When a “Salami Slice” Becomes a Maritime Blockade: China’s Maritime Disruptions in the Indo-Pacific and Consequences for Human Populations
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.
William J. Perry Conference Room
Ruth Gibson
Dr. Ruth Gibson is the founding Executive Director of the Stanford Geopolitical Human Impact Research Lab. This research lab is the first at Stanford University dedicated to researching the human impact of geopolitical decisions, with particular attention to the lives of children. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), where she completed postdoctoral training from 2022 to 2025.
Her scholarly expertise encompasses global health, foreign affairs, and strategic studies, with a particular emphasis on enhancing maternal and child health in geopolitically fragile regions—nations contending with war, sanctions, and diplomatic challenges. She is presently co-leading the Lancet Series on Foreign Policy and Global Health in an Era of Geopolitical Crisis with Professor Gary Darmstadt.
Dr. Gibson collaborates with the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner and the Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures to establish a universal monitoring framework to evaluate the effects of sanctions on human rights. She has contributed to reports prepared for the International Criminal Court. She is a research collaborator with the Global Burden of Disease Consortium at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, supporting efforts in global health estimation and forecasting, and a reviewer for Nature. Her research has appeared in The Lancet and The Lancet Global Health, and international media outlets, including TIME magazine and The New York Times, have featured her insights on geopolitics and human health. She writes publicly on Substack.
Before her academic career, Dr. Gibson spent a decade working in humanitarian and global health efforts across eight countries on five continents. Her efforts focused on fragile states confronting poverty, human rights violations, and armed conflict. She led a humanitarian foundation in Madagascar after a military coup, amid the disintegration of the healthcare system and international sanctions on foreign aid—an experience that continues to inform her research on unilateral coercive measures. While living in the Middle East, she worked for Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health Affairs and the Health Ministries of Yemen and Somalia on telemedicine-driven medical education, while also cultivating diplomatic relations through shared health objectives amid periods of conflict. Throughout this decade of overseas experience, Dr. Gibson directly observed the human costs of war and geopolitical coercion.
Dr. Gibson earned an Honors Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from the University of Toronto, a fellowship in Medical Education from the Wilson Center at the University Health Network, and a PhD in Global Health and Strategic Studies from the University of British Columbia. She completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University from 2022 to 2025, including fellowships at the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH), Stanford Medicine, and the Department of Health Policy. She speaks English (native), French, and Mandarin Chinese.
