About the Event: What effects will emerging technologies such as cyber, hypersonic strike, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing have on nuclear stability in wartime? It is hard to know, because studying the effect of new technology on the propensity for nuclear war amounts to examining the impact of something that does not yet exist on the likelihood of something that almost never happens. This presentation, based on work in progress, will offer a research strategy for addressing these twin methodological difficulties. It first generates an original typology of nuclear escalation risks, distinguishing among different mechanisms that could link new technologies to heightened instability. It then examines the impact of emerging technologies in past eras on the propensity for wartime escalation, using carefully chosen cases from past conflicts that witnessed the debut of new capabilities. Preliminarily, the evidence suggests that although new technologies could certainly contribute to escalatory dangers in war, they have rarely been the primary driver of such pressure in the past. Furthermore, the relationship between new technologies and escalation, where it exists, has usually been deliberated engineered by policymakers, and not arisen as a result of mistakes or accidents. This finding holds important implications for reducing nuclear risk in future conflicts.

About the Speaker: Caitlin Talmadge is Associate Professor of Security Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, as well as Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Research Affiliate in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines nuclear deterrence and escalation, civil-military relations, military strategy and operations, and defense policy, with a particular focus on security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell University Press, 2015), as well as co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, now in its fourth edition (Routledge, 2021). She is currently on research leave from Georgetown University as the Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: As governments, corporations, and citizens have become critically dependent on cyberspace, a transnational field of expertise has emerged to protect them from cyberattack. But unlike engineers whose goals are more quantifiably demonstrated—a missile hits its target with a particular probability, computer chips fail at a known rate—cybersecurity experts cannot prove that a system is “secure.”  In fact, experts paradoxically demonstrate skills in cybersecurity by demonstrating insecurities—for example, hacking systems to reveal their vulnerabilities. So how can these experts offer any authoritative assurance of security? What does growing reliance on cybersecurity experts—and the multinational industry in which they often work--mean for national sovereignty and international relations? Conversely, how have the distinctive interests of various private and government actors shaped the development of this relatively new field of expertise? And what does all this mean for our understanding of the relationships between expertise, transnationalism, and power in an age of global interdependence and vulnerability? These questions are addressed by Rebecca Slayton's book in progress, Shadowing Cybersecurity. The working hypothesis is that cybersecurity experts established themselves as authorities by developing ways of making risks visible and apparently controllable—a process Slayton calls shadowing cybersecurity. In this talk Slayton will present early findings and invite feedback.

About the Speaker: Rebecca Slayton is Associate Professor, jointly in the Science & Technology Studies Department and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, both at Cornell University. She is also a 2022-23 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her research examines the relationships between and among risk, governance, and expertise, with a focus on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count, shows how the rise of computing reshaped perceptions of the promise and risks of missile defense, and won the 2015 Computer History Museum Prize. Slayton’s second book, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Anna Weichselbraun interrogates how trust is constituted as a cultural norm and becomes mediated through future-building technologies. She probes the effort to “engineer” trust in Web3—a movement of software engineers, designers, and artists to resist centralized authorities through decentralization based on blockchain—a tamper-proof digital ledger. Web3’s advocates imagine themselves “builders and owners” of radically inclusive and participatory online worlds and alternative economies. Participants deploy blockchains and tokenization to build virtual communities—often in the form of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations)—that run on carefully considered social values. These values are encoded in algorithmic processes, the “smart contracts” by which participants’ behavior is governed along presumably universal incentives. Web3 proponents envision networked organizations of technologically-mediated trust that can supplant “untrustworthy” institutions like the state and the corporation. Web3 seeks to transform the future through technology and Weichselbraun's research follows projects and approaches that seek to democratize and decentralize work, community, and politics.

About the Speaker: Anna Weichselbraun is an anthropologist of knowledge, technology, and governance. She holds a postdoc at the University of Vienna and is currently a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She received her Ph.D. in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology from the University of Chicago, and has previously worked at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her book manuscript on the knowledge practices of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency is under review with Cornell University Press. Her newest research project examines novel forms of governance in Web3.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: For decades now, the use of ionizing radiation technologies in medicine has been to treat diseases and save lives. There is, however, an association of potential risk if the sealed radioactive source in such a device originates from a nuclide such as cobalt-60 and is handled maliciously. Deeply embedded human health challenges in treating diseases such as cancer in challenging environments also increase the complexity of this risk. While ionizing radiation technologies are available in multiple modalities, the non-source-based radiation technology tends to face greater difficulties with adoption in developing countries due to barriers associated with operation. Given these challenges, cancer patients in the developing world may only have access to one treatment modality in the form of a radioactive-isotope-based medical device that is easy to operate but poses as a potential security risk and clinically less customizable for treatment. As such, there is a growing intersection between security and health due to the variability of two major types of ionizing radiation technologies used for cancer treatment. While both technology modalities are used widely, there are known disparities in low-resource environments regarding the management and use of source-based and non-source-based technologies, requiring further investigation and problem-solving.   

About the Speaker: Pallabi M. Chakrabarti is a staff member at the Sandia National Laboratories Livermore, California campus and supports the International Nuclear/Radiological Security program office. She currently coordinates activities related to the security of radioactive materials across a diverse set of partners including international and domestic government officials, other US government laboratories, NGOs, industry, and academia. Through her role, Pallabi also provides recommendations and develops innovative methods and approaches to enhancing awareness of radioactive material security.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In Trafficking Data, Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fueled China's technological gold rush. DrawIn turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.

About the Speaker: Aynne Kokas is the C.K. Yen Professor at the Miller Center, the director of the UVA East Asia Center, and an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. Hollywood Made China (University of California Press, 2017) is Kokas’ multiple-award-winning first book. Her newest book is Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Her writing and commentary have appeared globally in more than 50 countries and 15 languages. In the United States, her research and writing appear regularly in media outlets including CNBC, NPR’s Marketplace, The Washington Post, and Wired. She has testified before the Senate Finance Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the U.S. International Trade Commission.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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.

About the Event: The fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 raised fears of the world’s single largest wave of nuclear proliferation in history, when the Soviet Union’s enormous nuclear arsenal found itself on the territory of not one but four newly sovereign states: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Of those only one nuclear successor would emerge: Russia. The other three ultimately decided to join the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons as non-nuclear-weapon states and proceeded to disarm. Of the three, Ukraine followed the most contested path to nuclear renunciation, becoming a serious proliferation concern but in the end negotiating a deal that included security assurances from nuclear states, Russia among them. Inheriting the Bomb is a story of why Ukraine decided to give up its nuclear weapons and how it shaped the post-Soviet security settlement. As Russia’s war against Ukraine rages on, the causes and consequence of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament gain new relevance and urgency.  

About the Speaker: Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. She is the author of a new book Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (2022, Johns Hopkins University Press). Formerly, she held appointments of a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, and a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana’s research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is a Global Fellow. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Co-sponsored with The World House Project at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

About the Event: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the 1951 Oscars. In this talk, Kal Raustiala, author of The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire explores Bunche’s extraordinary life and career, from professor of political science at Howard to the OSS, State Department, and eventually the UN, his professional home for 25 years. Bunche was a world class mediator and arguably the father of modern peacekeeping. But he was also a Black man in the very white world of diplomacy, who during the Cold War stood at the center of the one of the world’s great historical revolutions: the postwar decolonization of much of Africa and Asia.

About the Speaker: Kal Raustiala is the Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law at UCLA Law School, Professor at the UCLA International Institute, and Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. From 2012-2015 he served as UCLA’s Associate Vice Provost for International Studies and Faculty Director of the International Education Office.

Professor Raustiala's research focuses on international law, international relations, and intellectual property. His recent publications include “The Fight Against China’s Bribe Machine,” Foreign Affairs, October 2021 (with Nicolas Barile); “Faster Fashion: The Piracy Paradox and its Perils,” 39 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, (Spring 2021)(with Christopher Sprigman); “NGOs in International Treatymaking,” in Duncan Hollis, ed, The Oxford Guide to Treaties, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2020); “ Hollywood is Running Out of Villains,” Foreign Affairs, August 2020; “Innovation in the Information Age: The United States, China, and the Struggle Over Intellectual Property in the 21st Century,” 58 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (June 2020); and “The Second Digital Disruption: Streaming and the Dawn of Data-Driven Creativity,” NYU Law Review (2019, (with Christopher Sprigman). His books include Global Governance in a World of Change (Michael Barnett, Jon Pevehouse, and Kal Raustiala, eds, Cambridge University Press, 2021); Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (Oxford, 2009); and The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford, 2012) (with Christopher Sprigman), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His biography of the late UN diplomat, civil rights advocate, and UCLA alum Ralph Bunche, The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire, will be published in late 2022 by Oxford University Press.

In 2016 Professor Raustiala was elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Princeton University, the University of Chicago Law School, Melbourne University in Australia, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2016, he was the Yong Shook Lin Visiting Professor of Intellectual Property at the National University of Singapore. A graduate of Duke University, Professor Raustiala holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego.

Prior to coming to UCLA, Professor Raustiala was a research fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a Peccei Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems, and an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Raustiala has served on the editorial boards of International Organization and the American Journal of International Law and is a frequent media contributor whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde. Along with Catherine Amirfar of Debevoise & Plimpton, he is co-host of the American Society of International Law’s International Law Behind the Headlines podcast.

 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

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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.

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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.

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

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