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 serves as an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). 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.
Dr. Gibson is presently co-leading a Lancet series on the future of foreign aid, which scrutinizes military aid, humanitarian aid, and official development assistance. This Lancet Series investigates how these forms of foreign aid can be more effectively harnessed and integrated to fulfill their intended goals, while advancing prospects for humanity's future. She collaborates with the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, partnering with the Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures to establish a universal monitoring framework for evaluating the effects of sanctions on human rights. She has contributed to reports prepared for the International Criminal Court. Dr. Gibson 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. She is a reviewer for Nature. Her research has been published in The Lancet and The Lancet Global Health, and her insights on geopolitics and human health have featured in international media outlets, including TIME magazine.
Prior to her academic career, Dr. Gibson dedicated a decade to humanitarian and global health endeavors 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 in the aftermath of a military coup, dealing with the disintegration of the healthcare system amid international sanctions on foreign aid. 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, as well as cultivating diplomatic relations through shared fundamental health objectives amid periods of conflict. Throughout this decade of overseas experience, Dr. Gibson directly observed the human costs of war and geopolitical coercion, an experience that informs her ongoing research.
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 her postdoctoral training at CISAC from 2022 to 2025. She also undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH), Stanford Medicine, between 2022 and 2023, where she currently holds the position of visiting scholar. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Health Policy, Stanford University, from 2024 to 2025. She is conversational in English, Mandarin Chinese, and French.
