contend that certain patterns of international cooperation and conflict between dominant states cannot be fully understood without reference to their rival hierarchies. We identify three distinct mechanisms through which one hierarchy can influence the internal workings of a second hierarchy: competitive shaming, outbidding, and inter-hierarchy cooperation.

We illustrate the plausibility of our argument by exploring the politics of nuclear technology sharing by the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. We show that Soviet competitive shaming of the United States was a major motivation for the U.S. Atoms for Peace program. In response, the Soviet Union attempted to outbid the United States with its own technology sharing program. Ultimately, Moscow and Washington cooperated in founding the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The paper is co-authored with Nicholas Miller, Frank Stanton Assistant Professor of Nuclear Security and Policy at Brown University.

About the Speaker: Jeff D. Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  His research focuses on two main areas: (1) the causes of war and (2) global energy politics. His book, Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. An article that previews the book's argument won the Robert O. Keohane award for the best article published in International Organization (Oct 2010) by an untenured scholar. He has published other articles in International Organization, World Politics, International Security and elsewhere.

Description: In the Social Sciences and the Humanities, we regularly debate the implications of research drawing on oral interviews, but only infrequently discuss the process of collecting such testimony itself. Join postdoctoral fellows from FSI as they discuss the practical and ethical concerns of doing human subjects research they have encountered in their own work abroad. The panel will discuss issues such as the methods of building networks and asking questions, the logistics and risks inherent in conducting such research, and the moral or ethical considerations for protecting sources. The panel will conclude with an open discussion aimed both at scholars new to such methods and those who actively grapple with similar issues in their own work.

About the Panel:

• Brett Carter, Fellow at CDDRL; National Fellow at the Hoover Institution
• Kate Cronin-Furman, Law & International Security Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC
• Morgan Kaplan, Predoctoral Fellow, CISAC; Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago
• Terrence Peterson (moderator), Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC
• Magda Stawkowski, MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC

Abstract

Under Secretary Sewall will deliver remarks on Countering Violent Extremism, the U.S. Government’s comprehensive approach for preventing the spread of ISIL and emergence of new terrorist threats. The Under Secretary will describe how the evolution of violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks necessitates a “whole of society” approach to prevent people from aligning with terrorist movements and ideologies in the first place. Drawing on recent travel to Indonesia, India, and Egypt, the Under Secretary will describe the vital role of actors outside government in this approach, including women, youth, religious leaders, businesses, and researchers. She will also elaborate on new steps the U.S. Government is taking to intensify its CVE efforts around the world. The Under Secretary will also take questions from the audience.

Speaker bio

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Dr. Sarah Sewall is the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights at the U.S. State Department, and is a longtime advocate for advancing civilian security and human rights around the world. Dr. Sewall was sworn in on February 20, 2014. She serves concurrently as the Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues. Over the previous decade, Dr. Sewall taught at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she served as Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and directed the Program on National Security and Human Rights.

Dr. Sewall has extensive experience partnering with the U.S. armed forces around civilian security. At the Kennedy School, she launched the MARO (Mass Atrocities Response Operations Project) to assist the U.S. military with contingency planning to protect civilians from large-scale violence. She was a member of the Defense Policy Board and served as the Minerva Chair at the Naval War College in 2012. She also led several research studies of U.S. military operations for the Department of Defense and served as the inaugural Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance in the Clinton Administration. Prior joining the executive branch, Dr. Sewall served for six years as the Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to U.S. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell and earned a Ph.D at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

This event is co-sponsored by Stanford in Government and CISAC. 

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Abstract: Do states plan their grand strategies, or does grand strategy emerge in an ad hoc fashion as individual foreign policy decisions accumulate over time? The existing literature rests on the assumption, which has yet to be examined empirically, that grand strategies form according to an emergence model of grand strategy formation. This project tests that assumption by developing an original planning model and testing it on a “least-likely” case: the U.S. response to China’s rise after 9/11. This is a period in which the planning capacity of the Executive was severely taxed by the simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If, during that time, the U.S. formulated and enacted a long-term, integrated, and holistic (“grand”) plan in response to China’s rise, significant doubt would be cast on the assumed emergence model. Contrary to the expectations of the emergence model, this research finds that the U.S. developed a long-term military-diplomatic strategy in response to China’s rise, and that this strategy was substantially enacted as planned. This finding suggests that long-term plans govern U.S. behavior far more than is assumed in the scholarly literature. It also challenges the common belief among policy commentators that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq distracted the U.S. from attending to China’s rise. The findings of this research were not, however, wholly positive. Foreign economic policy and nuclear strategy were not fully integrated with the military-diplomatic strategy, indicating the existence of some serious stove-pipes in U.S. planning processes.

About the Speaker: Dr. Nina Silove is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Her research focuses on grand strategy, strategic planning, and U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific region. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a degree in law with first class honors from the University of Technology, Sydney, where she also received the Alumni Association Achievement Award for Contribution to the University. Previously, Dr. Silove was a Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a visiting Lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and the Tutor for International Politics in Diplomatic Studies at the University of Oxford.