About the event: China is practicing gray-zone coercion in the Indo-Pacific, deploying military vessels for drills in the waters between Taiwan and the Philippines. This “salami-slicing” strategy, advanced under Xi Jinping, incrementally escalates pressure on neighboring states while remaining below the threshold of open conflict. Disruption of critical sea lanes—through which fuel and food supplies transit—would have catastrophic implications for human populations dependent on uninterrupted maritime traffic. This talk presents research from the Stanford Geopolitical Coercion and Global Health Impact Initiative on maritime disruptions in the Indo-Pacific and what they would mean for human populations if maritime traffic were interrupted in a manner comparable to a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with particular attention to effects on food security, energy access, and maternal and child health.

About the speaker: Dr. Ruth Gibson is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Innovation in Global Health, Affiliated Scholar at CISAC and the Founding Executive Director of the Stanford Geopolitical Human Impact Research Lab—the first research initiative at Stanford University dedicated to examining how geopolitical decisions shape human lives, with particular attention to children. Based in the Department of Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, the Initiative brings together health modeling, open-source intelligence, and international humanitarian law to produce rigorous, policy-relevant scholarship. She co-leads The Lancet Series on Foreign Engagement and Health in an Era of Geopolitical Crisis with Professor Gary Darmstadt. Dr. Gibson earned her PhD in geopolitical coercion and global health from the University of British Columbia and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation from 2022 to 2025. Drawing on more than a decade of international global health experience across five continents, her research focuses on the health consequences of sanctions, blockades, and armed conflict, especially their effects on maternal and child health.