Stanford University

Society

FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.

The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.

Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.

2006-2007 CISAC Fellows Forum

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The CISAC Fellows Forum showcases some of the vitally important work that has been accomplished at CISAC this year. Moderated by Scott Sagan, CISAC co-director, three scholars represent the promising work of CISAC fellows:

David Patel

Postdoctoral Fellow

"Islam, Identity, and Electoral Outcomes in Iraq"

Why has a cohesive national Shiite political identity emerged in Iraq while Sunni Arabs remain fractured? What does the United States need to understand about how differences between Shiite and Sunni clerical networks influence electoral successes?

David Patel's work focuses on questions of religious organizations and collective action in the Middle East. In fall 2007, he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Jacob Shapiro

"Mis-overestimating Terrorism: The Problems Terrorists Face and How to Make Them Worse"

Terrorist organizations face substantial internal challenges which make them vulnerable to government action. Careful counter terrorism strategies can exploit these organizational pathologies.

Jacob Shapiro is a graduate student in political science at Stanford University and a CISAC predoctoral fellow. His research focuses on the economic forces that motivate terrorist organizations and the organizational challenges that these groups face.

Rebecca Slayton

"Technology Limited: How Scientists Do and Don't Influence U.S. Defense Policy"

In the United States, high technology is a favorite solution to national security problems. But how do we know when complex technology has reached its limits? The rancorous debate over missile defense shows how experts use science to authoritatively frame options and thus influence the making of defense policy.

Rebecca Slayton is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University and a CISAC affiliate. In 2004-2005 she was a CISAC science fellow. Slayton's research examines the relationships between technocrats, academia, and the media.

Bechtel Conference Center

Scott D. Sagan

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-2715 (650) 723-0089
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The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education  
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
rsd25_073_1160a_1.jpg PhD

Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).

Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).

In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.     

Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Scott D. Sagan Co-Director Moderator CISAC
David S. Patel Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker
Jacob N. Shapiro Predoctoral Fellow Speaker
Rebecca Slayton Lecturer, Science, Technology, and Society Program; CISAC Affiliate; former Science Fellow Speaker
Conferences

McFaul gives Class Day lecture to 6,000 Stanford graduates, family members

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CDDRL Director and political science Professor Michael A. McFaul gave the 2007 Class Day lecture on Saturday, June 16. More than 6,000 Stanford graduates, family members, faculty, and alumni attended the lecture.

Political science Professor Michael McFaul gave the Class Day lecture Saturday in Maples Pavilion.

If Stanford is indeed a bubble, political science Professor Michael McFaul deftly pointed out its radiant lining while simultaneously bursting it with a needle--in the form of sobering statistics and descriptions that paint a dour portrait of America's international standing--during his Class Day lecture on Saturday in Maples Pavilion.

Sponsored by the Stanford Alumni Association, the Class Day tradition gathers graduates and their families before a distinguished faculty member for a keynote address that is at once congratulatory and weighty. But McFaul, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, began by describing his humble roots as a boy from Montana.

"When I came to Stanford as a 17-year-old freshman, I was raw and not ready for prime time," McFaul admitted. "I had never lived anywhere but Montana. I hadn't even set foot in California, let alone a foreign country."

In 1986, McFaul said he emerged from the Farm a dramatically different person--holding a bachelor's degree in international relations and Slavic languages and literatures, as well as a master's in Russian and East European studies. He had lived in the Soviet Union, Nigeria and Poland; and today, McFaul is regarded as one of the top scholars in terms of bringing together the theory and practice of democracy.

"I came here wanting to practice law and left here wanting to practice diplomacy," said McFaul, who in 2005 was appointed director of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. "So, my time in the bubble changed me."

Then McFaul brought out the needle. He noted that, just as this year's graduates were first arriving on the Farm, President George W. Bush was outlining his "freedom agenda," a plan to transform the world. McFaul said the plan outlined Bush's strategy for promoting democracy around the world as a way of keeping Americans safe.

But so far, McFaul lamented, few of the plan's goals have been realized. "It hasn't been pretty out there," McFaul said. "While you have been living inside the bubble, a lot has been happening--much of it bad--outside of the bubble."

McFaul then reminded graduates of positive developments, such as the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. And, no one, he added, misses the Taliban regime in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

"But overall, trends are disappointing," McFaul said. "In Afghanistan, democracy is barely holding on. In Iraq and Palestine, there's civil war."

Between 2003, when the departing undergraduates in the audience arrived as freshmen, and today, more than 3,000 American soldiers, roughly 60,000 Iraqis and more than 200,000 people in Darfur have died, McFaul said. He added that the number of al-Qaida's followers also has grown during the four years that the Class of 2007 was in "the bubble."

And yet, the graduates might have left Maples completely deflated were it not for the main message of McFaul's lecture, which was one of renewal. When he graduated from Stanford in 1986, McFaul gave a graduation speech at the ceremony for international relations majors in which he lamented the failing arms control treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States. He also expressed dismay that South Africa's apartheid regime had just declared emergency rule and that Washington seemed too confrontational or too indifferent to address either.

"However, after each of these periods, the United States had found a way to renew itself and become again a force for freedom and justice around the world," McFaul said. "So, my understanding of history gives me confidence in our capacity for renewal. But so does my sense of the future that comes from teaching here at Stanford University."

McFaul said he has taught enough of this year's graduates to know that they have the smarts, the drive and the convictions to turn things around--young men and women from throughout the United States but also from nations such as Afghanistan, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Nigeria.

"Someone sitting here right now will someday open the first U.S. Embassy in a democratic Iran," McFaul said. "Someone sitting here right now will inspire a third grader in the South Bronx to become the first kid in his neighborhood to win a Nobel Prize in physics."

But in the effort to renew the world, McFaul also told the graduates they should not forget to renew themselves. He urged them not to describe whatever occupation they take up simply as a job title, but as an action verb; to occasionally welcome idle time to refocus their energies; to embrace uncertainty; and to continue to learn and stay connected to Stanford.

McFaul's parting message echoed the welcome address by Howard Wolf, '80, vice president for alumni affairs and president of the Stanford Alumni Association. "Alumni are the only permanent stakeholders" of the university, Wolf said. "Get involved, stay connected."

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What the Election Signifies for Democracy

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Larry Diamond
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The second presidential election campaign in Taiwan's young history as a democracy has entered its final week, providing a useful moment to ponder its larger meaning. This hard-fought election contest will determine more than simply which man and which (if any) party governs the country. It will also shape in important ways the future character and quality of democracy in the country.

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A Report Card on Democracy

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Larry Diamond
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If the twentieth century was the century of totalitarianism, total war, genocide, and brutality, it was also the century of democracy. As Freedom House notes in its latest annual survey of freedom in the world, there was not a single country in 1900 that would qualify by today's standards as a democracy. By 1950, only 22 of the 80 sovereign political systems in the world (28 percent) were democratic. When the third wave of global democratization began in 1974, there were 39 democracies, but the percentage of democracies in the world was about the same (27 percent). Yet by January 2000, Freedom House counted 120 democracies, the highest number and the greatest percentage (63) in the history of the world.

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Russia's Foreign Policy: The Substance behind the Tough Talk

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Dmitri Trenin is a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment, the deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and chair of its Foreign and Security Policy Program. He has been with the Center since its inception in 1993.

From 1993-1997, Trenin held posts as a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome, a visiting professor at the Free University of Brussels and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow. He served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993, including experience working as a liaison officer in the External Relations Branch of the Group of Soviet Forces Germany and as a staff member of the delegation to the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms talks in Geneva from 1985 to 1991. He also taught at the Defense University in Moscow.

Among the books Trenin authored are Getting Russia Right (2007, forthcoming); Russia's Restless Frontier: The Chechnya Factor in Post-Soviet Russia (2004; with Aleksei V. Malashenko) and The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and Globalization, (2001). He edited, with Steven Miller, The Russian Military: Power and Policy (2006).

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).

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Philippines Conference Room

Dmitri Trenin Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment and Deputy Director of the Carnegie Endowment Moscow Center Speaker
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WHO expert Heymann gives Payne Lecture

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Dr. David Heymann, assistant director-general for communicable diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO), concluded two weeks in residence at Stanford on April 12 by giving a 2007 Payne Lecture. In the lecture, titled "Infectious Diseases across Borders: Public Health Security in the 21st Century," Heymann discussed the collective responsibility to defend public health and surveyed what the WHO is doing to fight emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases on every continent.

Heymann, whom CHP/PCOR Director Alan M. Garber likened to an "Indiana Jones of the medical world," has a long history of field work in communicable diseases. He was involved in the initial characterization of legionnaire's disease and worked on the ground to contain the second outbreak of the Ebola virus. In his present capacity, Heymann oversees the communicable diseases and polio eradication programs at the WHO.

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Knight Fellowships 2007 Symposium: How Will We Pay for the Journalism We Need?

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This wired world needs good journalism - to report the news accurately and independently, to serve as a counterbalance to power, and to be a window and a mirror on society.

But the journalism institutions we might have relied on - newspapers, broadcast news programs and magazines - are bedeviled by the erosion and fragmentation of their audiences, by the economic appetites of their stockholders and by the skepticism of their most significant advertisers. That's the landscape in 2007, and the future is anything but clear.

About the speakers

Lauren Rich Fine, Chartered Financial Analyst, was until last month a managing director at Merrill Lynch in the Equity Research Department. She joined the department in 1988 and focusing on the publishing, information, advertising and online industries. She was a ranked member of the Institutional Investor All-American Research Team since 1994.

Vindu Goel (moderator) is an editorial writer and blogger for the San Jose Mercury News. He joined the paper in 1999 as an assistant business editor after eight years at the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, and from 2003 to 2005, he was business editor at the paper. Prior to joining the editorial board in October 2006, he studied the impact of the Internet on newspapers as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.

Lem Lloyd is vice president of the Newspaper Consortium at Yahoo!. He was formerly vice president, sales and business development at Oodle; corporate director of classifieds & vice president of classified and national sales for online at Knight Ridder and KR Digital; and senior director of business development at Knight Ridder Digital.

David Talbot founded Salon.com in 1995, and was its editor-in-chief and chief executive officer for 10 years before becoming chairman in 2005. Previously, he was the arts and features editor of the San Francisco Examiner and was senior editor of Mother Jones Magazine in the early 1980s. He is the author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published this month.

About the Knight Fellowships program

The Knight Fellowships program brings outstanding mid-career journalists, 12 from the U.S. and six to eight from other countries, to study at Stanford for an academic year. It initiated an annual lecture and symposium series in 1988. James Bettinger is director of the Knight Fellowships, and Dawn Garcia is deputy director.

For more information about this event, please visit the Knight Fellowship website.

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Kresge Auditorium

David Talbot Founder, Salon.com Speaker
Lauren Rich Fine Wall Street Analyst Speaker
Lem Lloyd Newspaper Consortium Executive, Yahoo! Speaker
Vindu Goel Editorial Writer and Blogger, San Jose Mercury News Moderator
Symposiums

New Efforts to Promote Democracy

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The symposium is being organized by the Center's "Taiwan Democracy Project." It will feature participation from the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other publicly funded as well as civil society efforts to assist democratic development internationally.

The symposium, which will be limited in size to facilitate extensive dialogue and exchange, has several purposes. One set of purposes is informational and analytical. We want to delineate and assess what new and smaller democracy promotion organizations are doing-and what they can do effectively-to support and advance democratic development around the world. To answer the latter question, we want to distill some of what the more established democracy assistance organizations have learned over the last two decades that can be of value in guiding the strategic thinking and organizational development of these new initiatives. How should such new and emerging foundations define their priorities, and what types of grants and activities are most likely to add value to existing efforts? What countries, sectors, and problems may provide, within each region, opportunities for new democracy assistance initiatives to leverage their limited resources into a higher impact?

Second, we would like to promote, in a modest and limited way, some interaction between academic studies of democratic development and the practical efforts to assist it. The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law has embarked upon a very ambitious study of how international influences affect democratic transitions and consolidation, and we would hope to inject some of what we are learning into the discussions-and most of all, to benefit from them.

Third, we want the workshop to be practically useful to the participants. We want to explore the possibilities for cooperation and joint effort among democracy promotion efforts, small and large, new and old. How can such newer and smaller initiatives acquire the information necessary to identify and evaluate potential projects and grantees? What opportunities may exist for sharing information about potential recipients of assistance? What other forms of exchange and interaction could help new and small assistance efforts to leverage their limited resources? How can the established democracy promotion organizations benefit from some of the "ground truth" that new initiatives may accumulate and the new methods that they may develop in their work?

DAY I: Thursday May 31

Morning Session (8:30 am - 12:30 am):

Introduction

Panel 1: Established Efforts to Promote Democracy: Evolution of Strategy, Priorities, and Programs

Panel 2: New Efforts to Promote Democracy--Asia

Afternoon Session (1:30 pm - 4:45 pm):

Panel 3: New Efforts to Promote Democracy--Eastern Europe

Panel 4: New Efforts to Promote Democracy--Africa

DAY II: Friday June 1

Morning Session (9:00 am - 12:15 pm):

Panel 5: Starting New Democracy Foundations

Panel 6: What Kind of Assistance Do New and Struggling Democracies Need?

Afternoon Session (1:15 pm - 3:00 pm):

Round Table Discussion: How to Measure Success?

Closing Comments

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Oksenberg Conference Room

Symposiums

Implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1540

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On April 28, 2004, the United Nations Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, unanimously passed UNSC 1540. The resolution "decided that all States shall refrain from providing any form of support to non-state actors" attempting to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction, "adopt and enforce appropriate effective laws" to that effect, and "take and enforce effective measures to "prevent the proliferation of" WMD. To carry out its part of this mandate, the UNSC established and renewed a Committee, which has mainly and usefully assisted States in adopting "appropriate effective laws." This study, in collaboration with Committee members, has focused on implementation mechanisms and indicators of performance in border and exports controls, securing materiel and facilities, and adapting controls to State needs. We conclude that the most meaningful measures of implementation need to be more broadly adopted and that the 1540 Committee needs a more extensive staff in order to extend its role to disseminate States' experience with those measures. We also conclude that mechanisms need to be developed to facilitate information sharing between the Committee and the private sector.

Michael May is a professor emeritus (research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000. May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971. May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards. His current research interests are in the area of nuclear and terrorism, energy, security and environment, and the relation of nuclear weapons and foreign policy.

Chaim Braun is a vice president of Altos Management Partners, Inc., and a CISAC science fellow and affiliate. He is a member of the Near-Term Deployment and the Economic Cross-Cut Working Groups of the Department of Energy (DOE) Generation IV Roadmap study. He conducted several nuclear economics-related studies for the DOE Nuclear Energy Office, the Energy Information Administration, the Electric Power Research Institute, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Non-Proliferation Trust International, and others. Braun has worked as a member of Bechtel Power Corporation's Nuclear Management Group, and led studies on power plant performance and economics used to support maintenance services. Braun has worked on a study of safeguarding the Agreed Framework in North Korea, he was the co-leader of a NATO Study of Terrorist Threats to Nuclear Power Plants, led CISAC's Summer Study on Terrorist Threats to Research Reactors, and most recently co-authored an article with CISAC Co-Director Chris Chyba on nuclear proliferation rings. His research project this year is entitled "The Energy Security Initiative and a Nuclear Fuel Cycle Center: Two Enhancement Options for the Current Non-Proliferation Regime."

Allen Weiner is an associate professor of law (teaching) at the Stanford Law School, as well as the inaugural Warren Christopher Professor of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, a chair held jointly by FSI and the Stanford Law School. He is also an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. His expertise is in the field of public international law and the foreign relations law of the United States. His work focuses on the effect of positive international law rules on the conduct of foreign relations and other implications for the behavior of states, courts (both national and international), and other international actors. Current research interests focus on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He teaches courses in public international law and international criminal law at Stanford Law School. Before coming to Stanford, Weiner served for 12 years as a career attorney in the U.S. Department of State. He served in the Office of the Legal Adviser in Washington, D.C. (1990-1996) and at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague (1996-2001), most recently as legal counselor, in which capacity he served as the U.S. Government's principal day-to-day interlocutor with the international legal institutions in The Hague, including the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. He received a BA from Harvard College and a JD from Stanford Law School.

Roger Speed is a physicist formerly with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and now an affiliate of CISAC. He has also worked at the National Academy of Sciences, at R&D Associates, and, as a Peace Fellow, at the Hoover Institution, where he wrote a book on strategic nuclear policy. He has served on a number of defense-related committees, including ones for the Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the American Physical Society, the U.S. Navy (Non-Acoustic ASW Panel), the National Academy of Sciences, and the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Organization. He has conducted a broad range of national security studies for the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Central Intelligence Agency in such areas as arms control, strategic deterrence, nuclear war, ballistic missile defense, nuclear weapons safety, and the survivability of strategic systems.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Michael M. May Speaker
Chaim Braun Speaker
Allen S. Weiner Speaker
Roger Speed CISAC Affiliate Speaker Stanford University
Seminars
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