The Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance (GTG) examines how emerging technologies—including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and smart devices—are redefining power, economies, and policies worldwide. Our research addresses the complex challenges these advances pose for international security, and how governments, businesses, and individuals adapt to shifting landscapes of risk and opportunity.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping economies, security, and governance worldwide, raising urgent questions about how to distribute its benefits equitably while managing risks. GTG examines how democracies can leverage AI innovation to advance shared prosperity and security, with particular attention to infrastructure requirements, Global South perspectives, and mechanisms for international cooperation.
Related projects:
AI for Peace
This research initiative investigates how the United States and its allies and partners can leverage their comparative advantages in AI innovation to equitably distribute the benefits of AI while incentivizing trustworthy deployment. The research focuses on three key areas:
Infrastructural requirements for deploying AI at scale for countries at all levels of economic development and multilateral, multi-stakeholder mechanisms for meeting those requirements.
Global South perspectives on promising use cases for AI and governance approaches for facilitating AI deployment while managing risks.
Prospects and options for international collaborations to address cross-border security, environmental, and other externalities.
The Future of Decision-Making Project (FODM) is a multi-year, interdisciplinary research initiative examining how emerging technologies—particularly artificial intelligence and advanced decision-support systems—are reshaping human decision-making in high-stakes domains such as national security, defense, and crisis management. Rather than focusing solely on technological capability, the project centers on the human dimension: how judgment, responsibility, and accountability evolve as machines increasingly inform, shape, or constrain human choices. The project brings together scholars and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to develop empirically grounded, policy-relevant insights into the future of human-machine decision systems.
GEOPOLITICS OF TECHNOLOGY
Emerging technologies are becoming central to great power competition and regional security dynamics. GTG examines how technological advantages translate into geopolitical leverage, how U.S. strategy can balance competition with innovation and alliance partnerships, and how technology is reshaping power dynamics across critical regions like East Asia.
GTG's annual conference and ongoing research initiative brings together leading regional experts, policymakers, and industry leaders to examine how technological developments are reshaping geopolitical dynamics across East Asia. The research focuses on critical technology supply chains—particularly semiconductors—regional responses to U.S.-China competition, and opportunities for multilateral cooperation on technology governance.
CHINA & DIGITAL COMPETITION
China's rapid digital development and distinct governance approaches have profound implications for global markets, security, and technology standards. GTG analyzes Chinese technology policy and corporate strategies through original-language sources, providing insights into how China's digital trajectory shapes international competition and governance debates.
The DigiChina project, led by Graham Webster, enhances understanding of China's digital policy developments through translating and analyzing Chinese-language sources. Since 2017, DigiChina has published translations of primary sources, contextual explanation, and analysis on China’s technology policy landscape, covering topics including the Cybersecurity Law regime, data governance, artificial intelligence, and China’s official push for greater technological independence.
CYBERSECURITY & INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
Effective governance of technology challenges requires sustained dialogue and cooperation across borders. GTG facilitates Track II exchanges with international partners, building relationships and shared understanding that can lay groundwork for broader policy cooperation on cybersecurity and technology governance issues.
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This Article reframes transitional justice as communication. It argues that the impact of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) and international criminal tribunals (ICTs) on countries where human rights violations occurred depends largely on these institutions changing what those countries’ citizens and elites know and believe. More precisely: most of the ways TRCs and ICTs could advance their goals—such as reconciliation and deterrence—require informing these domestic audiences about the institutions’ activities, methods, and findings, and persuading them to accept the institutions’ conclusions. Communication-specific activities, such as public outreach and media relations, are essential. Yet shaping elite and popular knowledge and opinion are not mere add-ons to what some see as TRCs’ and ICTs’ “core” work: investigating human rights violations, holding hearings, writing reports, and indicting and trying perpetrators. Rather, the imperative of influencing local people must shape how these institutions conduct those activities and sometimes even what conclusions they reach. Unfortunately, TRC commissioners, ICT judges and prosecutors, and their staff, along with transitional justice scholars, have underestimated the importance of influencing domestic audiences for advancing TRCs’ and ICTs’ goals. As a result, the institutions have devoted too little attention and resources to communication.
The Article also provides a typology of the activities and occasions through which TRCs and ICTs can influence domestic audiences. It offers examples of effective and ineffective practice from five international criminal tribunals, such as the International Criminal Court and Special Court for Sierra Leone, and over a dozen truth commissions, such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Where evidence permits, it assesses individual institutions’ performance. Finally, the Article analyzes the most important challenges that TRCs and ICTs encounter in communicating with domestic audiences.
High resolution crop type maps are an important tool for improving food security, and remote sensing is increasingly used to create such maps in regions that possess ground truth labels for model training. However, these labels are absent in many regions, and models trained in other regions on typical satellite features, such as those from optical sensors, often exhibit low performance when transferred. Here we explore the use of NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) spaceborne lidar instrument, combined with Sentinel-2 optical data, for crop type mapping. Using data from three major cropped regions (in China, France, and the United States) we first demonstrate that GEDI energy profiles are capable of reliably distinguishing maize, a crop typically above 2m in height, from crops like rice and soybean that are shorter. We further show that these GEDI profiles provide much more invariant features across geographies compared to spectral and phenological features detected by passive optical sensors. GEDI is able to distinguish maize from other crops within each region with accuracies higher than 84\%, and able to transfer across regions with accuracies higher than 82\% compared to 64\% for transfer of optical features. Finally, we show that GEDI profiles can be used to generate training labels for models based on optical imagery from Sentinel-2, thereby enabling the creation of 10m wall-to-wall maps of tall versus short crops in label-scarce regions. As maize is the second most widely grown crop in the world and often the only tall crop grown within a landscape, we conclude that GEDI offers great promise for improving global crop type maps.
American Political Science Review,
November 1, 2021
This paper stands at the intersection of two literatures—on partisan polarization and on democratic deliberation—that have not had much connection with one another. If readers find some of the results surprising, the authors have had the same reaction. In this paper we describe these results and our approach to explaining them.
Research in developed countries has found that paternal involvement has positive and significant effects on early childhood development (ECD). Less is known, however, about the state of paternal involvement and its influence on ECD in rural China. Using data collected in Southern China that included 1,460 children aged 6–42 months and their fathers (as well as their primary caregivers), this study examines the association between paternal involvement and ECD. Although the results demonstrate that the average level of paternal involvement is low in rural China, paternal involvement is related to a significant increase in three domains of ECD (cognition, language, and social-emotional skills). Older children benefit significantly more than do younger children from paternal involvement in all domains of ECD. The results also show that, if the mother is the primary caregiver, the mother’s higher educational level and the family’s higher socioeconomic status are positively associated with paternal involvement.
The Texas National Security Review,
October 1, 2021
Emerging and disruptive technologies spell an uncertain future for second-strike retaliatory forces. New sensors and big data analysis may render mobile missiles and submarines vulnerable to detection. I call this development the “standstill conundrum”: States will no longer be able to assure a nuclear response should they be hit by a nuclear first strike. If the nuclear weapons states can manage this vulnerability, however, they might be able to escape its worst effects. “Managing” could mean shoring up nuclear deterrence; it could mean focusing more on defenses; or it could mean negotiating to ensure continued viability of second-strike deterrent forces.
