As street protests in the U.S. grew in strength in support of racial justice, authoritarian regimes around the world offered their own interpretations of events to their people back home. The Iranian regime in particular points to the demonstrations as proof that U.S. democracy has failed. Join us as Stanford scholars discuss recent and persistent challenges to democracy in the U.S., in particular violence against the Black community and in response to recent protests.

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Director Michael McFaul will moderate a panel discussion on this trend with Larry Diamond, senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution, Didi Kuo, associate director for research at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Abbas Milani director of the Iranian Studies Program, and Nancy Okail, visiting scholar at CDDRL.

This event is online only. Register to receive a personalized link to join the Zoom webinar.

REGISTER HERE.

This event is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at FSI and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford.

Join Cyber Policy Center, June 17rd at 10am Pacific Time for Patterns and Potential Solutions to Disinformation Sharing, Under COVID-19 and Beyond, with Josh Tucker, David Lazer and Evelyn Douek.

The session will explore which types of readers are most susceptible to fake news, whether crowdsourced fact-checking by ordinary citizens works and whether it can reduce the prevalence of false news in the information ecosystem. Speakers will also look at patterns of (mis)information sharing regarding COVID-19: Who is sharing what type of information? How has this varied over time? How much misinformation is circulating, and among whom? Finally, we'll explore how social media platforms are responding to COVID disinformation, how that differs from responses to political disinformation, and what we think they could be doing better.

Evelyn Douek is a doctoral candidate and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society. Her research focuses on online speech governance, and the various private, national and global proposals for regulating content moderation.

David Lazer is a professor of political science and computer and information science and the co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Before joining the Northeastern faculty in fall 2009, he was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Program on Networked Governance. 

Joshua Tucker is Professor of Politics, Director Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, Co-Director NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab, Affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Affiliated Professor of Data Science.

The event is open to the public, but registration is required.

On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order threatening to revoke CDA 230 protections, which would expose social media companies to increased liability for content that is posted on their sites. This comes on the heels of Twitter, last week, fact-checking two misleading tweets from the president about mail-in voting. Critics of the executive order say the White House is overstepping its authority, and cannot limit the legal protections that social media companies currently hold under federal law.
 
Join the Stanford Cyber Policy Center's team Monday June 1 at 8AM PST for President Trump’s Executive Order on Platforms and Online Speech: Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center Responds, with Nate Persily, Faculty Co-Director of the Cyber Policy Center and Director of the Program on Democracy and the Internet; Daphne Keller, Director for the Program on Platform Regulation and former associate general counsel for Google; Alex Stamos, Director of the Cyber Center’s Internet Observatory and former Chief Security Officer at Facebook; Marietje Schaake, Policy Director for the Cyber Policy Center and former Member of EU Parliament; and Eileen Donahoe, Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator and former US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Counsel, in conversation with Cyber Center Director Kelly Born.

Monday, June 1st
8am PDT
Join via Zoom

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

Livestream: Please click here to join the livestream webinar via Zoom or log-in with webinar ID 924 4971 4330.

About the Event: International statebuilding aims to transform weak, conflict-affected states into stable modern states, grounded in rule of law, market economies, and liberal democracies (Barnett 2006, Mann 2012). International organizations (IOs) play a central role in this effort. By deploying country-level statebuilding missions in conflict-affected states, IOs aim to co-govern with the conflict-affected state for a defined period of time, helping to strengthen the capacity of the state to govern itself. International relations scholarship assumes that once IOs exercise, possess, and assert their authority to intervene on a country’s domestic territory they do not have to renegotiate this authority. We argue, in contrast, that most agreements between IOs and the host government are incomplete contracts that give weak states substantial authority over the intervening IO. We demonstrate that in a context of changing sovereignty norms, weak states have consistently used their authority to resist the influence of IOs and reduce the effectiveness of international statebuilding efforts. To test the observable implications of these claims, we employ a mixed method research design that integrates text-as-data analysis with in-depth case studies.

About the Speakers:

Susanna P. Campbell is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Service and Director of the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab (RIPIL) at American University. Her research examines the sub-national behavior of international actors in fragile and conflict-affected states, addressing debates in the statebuilding, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, international aid, and global governance literatures. She uses mixed-method research designs and has conducted extensive fieldwork in conflict-affected countries, including Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Sudan, South Sudan, and East Timor. She has received grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Network for International Studies, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Swedish and Dutch governments, among others. In 2018, she won the School of International Service Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award and the Excellence in PhD Mentoring Award.

Prof. Campbell’s first book, Global Governance and Local Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2018), argues that because global governance actors are accountable to external stakeholders, seemingly “bad behavior” by country-based staff is necessary for local peacebuilding performance. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize and featured as one of the 2018 top picks for engaged scholarship by Political Violence @ a Glance. She is finishing a co-authored second book, Aid in Conflict, that explains the aid allocation behavior of international donors in war-torn countries. Her work has also been published by Columbia University Press, International Studies Review, International Peacekeeping, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Political Research Quarterly, among others. Prior to graduate school, she worked for the United Nations, International Crisis Group, and the Council on Foreign Relations and recently served as a senior advisor for the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, mandated by the US Congress. She received her PhD from Tufts University and was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and The Graduate Institute in Geneva.

Aila M. Matanock is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research addresses the ways in which international and other outside actors engage in fragile states. She uses case studies, survey experiments, and cross-national data in this work. She has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Central America, Europe, Melanesia, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. She has received funding for these projects from many sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Minerva Research Initiative, the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START), and the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her 2017 book, Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation, was published by Cambridge University Press. It won the 2018 Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize and was a runner up for the 2018 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize. It is based on her dissertation research at Stanford University, which won the 2013 Helen Dwight Reid award from the American Political Science Association. Her work has also been published by the Annual Review of Political Science, Governance, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and elsewhere. She worked at the RAND Corporation before graduate school, and, since then, she has held fellowships at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UCSD. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/M7DEG62NsVQ

About the Event: In recent years, small modular reactors (SMRs, i.e. nuclear reactors with electric capacities less than 300 MW_elec) have received bipartisan, Congressional support on the pretense that their development will reduce the mass and radiotoxicity of commercially generated nuclear waste. However, these metrics are of limited value in planning for the safe management and disposal of this radioactive material. By analyzing the published design specifications for water-, sodium-, and molten salt-cooled SMRs, I here characterize their notional, high-level waste streams in terms of decay heat, radiochemistry, and fissile isotope concentration, each of which have implications for geologic repository design and long-term safety. Volumes of low- and intermediate-level decommissioning waste, in the form of reactor components, coolants, and moderators, have also been estimated.

The results show that SMRs will not reduce the size of a geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel, nor the associated future dose rates. Rather, SMRs are poised to discharge spent fuel with relatively high concentrations of fissile material, which may pose re-criticality risks in a geologic repository. Furthermore, SMRs—in particular, designs that call for molten salt or sodium coolants—entail increased volumes of decommissioning waste, as compared to a standard 1100 MW_elec, water-cooled reactor. Many of the anticipated SMR waste challenges are a consequence of neutron leakage, a basic physical process that reduces the fuel burnup efficiency in small reactor cores. Common approaches to attenuating neutron leakage from SMRs, such as the introduction of radial neutron reflectors, will increase the generation of decommissioning waste. The feasibility of managing SMR waste streams should be performed before these reactors are licensed, and future clean energy policies should acknowledge the adverse impact that SMRs will have on radioactive waste management and disposal.

About the Speaker: Dr. Lindsay Krall is a MacArthur post-doctoral fellow and a geochemist at SKB. Her post-doctoral research assesses the technical credibility of recent DOE programs related to SNF management, in particular those centered around deep borehole disposal and advanced nuclear reactors.