About the Event: 

In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables.

The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger.

The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, brings together a diverse collection of rigorous and creative scholars who analyze how the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. Scholars, pundits, and policymakers who think that the spread of nuclear weapons can create stable forms of nuclear deterrence in the future will be forced to think again. The volume was produced under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project “Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age”, co-chaired by CISAC Director Scott D. Sagan.

About the Speakers:

Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She works in the areas of political psychology.  She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has also taught at Cornell and UCSB.   She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences twice. She is the author of five books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over two hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as American foreign and defense policy, experimentation, national security intelligence, gender, social identity, cybersecurity, emotion and decision-making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.

Amy Zegart is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Political Science by courtesy at Stanford University. She is also the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Chair of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence and International Security Steering Committee, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She specializes in U.S. intelligence, cybersecurity, emerging technologies and national security, and global political risk management.

The author of five books, Zegart’s award-winning research includes the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022); Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (Brookings, 2019), co-edited with Herb Lin; Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (Twelve, 2018), co-authored with Condoleezza Rice; and the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11 – Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton 2007).  Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and elsewhere. 

Zegart has been featured by the National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. She served on the Clinton administration’s National Security Council staff and as a foreign policy adviser to the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. She has also testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and advises senior officials on intelligence, homeland security, and cybersecurity matters.

Previously, Zegart served as co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, founding co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Program, and chief academic officer of the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Stanford, she was Professor of Public Policy at UCLA and a McKinsey & Company consultant.

She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Political Science Association’s Leonard D. White Dissertation Prize, and research grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Hewlett Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Zegart received an A.B. in East Asian studies magna cum laude from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. She serves on the board of directors of Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (KTOS) and the Capital Group. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Over the past decade, illiberal demagogues around the world have launched ferocious assaults on democracy. Embracing high-dominance political styles and a forceful argot of national greatness, they hammer at their supposed superiority as commanders, protectors, and patriots. Bewildered left-liberals have often played to the type their tormentors assign them. Fretting over their own purported neglect of the folks’ kitchen-table concerns, they leave the guts and glory to opponents who grasp that elections are emotions-driven dominance competitions.

Consequently, in America, democracy’s survival now hangs on the illiberal party making colossal blunders on the eve of elections. But in the wake of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, a new cohort of liberals is emerging in Central and Eastern Europe. From Greens to right-center conservatives, they grasp the centrality of messaging, nationalism, chutzpah, and strength. They’re showing how to dominate rather than accommodate evil. What can American liberals learn from their tactics and ways?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

 

Steve Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Democracy from Scratch, Democracy Derailed in Russia, and Are Muslims Distinctive? and coauthor of The Handbook of National Legislatures. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Comeback: Crushing Trump, Burying Putin, and Restoring Democracy’s Ascendance around the World.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

 

Across Europe, social democratic (or more broadly center-left) parties are a shadow of their former selves.

Most treatments of the center-left's decline stress economic factors like globalization or the decline of manufacturing or social factors, like the decline of the traditional working class. While such factors are important, they alone cannot explain the center-left’s decline if only because such factors do not correlate well with the fortunes of center-left parties across either time or space. This talk will accordingly focus on the political causes of the center-left's decline, in particular its shift to the center on economic issues and the dilution of its class-based political appeals during the late 20th century. This transformation had a variety of unintended and detrimental consequences for center-left parties, played a significant role in the rise of the populist right, and contributed to reshaping the dynamics of western democracies more generally.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests include the development of democracy and dictatorship, European politics, populism and fascism, and the history of the left. Her latest book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day. In addition to her scholarly work, she has published in a wide variety of non-scholarly publications including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, VOX, The Guardian and Dissent. She is on the boards of The Journal of Democracy, Political Science Quarterly, Dissent and Persuasion. 

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

 

Every year, millions of low-income households around the world receive over $100 billion in anti-poverty aid. This research shows how psychologically savvy and culturally attuned narratives of anti-poverty policies can both improve recipients’ economic outcomes and build public support. This research suggests that status quo narratives of aid that are focused on recipients’ neediness and helplessness may paradoxically maintain cycles of stigma, prejudice and poverty. However, a series of experiments in East and West Africa demonstrate that these cycles can be interrupted when narratives represent aid as an opportunity for recipients to realize their agency and aspirations in culturally resonant ways. Lab and field experiments with low-income recipients of aid in East and West Africa demonstrate how such narrative-based interventions can enhance the cost-effectiveness of large-scale anti-poverty programs. Online experiments in the US show how such narratives can mitigate welfare-related prejudice and build support for policies like universal basic income.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Catherine Thomas is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions (SPARQ). She assesses psychological drivers of cycles of poverty and inequality through lab and field experiments in the US and low-income countries. With a focus on agency and dignity, she tests culturally attuned psychological interventions for reducing poverty, attenuating inequality, and mitigating prejudice against people living in poverty. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University and an M.Sc. in Global Mental Health from the University of London. 

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Infrastructure development requires democracies to balance multiple, competing governance priorities. The representativeness of the decision-making process must be balanced against the benefits of impartial technical assessments by the civil service, and both must be balanced against the efficiency of infrastructure development and government actions. Using the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) as a case study, we will argue that California has become a “vetocracy” in which decisions in favor of collective action have become extremely difficult to arrive at. This presentation is based in part on CDDRL’s recent research on California governance, in collaboration with the California 100 Initiative. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Francis Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was published in September 2018. His latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in the spring of 2022.

Dr. Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and the Volcker Alliance. He is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
 

Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar at CDDRL for the Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative. Michael's research interests include infrastructure policy, project finance, public-private partnerships and institutional design in the infrastructure sector. Michael also teaches Global Project Finance to graduate students at Stanford. Prior to Stanford, Michael served as a Captain in the US Army and US Army Corps of Engineers for five years, leading Engineer units, managing projects, and planning for infrastructure development in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan and Thailand.
 

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Our empirical and theoretical focus is on what constitutes political equality as "equal consideration" in advanced capitalist democracies. We claim that political inequality is a distinctive type of inequality. First, although affected by the factors that routinely go into thinking about social, economic and power inequality, it cannot be reduced to those factors. Second, its currency is performative, not only distributive. To make our case, we focus on three broad dimensions of political equality: participation, representation, and responsiveness. Although there is some research on each of these dimensions, influential commentators on political equality have tended to focus almost exclusively on political participation. We develop concepts and measurement for all three and then weigh the trade-offs among these dimensions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Margaret Levi is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) at Stanford University. She is the former Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) Levi is currently a faculty fellow at CASBS and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society and Technology Hub, and the Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association of Political and Social Sciences. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004 to 2005. In 2014 she received the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science, in 2017 gave the Elinor Ostrom Memorial Lecture, and in 2018 received an honorary doctorate from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

She earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1974, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington. Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and seven books, including Of Rule and Revenue; Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism; Analytic Narratives; Cooperation Without Trust?; In the Interest of Others; and A Moral Political Economy.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The use of machine learning for causal inference has become increasingly popular in the social sciences. But relatively less attention has been paid to how machine learning (ML) algorithms can be used to generate novel measures in data-sparse environments like those that prevail in many developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here, I present results from a suite of projects that utilize high-resolution measures of economic development generated by a convolutional neural net trained on satellite imagery. I show that, in addition to superior spatial and temporal coverage, this ML-generated data resolves serious inferential shortcomings in existing national and sub-national estimates of wealth, alters influential findings in African political economy, and opens up several promising avenues of research. I demonstrate one such avenue by discussing ongoing work that investigates the impact of climate change on political behavior, an emerging area of scholarship that demands accurate, high-resolution data in places where such data rarely exist. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Brandon Miller-de la Cuesta is a postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). He received his PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 2020. He has a strong regional focus in sub-Saharan Africa with a special interest in applied methods and political accountability. His current work utilizes machine learning in both dataset generation and causal inference to estimate the impact of infrastructure investments on economic well-being and to investigate how climate change is altering the strength and substance of accountability demands.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.