CISAC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 5th due to the ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

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About this Event: Somatic (i.e. non-heritable) genome editing is already in clinical trials for the treatment of diseases ranging from certain cancers to sickle cell anemia.  But public fascination has largely focused on germline editing, especially with the startling late 2018 announcement that human embryos had been edited and then used for a pregnancy resulting in two live-born girls.  This talk will highlight key scientific and political responses since that announcement, and offer insights into ongoing debates and ongoing work by international commissions looking at whether there are any conditions under which such experiments could be done responsibly in the future.

About the Speaker:

R. Alta Charo, J.D., is a 2019-2020 Berggruen Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin.  She was co-chair of the National Academies’ 2017 report on human genome editing, and a member of the organizing committee for the 2019 international summit on genome editing in Hong Kong.  At present, she serves on the  World Health Organization committee developing global governance standards for genome editing, and on the steering committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research effort to revise and expand ethical guidelines for research and development of both heritable and non-heritable human genome editing.

Abstract: In 2013, the Obama Administration’s “Nuclear Employment Strategy” guidance announced that all war plans and operations would be “consistent with the fundamental principles of the Law of Armed Conflict” (LOAC). The Trump Administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review repeated this commitment. The literature on nuclear strategy and deterrence in political science however, has either ignored these legal requirements or misunderstood them. The legal literature on nuclear weapons, however, has largely ignored the technical revolution regarding improved accuracy and lower-yield nuclear weapons and the different strategic contexts in which the U.S. might contemplate nuclear use. This paper analyzes how proper application of the Law of Armed Conflict should constrain U.S. nuclear doctrine and war planning and how knowledge of strategic considerations is fundamental to proper legal analysis. We argue that the principle of proportionality can permit “counter-force” targeting— most clearly when such attacks can prevent or significantly reduce the expected damage to U.S. and allied populations with lower foreign collateral damage. We also argue that the legal requirement to take “feasible precautions” to protect non-combatants means the U.S. must use conventional weapons or the lowest yield nuclear weapons possible in any counterforce attack. Finally, we contend that the prohibition against deliberate targeting of civilians has gained the status of customary international law and that the U.S. government should therefore reverse its traditional position and reject the doctrine of “belligerent reprisal” against foreign civilians. This prohibition means that it is illegal for the United States, contrary to what is implied in the 2018 NPR and explicitly maintained by prominent U.S. Air Force lawyers, to either intentionally target civilians in reprisal to a strike against U.S. or allied civilians, or launch attacks against legitimate military targets if the intent to is cause incidental civilian harm.

Speaker's Biography:

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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 Learning from a Disaster: Improving Nuclear Safety and Security after Fukushima (Stanford University Press, 2016) with Edward D. Blandford and co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn. 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 “Armed and Dangerous: When Dictators Get the Bomb” in Foreign Affairs (November/December 2018); “Not Just a War Theory: American Public Opinion on Ethics in Combat” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Studies Quarterly (Fall 2018); The Korean Missile Crisis” in Foreign Affairs (November/December 2017); “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think About Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Summer 2017); and “Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons” with Daryl G. Press and Benjamin A. Valentino in the American Political Science Review (February 2013).

In 2018, Sagan received the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 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.

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Senior Lecturer Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law and co-director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2003, Weiner served as legal counselor to the U.S. Embassy in The Hague and attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. He was a law clerk to Judge John Steadman of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Testing the manual entry of venue locations

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/qpUNQ9BgpPg

About this Event: There is growing alarm over how drugs empower terrorists, insurgents, militias, and gangs. But by looking back not just years and decades but centuries, Peter Andreas reveals that the drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful states have been its biggest beneficiaries. In his new book, Killer High, Andreas shows how six psychoactive drugs-ranging from old to relatively new, mild to potent, licit to illicit, natural to synthetic-have proven to be particularly important war ingredients. This sweeping history tells the story of war from antiquity to the modern age through the lens of alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, opium, amphetamines, and cocaine. Beer and wine drenched ancient and medieval battlefields, and the distilling revolution lubricated the conquest and ethnic cleansing of the New World. Tobacco became globalized through soldiering, with soldiers hooked on smoking and governments hooked on taxing it. Caffeine and opium fueled imperial expansion and warfare. The commercialization of amphetamines in the twentieth century energized soldiers to fight harder, longer, and faster, while cocaine stimulated an increasingly militarized drug war that produced casualty numbers surpassing most civil wars. As Andreas demonstrates, armed conflict has become progressively more drugged with the introduction, mass production, and global spread of mind-altering substances. As a result, we cannot understand the history of war without including drugs, and we similarly cannot understand the history of drugs without including war. From ancient brews and battles to meth and modern warfare, drugs and war have grown up together and become addicted to each other.

Speaker's Biography: 

Peter Andreas is the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University, where he holds a joint appointment between the Department of Political Science and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Andreas has published ten books, including Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America. He has also written for publications such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, Slate, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Livestream: This event will not be live-streamed or recorded.

Abstract: Despite a lull after the fall of the Soviet Union, grassroots activism in Russia is on the rise. The protests for free elections that swept across Russia in the summer of 2019 may have captured international headlines, but many other Russian grassroots groups have been actively organizing over the last decade. What types of civic movements exist in today’s Russia? What are the risks that civic activists face? How do they interact with the state or state-protected interest groups? Finally, what role could grassroots groups play in democratizing Russia? Russian activist Evgeniya Chirikova will shed light on these questions through her personal experience as an environmental activist and as a coordinator of Activatica.org, an online news platform covering grassroots activism across Russia.

Speaker's Biography:

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/nTFLMMdK9Zc

Abstract: What is Putin up to? In this lecture, Taylor argues that Russian foreign policy is best understood as a product of both Russian power and purpose. Purpose is understood as the worldview and mentality of Team Putin, which Taylor has defined as “The Code of Putinism” (as elaborated in his 2018 book of that name). Power and purpose combined produce a foreign policy strategy driven by Russia’s consistent attempts to “punch above its weight.” The disjuncture between this Russian mentality and foreign policy strategy and traditional US approaches to world politics explain the current low point in US-Russian relations.

Speaker's Biography:

Brian Taylor