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

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

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About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

About the event: China's nuclear forces, policies, and, possibly, strategy seem to be changing dramatically, with official US estimates suggesting the country may reach peer status by the end of the decade. Policymakers and scholars alike want to understand why these changes are occurring, but determining what is changing must precede explaining why. China, like many other nuclear powers, veils its nuclear forces in secrecy. That veil, however, has been increasingly pierced by open-source intelligence. The discovery of more than three hundred ICBM silos under construction surprised many experts who long believed China was moving decisively toward mobile forces. This talk considers the relationship between models of China's decision-making and sources of information, both historical and contemporary. I compare the gaze of the intelligence community with that of scholars to create a framework for reconsidering our understanding of China's nuclear forces in the past and to suggest how open-source information could shape our understanding in the future. While focused on China's nuclear arsenal, the case illustrates a broader point: open-source analysis represents a distinct way of knowing about the world, but only when married to traditional research methods. Scholars working on other opaque policy challenges, especially in security, face similar empirical problems, and this talk offers a framework for thinking about how open-source research might contribute to their work.

About the speaker: Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is a Distinguished Scholar of Global Security at Middlebury College. He is also a member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control and the Frontier Red Team for Anthropic. From 2022 to 2025, Dr. Lewis was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board. He is the author of three books, The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China’s Search for Security in the Nuclear Age; Paper Tigers: China’s Nuclear Posture; and The 2020 Commission on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks on the United States.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

"Rebuilding Democracy in Venezuela" is a four-part webinar series hosted by CDDRL's Democracy Action Lab that examines Venezuela’s uncertain transition to democracy through the political, economic, security, and justice-related challenges that will ultimately determine its success. Moving beyond abstract calls for change, the series will offer a practical, sequenced analysis of what a democratic opening in Venezuela would realistically require, drawing on comparative experiences from other post-authoritarian transitions.

Margaret Brandeau is the Coleman F. Fung Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford and a Professor of Medicine (by courtesy) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the development of applied mathematical and economic models to support health policy decisions.

She has published cost-effectiveness analyses of a variety of HIV and drug-abuse interventions including methadone maintenance, buprenorphine maintenance, HIV testing and counseling programs targeted to women of childbearing age, and HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis for key populations. She has also published a number of studies on effective allocation of HIV prevention resources. She has been a Principal Investigator and co-Principal Investigator on four sequential five-year NIDA-funded projects entitled "AIDS and Drug Abuse: Policy Modeling for Better Decisions" that have led to numerous publications and presentations. Recently she has also worked in the area of bioterrorism preparedness planning, and on hepatitis B prevention and control.

About the event: Michael F. Joseph will present the theory and experimental chapter from his forthcoming book (Cambridge May, 2026), The Origins of Great Power Rivalries. In it, he advances a comprehensive rationalist theory of how great powers assess emerging threats; why enduring great power rivalries unfold through either delayed competition, or delayed peace; and how diplomacy functions when rising powers emerge on the scene. In an important departure from traditional realist theory, Joseph argues that countries are motivated by distinct principles - normative values that shape foreign policy beyond simple security concerns. He then integrates these complex motives into a formal model of great power rivalry to explain how rational states draw qualitative inferences about rivals' intentions by examining the historical context of their demands, not just military capabilities. Empirically, he shows that his predictions about the instances and timing of competition better fit great power rivalry cases than leading rationalist and psychological alternatives via a medium-n analysis of great power rivalries since 1850. He illuminates British reactions to Stalin at the beginning of the Cold War via an in depth historical analysis. He animates a theoretically sophisticated defense of America's approach to China in the post-Cold War era with 100s of Washington-insider interviews and a novel analysis of recently declassified estimates. He demonstrates that real life intelligence analysts integrate diplomacy, historical context and an appreciation of strategic incentives as his theory expects, by embedding a survey experiment into an intelligence simulation given to 100s of real-life intelligence analysts and national security professionals from the CIA, State Department, DOD and elsewhere. Michael is known for "hot takes," and all information he presents is his personal opinion and does not reflect the position of any government and should not be taken seriously be anyone.

About the speaker: Michael F. Joseph is an Assistant Professor at UCSD. He harnesses a decade of foreign policy experience and sophisticated research skills to resolve modern national security problems of great power competition, and technology in the intelligence community. His research was recognized with APSA's 2021 Formal Theory Section Award, the 2023 Palmer Prize, and a $450,000 NSF Grant for National Security Preparedness, among other accolades. His book is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. His articles are published or forthcoming in the APSR (x3), JOP (x2), IO, and other journals. Policy insights from this research have attracted policy-maker attention in DC, and appear in the Washington Post, War on the Rocks, and other leading outlets.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.