The REDI task force invites you to a second keynote featuring Dr. Nita Mosby Tyler. This presentation takes participants on a journey of “deconstructing” the real meaning of equity, inclusivity and diversity. Participants will learn fascinating facts and insights that help us shift from learning and exploring to doing. The keynote is designed to inspire, intrigue and energize us during a complex time in history. We will explore everything from definitions, history, imposter syndrome, and begin to name and break down the fences which can stand in the way of developing equitable systems. 

Speaker's Biography:

Dr. Dwinita “Nita” Mosby Tyler is the Chief Catalyst and Founder of The Equity Project, LLC – an organization designed to support organizations and communities in building diversity, equity and inclusion strategies and The HR Shop, LLC - a human resources firm designed to support non-profits and small businesses. She is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Inclusion Officer for Children’s Hospital Colorado – the first African American woman to hold that position in the organizations 100+ year history. She is also the former Executive Director of the Office of Human Resources for the City and County of Denver – the first African American woman to hold that position in the 63+ year history of the agency. Dr. Mosby Tyler, a consultant accredited by the Georgetown University National Center for Cultural Competence and recipient of the Cornell University Diversity & Inclusion certification, is nationally recognized for her equity work with non-profit, community, government and corporate organizations.

Dr. Mosby Tyler holds a doctorate in the field of Organizational Leadership, a Master of Arts degree in Management and a Bachelor of Science degree in Education.

Note: This is event is accessible current Stanford students, staff, and faculty.

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On Wednesday, May 26 at 10 am pacific time, please join Andrew Grotto, Director of Stanford’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance, for a conversation with Nicole Perlroth, New York Times Cybersecurity Reporter, about the underground market for cyber-attack capabilities.

In her book “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race,” Perlroth argues that the United States government became the world's dominant hoarder of one of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, the zero-day vulnerability. After briefly cornering the market, in her account, the United States then lost control of its hoard and the market.

Perlroth and Grotto, a former Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the White House in both the Obama and Trump Administrations, will talk about the development and evolution of this market, and what it portends about the future of conflict in cyberspace and beyond.

This event is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Cyber Policy Center.

Praise for “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends”: “Perlroth's terrifying revelation of how vulnerable American institutions and individuals are to clandestine cyberattacks by malicious hackers is possibly the most important book of the year . . . Perlroth's precise, lucid, and compelling presentation of mind-blowing disclosures about the underground arms race a must-read exposé.” —Booklist, starred review

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The Indo-Pacific will be the locus of global conflict and growth in the realm of critical and emerging technologies in the new decade. The region is home to the largest, most rapidly growing internet user bases in the world, accounting for just over half of the world’s internet users. At the same time, the US–China trade war during the Trump administration and the digital dependencies underscored by the pandemic have led some Indo-Pacific countries to rethink their own technological dependence on global supply and value chains, in favor of greater regional connectivity and resilience. There is now a sharp focus on the need for a coherent grand strategy for a “Digital Indo-Pacific”. What are the building blocks for a secure, prosperous and resilient Digital Indo-Pacific? How can the Quad, ASEAN, and other regional stakeholders cooperate to tackle broader issues relating to cybersecurity, emerging technology norms, diversifying and securing supply chains, hybrid operations and other emerging threats?

On April 22nd at 9 am PST, join Kelly Born, Director of the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation and former Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, in conversation with Trisha Ray of India’s Observer Research Foundation’s Technology and Media Initiative, and Martijn Rasser, Senior Fellow in the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/sFsmjTf9xUg

About the Event: Contemporary global politics are marked by a renewed debate over the significance and limits of state sovereignty. In the eyes of many, the COVID-19 pandemic has reasserted the importance of territorial sovereignty as well as of national identity and citizenship. Populations have become more acutely conscious of their rights and responsibilities as members of a particular political community, and their ultimate reliance upon their governments to protect them from the virus. Well before the outbreak of this pandemic, however, many scholars, policy-analysts, and state officials had already been highlighting the ‘return’ of sovereignty, often in juxtaposition to either the transnational economic forces of globalization or liberal international norms. Powerful economic and political trends (including protectionism and populism) were casting doubt on the reach and impact of liberal ideals such as free movement and economic interdependence. In part, these trends reflected a structural shift in international order in which the relative position of the United States was declining, and the standing of non-Western powers with attachment to what is loosely referred to as “Westphalian” sovereignty was increasing. Although some IR scholars have argued that today’s great powers (Russia, China and the US) are espousing and practicing a new form of “extra-legal sovereignty” (Paris 2020), the former two states - in order to garner wider support for their respective world views - regularly appeal to an understanding of sovereignty that underscores long-standing principles of territorial integrity and political independence.

This book project takes a step back, to more critically analyse the period preceding our current debate. Before we can address the question of whether and how Westphalian sovereignty has returned to shape contemporary global order, we should examine more deeply why sovereignty was alleged to have been transformed in the first place. In other words, what was the nature and reach of the post-Westphalian order that was proclaimed by so many in the first decades of the post-Cold War period?  While analysts and commentators have pointed to several manifestations of this changed understanding of sovereignty, I focus on the liberal idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, which, inter alia, seemingly underpinned the articulation in 2005 of the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’. According to this liberal understanding, sovereignty can no longer be conceived as unrivalled control over a delimited territory and the population residing within it – ‘sovereignty as authority’ – but rather as a status and set of rights which are conditional upon certain behaviours and capacities of states. Sovereignty is thus not solely the right of the state to be “undisturbed from without” but the responsibility to perform certain roles and tasks within its frontiers.

The central aim of this study is to examine the rise, contestation, and potential fate of what some have called this “revolutionary” understanding of sovereignty.  I ask three more specific questions. The first is conceptual and draws upon the history of ideas relating to sovereignty. Was the post-Cold War articulation of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ really so novel? Or was it juxtaposing itself to a very particular historical period, during which non-intervention was championed by newly decolonized states? The second set of issues is empirical. How has sovereignty been understood in the post-Cold War period, particularly through practices of intervention and state recognition? Have the key actors in international society spoken and acted in ways consistent with the liberal understanding of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’? And the final set of questions is normative. Is it desirable to understand sovereignty in this way? What are the benefits and limitations of viewing sovereignty as deeply connected with responsibility?

While the book project is organized around these three central themes, my presentation will focus in, for purposes of illustration, on the ‘responsibility to protect’ (RtoP). This chapter assesses the degree to which ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ has been widely accepted and practiced by states in their interpretation and implementation of this principle and, in so doing, seeks to both account for and analyse the nature and impact of the contestation that surrounds RtoP.  The chapter’s findings suggest that a conditional understanding of sovereignty was not necessarily shared or practiced across international society, even during the height of liberal internationalist ‘moment’ of the post-Cold War period - thereby posing a challenge not just to the proponents of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, but also to some of its fiercest critics, who overstate its negative effects on international politics.

I begin by arguing that while the 2005 Summit Outcome Document (SOD) was a significant intergovernmental agreement that provided greater precision about the source, scope, and bearer of the responsibility to protect, its particular formulation indicates that the logic of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ was not fully embraced.  Instead, the text reflected a horizontal logic, associated with respect for sovereign equality and positive international law, rather than a vertical logic that places the international community in a position of authority over states. While the notions of sovereignty and responsibility did come together, they did so in a way that did not override or replace sovereignty in situations of humanitarian emergency, but rather aimed to reinforce sovereignty and support states in protecting their populations.

In a second step, the chapter analyses the types of contestation that have accompanied RtoP’s development, which relate both to procedural matters (such as the appropriate intergovernmental body that should ‘own’ RtoP’s development) and to substantive elements of the principle – including, most notably, the relationship between national and international responsibility. I suggest that RtoP is particularly susceptible to contestation, given its complex structure and inherently indeterminate nature. I also argue that, far from establishing an independent international authority that specifies and enforces state responsibility, the most that RtoP creates within its so-called third pillar is a responsibility to consider a real or imminent crisis involving atrocity crimes - what in legal literature is sometimes called a ‘duty of conduct’.

In the final section of the chapter, I contend that the contestation surrounding RtoP can be better understood by giving greater attention to the normative underpinnings of contemporary critiques of the principle, most notably those which stress the importance of sovereignty equality. Given that RtoP has continued to be associated – rightly or wrongly – with the use of military force, it has frequently generated sharp debate among states about the meaning of sovereignty, and efforts to assert the continuing power of the principle of non-intervention. The result of this contestation, and the reshaping of RtoP by non-Western states such as China, has been a dampening of the original cosmopolitan roots of the principle and an increased focus on maintaining strong and capable states. In short, while RtoP has created a linkage in international discourse and practice between sovereignty and responsibility, it has not given effect to the liberal understanding of sovereignty as responsibility.

About the Speaker: Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. She was previously Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect.

Professor Welsh is the author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on humanitarian intervention, the evolution of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ in international society, the UN Security Council, norm conflict and contestation, and Canadian foreign policy.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/5616166186207/WN_Zdzl0PrwR7CXSPoASOs5Xg

About the Event: Conventional wisdom on proxy warfare exclusively focuses on explaining governments’ provision of military, logistical, and financial support to rebel groups involved in conflict abroad. In reality, foreign militant groups play a much larger role in these partnerships than recognized: foreign militants often provide government partners with intelligence, logistical support, access to their military infrastructure, and send elite units to train and supplement their state partner’s troops. Because armed non-state actors are smaller and face greater difficulties accessing resources, the fact that they provide any type of support – let alone deploying their forces to conduct joint combat operations with state armed forces abroad – is puzzling. In this presentation, I provide insights into the strategic benefits that foreign militants receive from supporting states, identify factors that influence the types of support foreign militants provide to government partners once the decision to provide support has been made, and highlight how foreign militants can constrain and influence their government partners’ future behavior. To do so, I conduct an in-depth examination of the overtime trends in the various types of support that Shia paramilitary groups from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan provided to the Syrian regime and Russian forces throughout the course of the decade-long Syrian conflict.

About the Speaker: Melissa Carlson is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s Middle East Initiative. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. Her research examines cooperation between states and non-state actors in conflict, and her book manuscript explains variations in the types of support that governments and foreign militants provide to each other. Previously, Melissa has worked with the International Organization of Migration’s Missions in Jordan and Iraq to examine relations between refugees, host governments, and aid organizations.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/t4xteN7N99U

About the Event: In The State from Below, we seek to understand democracy through ground-up knowledge of the state. We use a new technology and civic infrastructure, Portals, to initiate conversations about policing in communities where these forms of state action are concentrated.  Portals are virtual chambers where people in disparate communities can converse as if in the same room.  Based on over 850 recorded and transcribed conversations across fourteen neighborhoods in five cities – the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of the police to date – we analyze patterns in political discourse.  We reveal four currents that challenge liberal-democratic framings of political life:  that an arrangement of distorted responsiveness characterizes the relationship between policed communities and the state; that the political desire of policed communities is not for greater engagement and responsiveness but for political recognition – to be known by the state; and that in contrast to prevailing wisdom about uninformed electorates, these citizens have too much knowledge of and too little power vis-à-vis state representatives.  Finally, we observe among policed communities an “ethics of aversion” in their political responses, a belief that power is best achieved by receding from state institutions in the short term and forging their own collective, community autonomy in the long term. At a broader level, we observe that it is not exclusion from democratic institutions that characterizes political inequality in our time, but inclusion in what we call racial authoritarianism, and the experience of misrecognition that results.

About the Speaker: Vesla Mae Weaver is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. 

She has contributed to scholarly debates around the persistence of racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons and police power for race-class subjugated communities. She is co-author with Amy Lerman of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, the first large-scale empirical study of what the tectonic shifts in incarceration and policing meant for political and civic life in communities where it was concentrated. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (with J. Hochschild and T. Burch). She is at work on a new book, The State From Below, based on the largest archive of policing narratives using an innovative civic infrastructure called Portals (https://www.portalspolicingproject.com).

About this Event: There is no shortage of scholarship on the rise of strategic experts—campaign strategists, consultants, and the like—in Western politics. Some accounts treat the rise of the strategist as an effect of the functional demands of party competition, linked with technological change and the accumulation of political data; others see the rise of the strategist as a symptom of a larger process of party decline. In this seminar I'll present a different argument: the rise of the strategist was linked with a turn, especially on the left, toward prioritizing markets over constituents. This argument is built on an "inside-out" (or refraction) analysis that traces the rise and fall of dominant party experts, attending to the link between their social location and their conceptions of the economic world, democratic politics and experts' public roles.  I will conclude by outlining a new project that builds on this work, tentatively titled Strategy and Democracy.

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About this Event: In this book project, we walk in the footsteps of the pioneers of the nonviolent approach to provide a reinterpretation of the histories of the great movements of the twentieth century from a game theoretic perspective, bringing to bear a host of new quantitative analyses to understand the challenges they faced, when they were successful at overcoming them and why. We develop a simple conceptual framework for understanding the strategies available to both the leaders and the followers of political movements, the media and outside audiences, as well as the regimes that they seek to influence, and how these decisions interact. We use this framework to highlight the presence of three key tensions that exist in many political movements.

These tensions include: those between the allure of violence and the seeming pedestrianism of nonviolence, between the need for numbers and the need for focus, and between organizations that depend on grassroots mobilization versus hierarchies and leadership. 

In light of the framework and new quantitative evidence, we then retrace and re-examine the decisions of the participants of the Indian Independence Movement in each of their three great nonviolent drives for change---the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s, the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s and the Quit India Movement of the 1940s---and how they succeeded or failed in addressing these tensions. At each step, we also discuss both grand strategy and the effectiveness of local tactics. We next compare the Indian experience with the movements that came after, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Arab Spring and recent protests around the world. Finally, we draw on what we have learned to suggest ideas for better implement nonviolent protests today.

About the Speaker:

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