Stanford University

Explaining the Dramatic Decline in Political Violence around the World since the End of the Cold War

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Professor Andrew Mack is the Director of the Human Security Centre at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia. Prior to establishing the Human Security Centre, he was a Visiting Professor at the Program on Humanitarian Policy at Harvard University (2001) and spent two and a half years as the Director of Strategic Planning in the Executive Office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the United Nations (1998-2001).

Professor Mack has held the Chair in International Relations at the Institute of Advanced Study at the Australian National University (1991-1998), was the Director of the ANU's Peace Research Centre (1985-91) and was the ANU's Senior Research Fellow in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (1984-85).

He has held research and teaching positions at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia) the London School of Economics, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, the Richardson Institute for Peace and Conflict Research, University of California at Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Fudan University in Shanghai and the International University of Japan.

His pre-academic career included six years in the Royal Air Force (engineer and pilot); two and a half years in Antarctica as meteorologist and Deputy Base Commander; a year as a diamond prospector in Sierra Leone and two years with the BBC's World Service producing the current affairs program "The World Today".

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Andrew Mack Director, Human Security Centre Speaker the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia
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U.S.-India pact recognizes reality of nuclear politics

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Daniel C. Sneider
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The newest member of the nuclear club will also gain a stake in nonproliferation, observes Pantech Fellow and San Jose Mercury News foreign affairs columnist Daniel C. Sneider

The nuclear deal reached during President Bush's recent visit to India unleashed a predictable wave of criticism. From editorial and op-ed pages to Congress, led by the left but supported on the right, the administration has been assailed for making a bad bargain.

Under the agreement, which still needs congressional approval, India would open much of its nuclear facilities to international inspections in return for gaining access to the world's supplies of uranium and U.S. nuclear expertise.

The attacks on the deal reflect the view of the nonproliferation lobby -- the experts and policymakers whose central concern is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. I share their aim. But American arguments against the India deal are misleading and only expose the deep contradictions, if not hypocrisy, of our own nuclear policies.

There are two main criticisms of the agreement: first, it undermines the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the NPT, and second, it permits, even encourages, India to expand its nuclear weapons production.

The NPT issue is particularly sensitive at a time when the international community is trying to persuade Iran to give up certain nuclear technologies which many nations fear are part of a secret bomb program.

The NPT created two sets of global rules -- one for the five nuclear weapons powers it recognizes (China, the United States, Russia, Britain and France) and another for everyone else. The five, for example, allow only "voluntary'' international safeguards on their civilian nuclear facilities. They have no obligation to open their military programs to any kind of scrutiny. And the NPT places no real limits on their arsenals, other than a vague commitment to reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons.

The rest must open their nuclear energy programs fully to international inspection and agree never to build bombs. In exchange, they gain access to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Iran -- and North Korea -- made that bargain and can be held to account for breaking the rules. But India consistently regarded that as an unequal trade-off and never signed the NPT; neither did Pakistan and Israel, two other nuclear weapons states.

India's nuclear program is the product of decades of largely indigenous effort; it did not result from secretive proliferation in violation of the NPT.

The deal with India turns the five into six. It treats India as a de facto member of the inner club. The deal would require changes in U.S. law to remove existing restrictions on the transfer of nuclear energy technology, changes that would allow India to be treated no differently from China.

That does not weaken the NPT -- it strengthens it. It brings it more into accord with reality and gives India a stake in a system it had previously rejected as unfair. It paves the way for India to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the international organization that controls nuclear exports.

The critics are right that the deal enables India to expand its production of fissile materials to make nuclear warheads. Eight of India's 22 power reactors will remain outside international controls, along with a new breeder reactor. The Indians fought for that exemption because they feel their nuclear arsenal may not be large enough to deter a nuclear first strike by Pakistan or China in the future. Critics fear that with increased access to uranium and limited inspections, India will set off an arms race in South Asia.

Again, the agreement simply treats India like the five. Nonproliferation experts claim that unlike India, however, the five have halted their production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium that could be used to build new weapons. This is true, but misleading.

The five have massive stockpiles of fissile material built up during the Cold War. "If I've got a full pantry, it's easy for me to swear off trips to the supermarket,'' said Michael Levi, an arms-control expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Moreover, the United States has embarked on a new program to rebuild its nuclear weapons production capability, including creating new facilities to produce plutonium cores for warheads and to assemble them.

India has agreed to back a global pact to cut off fissile-material production. But the Bush administration does not support a treaty that would actually verify this is taking place. And the U.S. Senate has refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that would permanently halt any new testing of nuclear weapons.

A Congress that can support those policies is hardly in a position to challenge the administration's agreement with India. Rather than block the U.S.-India deal, it makes more sense to improve it. This could include reaching agreements for cooperation between the two countries to ensure the safety and security of nuclear facilities, including those for military purposes, suggested Stanford Professor Scott D. Sagan, a leading expert on nuclear safety and nonproliferation. "Reducing the risk of terrorist theft of nuclear materials or weapons in India would also help protect the United States,'' argues Sagan.

Beyond that, the six acknowledged nuclear powers should begin to seriously fulfill their part of the NPT bargain -- to cap fissile-material production, to ban nuclear testing, and to eventually radically reduce stored arsenals of nuclear weapons and materials.

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Japan and the Bomb: a History of the Japanese Anti-Nuclear Movement

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The Japanese anti-nuclear movement has been characterized by the same kinds of political divisions as other popular movements, while it also reflects some uniquely Japanese features. Today, with the risk of use of nuclear weapons climbing towards levels not reached since the darkest days of the Cold War, the Japanese movement, led by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the aging "Hibakusha" (survivors), plays a key role in the global nuclear abolition movement, serving as its conscience and its inspiration. At the same time it is confronting new challenges at home. The Japanese government maintains an ambivalent relationship with nuclear weapons. While it rhetorically calls for global nuclear disarmament in the United Nations, it remains firmly situated under the U.S. "nuclear umbrella." Meanwhile, the U.S. is refurbishing and upgrading its still vast nuclear arsenal, and expanding the role of nuclear weapons in its national security policy. With an enormous civilian nuclear power program, and huge stocks of plutonium, Japan has the capacity to produce its own nuclear weapons, should it decide to do so - a fact that does not go unnoticed by its neighbors in the region, China, and the Koreas.

Japan's three nonnuclear principles of not possessing, not producing, and not allowing nuclear arms on its soil, and Article 9 of its 1946 post-war constitution, which renounces war and prohibits maintenance of armed forces, are under serious attack. In 2004, Japan, one of the U.S.'s closest allies, deployed 1000 members of its "Self Defense Forces" to Iraq - the first time Japanese troops have been sent into combat zone since World War II. According to some estimates, Japan is second only to the U.S. in its military spending.

On the 60th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of their cities, the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki declared August 6, 2005 until August 9, 2006 to be an international Year of Inheritance, Awakening, and Commitment.

Jacqueline Cabasso has served as Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation (WSLF) in Oakland, California since 1984. Founded two years earlier, the nonprofit WSLF seeks to abolish nuclear weapons as an essential step in making possible a more secure, just, and environmentally sustainable world. Since 1994, Ms. Cabasso has participated as an accredited non-governmental organization representative in 12 negotiating and review sessions of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 1995, she co-founded the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, which has grown to include more than 2000 organizations in over 90 countries, and she continues to serve on its international Coordinating Committee. Ms. Cabasso chairs the Coordinating Committee of the multi-issue Peoples NonViolent Response Coalition, located in the Bay Area, and formed in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

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Jacqueline Cabasso Executive Director Speaker the Western States Legal Foundation
Lectures

Innovation and the State: High Technology Industries in a World of Fragmented Production - Ireland, Israel, & Taiwan

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One of the most unexpected changes of the 1990s was that firms in a number of emerging economies not previously known for high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new information technologies (IT). Surprisingly, from the perspective of comparative political economy theories, the IT industries of these countries use different business models and have carved out different positions in the global IT production networks. Of these emerging economies, the Taiwanese, Israeli, and Irish have successfully nurtured the growth of their IT industries.

Breznitz argues that emerging economies have more than one option for developing their high technology industries. His research shows how state actions shaped the structure of these three IT industries and that the industry's developmental path was influenced by four critical decisions of the state. His work provides a basis to advance a theoretical framework for analyzing how different choices lead to long-term consequences and to the development of successful and radically different industrial systems.

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Danny Breznitz

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Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-0121 (650) 723-6530
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Danny Breznitz SPRIE Visiting Scholar and Assistant Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Public Policy Speaker Georgia Tech
Seminars
Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE)

Military Manipulations of Mass Culture in Japan

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This talk addresses a set of intimately intertwined contradictions that characterize military-societal relations in present-day Japan: the contradiction between Article 9 of Japan's constitution, which forbids a standing army and the existence of its armed forces; the contradiction between the civilian prohibition of violence and the military's training for and potential demand of violent acts; and the dilemma of representing a profession that must negotiate between societal mores and the demands associated with military service. More specifically, Professor Frühstück will untangle the Self-Defense Forces' public relations strategies, ranging from comics to live firing exercises. She argues that these strategies are deeply embedded in Japanese culture and affecy various segments of the Japanese public in radically different ways.

Sabine Frühstück focuses her research on the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and society include problems of power and knowledge, sexualities and genders, and military-societal relations. Frühstück is currently completing a book on military-societal relations in modern and present-day Japan, Avant-garde: The Army of the Future. Her book, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, is a history of sexual knowledge in Japan and the different uses made of that knowledge. Based on a wide variety of sources including military data on soldiers' health, sex education treatises for youth, and pronatalist and expansionist propaganda that fought frigidity in women and impotence in men, the book analyzes the techniques at work in conflicts and negotiations that aimed at the creation of a normative sexuality. Frühstück has co-edited Neue Geschichten der Sexualität: Beispiele aus Ostasien and Zentraleuropa 1700-2000 and The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure.

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Sabine Frühstück Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies Speaker UC-Santa Barbara
Lectures

Women and Poetry in 20th Century Japan: Ishigaki Rin

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In Japan, the 20th century renaissance of poetry by women is associated most closely with Yosano Akiko, who first came to prominence at the turn of the century. But there was another renaissance, part of the general flowering of culture that characterized the immediate postwar period. It was then that Ishigaki Rin first achieved fame. Comparatively unknown outside Japan, like most contemporary Japanese poets, Ishigaki, who died last year at the age of 84, had an enthusiastic following in her own country. By introducing her life and her poetry, Professor Beichman will show why.

Janine Beichman has been living in Japan for more than thirty years, where she is a professor in the Department of Japanese Literature at Daito Bunka University. She took her PhD at Columbia University under the guidance of Donald Keene. Her publications in English include two critical biographies, Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works, and Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry, and the original Noh play Drifting Fires, which has been performed in Japan and the United States. Beichman has also published numerous translations, including Ooka Makoto's Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems 1972-1989 ,Poems for All Seasons/Oriori no Uta ; and Setouchi Jakucho's The End of Summer . Her current research centers around two topics: Japanese women poets, in particular Yosano Akiko and Ishigaki Rin; and the tradition of ekphrasis in Japanese art and literature.

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Janine Beichman Professor of Japanese Literature Speaker Daito Bunka University
Lectures

Stephen Walt: "Taming American Power: the Global Response to U.S. Primacy"

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"The United States is the most powerful since the Roman Empire," stated Stephen Walt, the Belfer Professor of International Affairs and academic dean of the John F. Kennedy School, Harvard University, delivering the 2005 Robert G. Wesson Lecture in International Relations Theory and Practice, at the Freeman Spogli Institute on November 16, 2005. America's unmatched power is therefore of great interest and concern to leaders in most other parts of the world, from President Putin in Russia, to President Chirac in France, and President Musharraf in Pakistan. For Americans, however, the key issue is how others are now responding to U.S. power.

Speaking before an audience of Stanford faculty, students, and the broader community, Professor Walt examined three interwoven themes: why other states do not welcome U.S. power; what are the main strategies available to them for dealing with American power? and what should the United States do in response?

As an integral part of his analysis, Walt showed opinion polls demonstrating a striking gap between American views of U.S. primacy and other countries' perceptions of the current U.S. role. For example, although the 2002 Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 79 percent of U.S. citizens believe it is good that "American ideas and customs are spreading around the world," and 70 percent think that U.S. foreign policy takes the interests of other states into account either "a great deal" or "a fair amount," overwhelming majorities overseas say the United States considers the interest of others "not much" or "not at all." Similarly, a 2005 BBC survey of 21 countries found only five, India, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, and South Korea, where a majority of people had "positive" attitudes toward the United States.

There are three major sources of anti-Americanism, Walt explained. First, our sheer power makes other nations nervous. Second, there is a perceived sense of hypocrisy between our words and our actions. The case of nuclear weapons provides a vivid example. We preach nonproliferation, yet accord new respect and policy cooperation with newly nuclear states, such as India. Third, how the United States behaves in the world-what we do-invites antipathy. This latter point is abundantly clear in global opinion polls: Even in regions where anti-Americanism seems most strident, nations and individuals report that they do not object to our values or to what we stand for but rather to what we do.

Other nations, Walt pointed out, can choose a strategy of accommodation to our power or a strategy of resistance. Commonly adopted strategies of accommodation include 'bandwagoning," or realigning foreign policies with U.S. wishes, such as Libya's abandonment of nuclear weapons; "regional balancing"-using U.S. power to balance regional threats; "bonding" to curry favor with the United States; and "penetration," a strategy aimed at infiltrating the American political system to influence foreign policy outcomes.

In contrast, countries that choose to resist American power pursue five strategies:

"balancing" our power, alone or in alliance with others; "asymmetric responses," such as terrorism, which try to exploit specific areas of U.S. vulnerability; "blackmail," like North Korea's efforts to extract concessions from its nuclear weapons program; "balking," or tacit non-cooperation; and "delegitimizing," or attempts to turn others against the legitimacy of our actions or policies.

In light of the growing antipathy to U.S. primacy in so many parts of the world, Walt proposed three major courses of action to produce a more favorable response to U.S. power. First, he urged that we reduce American's military footprint abroad-and especially our ground force deployments-and return to a more traditional policy of regional balancing in cooperation with other nations. This policy would make greater use of American air and naval power and limit American intervention to cases where vital U.S. interests are threatened. Second, we should work harder to defend our international legitimacy and rebuild the U.S. image abroad, through a sustained campaign of public diplomacy and by keeping key American institutions-such as higher education-available to foreign visitors. Third, he advocated a more nuanced approach to America's traditional support for Israel, one that balances our genuine support for Israel's existence with the urgent need to bring a lasting settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"The more the United States uses its power in an overwhelming and capricious manner," Professor Walt warned, "the more the rest of the world will resist us." Conversely, the more the United States recognizes and respects the interests of others, while using its power to defend its own interests, the more other nations will welcome U.S. power. "The task we face," he advised, "is to rebuild the trust, admiration, and legitimacy the United States once enjoyed, so the rest of the world can focus not on taming U.S. power but on reaping the benefits it can bring."

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Creating Wealth and Poverty in China

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In the run-up to the Olympics, China is a country of contradictions. On one hand, market reforms since 1980 have radically improved living standards across the vast country and dramatically decreased the levels of absolute poverty. On the other hand, the distribution of income and wealth has become more unequal, hard-core urban poverty has returned, and there are new concentrations of enormous wealth among a small minority. Drawing on fieldwork and survey results collected since 1998, Professor Davis will discuss how the accelerated commodification of assets and the internationalization of capital have re-shaped accumulation of material and non-material rewards at individual and group levels. In concluding, she addresses competing hypotheses about class formation and consolidation of privilege.

Deborah S. Davis (Ph.D. Boston University, 1979) is a Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her primary teaching interests are historical and comparative sociology, inequality and stratification, contemporary Chinese society, and methods of fieldwork. Davis is currently a member of the National Committee on US China Relations and serves on the editorial boards of The European Journal of East Asian Studies, Social Forces and the new Yale China Health Journal. Past publications have analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, social welfare, class cleavages and occupational mobility. She is currently completing two books: A Home of Their Own, a study of the social consequences of privatization of real estate in Shanghai and Wealth and Poverty in China Today, proceedings from conference held at Yale on how recent Chinese experiences challenge prevailing sociological analysis of inequality and stratification. She also is actively involved in research and advocacy work in response to the AIDS epidemic in China.

This series is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.

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Deborah Davis Professor of Sociology Speaker Yale University
Seminars

Operations research, mathematics yield homeland security decision tools

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George Habash, a militant and former secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, once characterized terrorism as a "thinking man's game." Fighting terrorism is a thinking game, too, as illustrated by CISAC scholars Lawrence M. Wein and Jonathan Farley who use operations research and mathematics to devise rational methods for homeland security policy making.

George Habash, a militant and former secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, once characterized terrorism as a "thinking man's game." Using mathematics, researchers at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) have made fighting terrorism a thinking man's game as well.

CISAC affiliate Lawrence M. Wein of the Graduate School of Business and CISAC Science Fellow Jonathan Farley are both applying mathematical models to homeland security problems, such as preventing a nuclear detonation in a major U.S. city and determining whether terrorist cells have likely been disrupted.

Wein, who teaches operations classes about different business processes used to deliver goods and services, has focused his research on bioterrorism and border issues. He has performed, he says, the first mathematical analyses of hypothetical botulism poisoning, anthrax outbreaks and smallpox infections.

"One overriding theme of my work is that all these homeland security problems are operations problems," said Wein, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Management Science. "Just as McDonald's needs to get hamburgers out in a rapid and defect-free manner, so too does the government have to get vaccines and antibiotics out and test the borders for nuclear weapons or terrorists in a rapid and defect-free manner."

In collaboration with Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan research center, Wein recently has conducted research to improve security at U.S. borders and ports. Port security has received significant attention recently owing to the furor over Dubai Ports World's bid to manage six terminals at major U.S. harbors. The aim of Wein and Flynn's work is to prevent terrorists from bringing into the country a nuclear weaponbe it an atomic bomb or a so-called "dirty bomb," or conventional explosive packed with radioactive waste.

"Of all the problems I've studied, this is the most important because the worst-case terrorist scenario is a nuclear weapon going off in a major U.S. city and also it is the one the government has dropped the ball on the most," Wein said. "They have done a very poor job."

Instead of using the existing approach, where U.S. Customs actively inspects a minority of containers based on information from a specialized tracking system designed to identify suspicious containers, Wein and Flynn have recommended the government use a multi-layer, passive screening system for every container entering the country. Under their system, Customs would photograph a shipping container's exterior, screen for radioactive material and collect gamma-ray images of the container's contents. If terrorists shielded a bomb with a heavy metal such as lead to hide it from radiation detectors, gamma-ray imaging would allow inspectors to see the shielding and flag the container for inspection. Wein and Flynn believe this whole process would cost about $7 per container.

"Right now about maybe 6 percent of the containers are deemed suspicious and they will go through some testing and the other 94 percent of the containers just waltz right into the country without an inspector laying an eye on them," Wein said. "What we're proposing to do is 100 percent passive testing."

Wein's earlier work addressed a different threat: bioterrorism. In 2005, Wein revealed the nation's milk supply was vulnerable--a terrorist could potentially poison 100,000 gallons of milk by sneaking a few grams of botulinum into a milk tanker. Although the government and dairy industry have collaborated to intensify the heat pasteurization formula for milk, Wein is still pushing for additional botulinum testing, which he says would cost less than 1 percent of the cost of milk.

Wein also has used math to study smallpox outbreaks, the U.S. fingerprint identification system and U.S.-Mexico border security issues. Wein's congressional testimony on the fingerprint identification system in 2004 led to a switch from a two-finger system to a 10-finger system. His 2003 research on anthrax attacks resulted in a Washington, D.C., pilot program to use the U.S. Postal Service to distribute antibiotics throughout the capital after an outbreak. Seattle is now testing a similar program.

"In Washington, D.C., now, if there is a large-scale anthrax attack, postal workers will be the first to get their Cipro and, on a voluntary basis, they will go door-to-door distributing antibiotics," Wein said.

He said the common thread throughout his research is queuing theory, or the mathematical study of waiting lines, but he also draws upon mathematical epidemiology for his smallpox studies; air dispersion models for the anthrax model; supply chain management for the milk study; probability theory for the fingerprint identification system; and models for nuclear transport and detection for his work with containers.

From tainted lactose to lattice structures

While Wein is working on improving the government's counterterrorism systems, Jonathan Farley is working to figure out when terrorist organizations have been effectively disrupted. His mathematical model is designed to help law enforcement decide how to act once they have captured or killed a terrorist or a number of terrorists in a cell.

A professor at the University of the West Indies who will chair the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science there next year, Farley is on a one-year science fellowship at CISAC. In 2003, he co-founded Phoenix Mathematical Systems Modeling Inc., a company that develops mathematical solutions to homeland security problems.

He is using lattice theory--a branch of mathematics that deals with ordered sets--to determine the probability a terrorist cell has been disrupted once some of its members have been captured or killed.

"Law enforcement has to make decisions about what resources they should allocate to target different cells," Farley said. "The model should provide them with a more rational basis for allocating their scarce resources. ... It will inform you when you're making decisions about how much time and effort and how much money you're going to spend going after a particular cell."

While at Stanford, Farley hopes to unearth the perfect structure, mathematically speaking, for a terrorist cell--or in other words, a cell structure that is most resistant to the loss of members.

"If it's possible to determine the structure of an ideal terrorist cell, you can focus on a much smaller number of possibilities, because it makes more sense to assume the adversary is going to be smart rather than stupid," Farley said.

Farley has suggested it is possible Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations already may have figured out the perfect structure for a terror cell by trial and error.

"I don't expect Osama bin Laden to be reading lattice theory in his caves in Afghanistan," said Farley. "But if it follows from the mathematics, perhaps heuristically, the terrorists will have come to the same conclusion--that this is the best way to structure a terrorist cell."

Although Farley acknowledges his model is not a panacea for terrorism, he hopes it will help reduce guesswork that might be involved in pursuing terrorists.

"It's not that I think mathematics can solve all of these problems," Farley said. "Because it can't. But it's better to use rational means to make decisions rather than guesswork."

John B. Stafford is a science-writing intern at Stanford News Service.

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