The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. Their descendants endowed the annual lecture series at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in order to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and to increase support for informed international cooperation.

The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking; a broad, practical grasp of a given field; and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges.

About the event: Arms racing and future strategic stability assessments are largely focused on moving from the Cold War paradigm of two nuclear powers – the US and Russia, to the likely new reality of three nuclear peers – the US, Russia, and China.  However, there are technologies being matured that may be more important drivers of the new arms race than the increase in the number of Chinese nuclear weapon systems.  Emerging capabilities include adversary development of long-life and loitering delivery platforms, the US investment in Golden Dome and international improvements in integrated air and missile defense, the rapid advancement of AI and autonomous systems, and the potential resumption of nuclear testing.  These developments are as disruptive as the creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-powered submarines in the 1950s and have the potential to drastically change the nuclear weapons landscape.  This talk will discuss the potential impact of these emerging technologies.

About the speaker: Jill Hruby served as the Under Secretary for Nuclear Security at the Department of Energy from 2021 to 2025. Prior to that, Hruby had a 34-year career at Sandia National Laboratories, retiring as the Director in 2017. Hruby was the inaugural Sam Nunn Distinguished Fellow at NTI. Currently, Hruby is on boards at Lawrence Livermore and the Atomic Weapon Establishment. She is a member of the Anthropic National Security Advisory Committee, the National Academy Committee for International Security and Arms Control, among other advisory roles. This quarter, she is the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Nuclear weapons are considered a prominent international status symbol that signal military strength, technological prowess, and a state’s association with the great power club. This idea of “nuclear prestige” has affected our understanding of proliferation, nonproliferation, and nuclear modernization. Debate rages on whether nuclear prestige still exists. I contribute to this debate by arguing that nuclear prestige has never been symbolically dominant in the international community’s understanding of the bomb. I offer a theory of status symbols and demonstrate that global opposition and divided superpower messaging prevented the rise of nuclear prestige. I test my argument with a case study of contestation over the meaning of the bomb and pair it with a discourse analysis of 10,000 hand-coded observations of nuclear mentions in United Nations General Debate speeches (1946 – 2025). I contribute to our understanding of nuclear symbolism, the effectiveness of the NPT, and to our understanding of international status.

About the speaker: Kevin Bustamante is the Macarthur Hennessey Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame where he earned his PhD in August 2024. His research agenda centers around questions of international security and racism, with a focus on nuclear politics. His work has been published in Security Studies and his book project examines the transformation of dominant racial ideas over the last two centuries.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Dr. Figueroa focuses her research on developing and testing personalized digital health tools to help individuals lead healthier lives. She focuses on tailoring these tools to the needs of underserved populations, such as people from ethnic and gender minority backgrounds, low-income individuals, and those with severe mental illness. Among other projects, she studies mobile apps that use artificial intelligence to help individuals manage their mental health and increase their physical activity. She developed frameworks to conduct digital health research through a social justice and feminist intersectionality approach. 

About the event: The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced. Radioactive Governance offers an ethnographic look at how the disaster was handled by Japan. Unlike prior nuclear-related narratives, such as those surrounding Chernobyl or Hiroshima, which focused on themes of harm, trauma, and victimization, the Japanese government consistently put forward a discourse of minimal or no radiation-related dangers, a gradual bringing home of former evacuees, a restarting of nuclear power plants, and the promotion of a resilient mindset in the face of adversity. This narrative worked to counter other understandings of recovery, such as those of worried citizens unsuccessfully fighting for permanent evacuation because they were afraid to go back to their homes. Providing a rich theorization of how both governments and citizens shape narratives about catastrophic events, Radioactive Governance not only displays how Fukushima became a story of hope and resilience rather than of victimization, but also how radioactive governance shifted from the nuclear secrecy that characterized the Cold War era to relying on international organizations and domestic citizens to co-manage the aftermath of disasters.

About the speaker: Maxime Polleri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval and a member of the Graduate School of International Studies. As an anthropologist of technoscience, he studies the governance of disasters, waste and misinformation, with a primary focus on nuclear topics and a regional expertise on Japan.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Why do democratic leaders politicize foreign policy bureaucracies? While existing scholarship recognizes that leaders and bureaucrats often clash, it usually attributes these conflicts to organizational pathologies, principal-agent problems, or policy disagreements. This project develops a theory that explains when leaders attack their foreign policy bureaucracies by installing loyalists, marginalizing or purging careerists, and creating parallel agencies, a strategy I call politicization. It argues that leaders tend to politicize instead of bypassing or coordinating with the bureaucracy when two forces come together: when leaders strongly distrust the bureaucracy, fueled by intense partisan, ideological, and social conflicts, and have enough domestic political power to reshape institutions in their own image.

About the speaker: Emily Tallo is the India-U.S. security studies postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in August 2025. Emily’s research centers on the domestic politics of foreign policy, focusing on how leaders, bureaucracies, and political parties shape international politics with a regional emphasis on South Asia. Before academia, Emily was a researcher at the Henry L. Stimson Center’s South Asia program in Washington, DC, and an editor of the online magazine South Asian Voices. Her commentary has been featured in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, and War on the Rocks.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Following the failed 1959 Lhasa Uprising, tens of thousands fled Tibet. Most of these refugees (including the fourteenth Dalai Lama) settled in India, but others ended up in countries such as Australia, Canada, Nepal, Switzerland, and the United States. Drawing on newspapers, multinational archival sources, and assorted secondary works, this talk will explore how and why both governments and civil society assisted the Tibetans as well as the ways in which Cold War considerations shaped their decisions. This talk will also shed light on Chinese reactions to aid for Tibetans and how refugees have been perceived.

About the speaker: Reed Chervin is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Motwani Jadeja Institute for American Studies at O. P. Jindal University. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Strategy and Policy Department at the U.S. Naval War College. His first book, The Cold War in the Himalayas, was published with Amsterdam University Press/Routledge, and his other work has appeared in The China Quarterly, The Journal of Cold War Studies, and H-Diplo, among other venues. His current book project is on foreign support for Tibetan rebels and refugees from the 1950s through the 1970s.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: In the wake of conflict and the rise of authoritarian populist movements, national police are becoming more militarized across the globe. This is in spite of the consolidation of international norms for civilian policing. That state police are more militarized is not necessarily surprising since states are fundamentally concerned with domestic order. Like states, international organizations (IOs) are concerned with domestic security and often participate in domestic police reforms as a result. Do IO police reforms operate as a check on global trends toward police militarization? I argue that IOs, though they make determined attempts to institute civilian and democratic policing norms, often reinforce militarized policing. This occurs through institutional and individual mechanisms. First, IOs view order as a necessary condition for democratic or human rights-based policing. Second, individual bureaucrats reinforce this trend because they see insecure spaces as inherently prone to violence and recommend more militarized policing in response. I evaluate the theory using archival evidence from two United Nations (UN) policing missions in Namibia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and interviews with IO policing experts. I find that police militarization is a persistent problem that lacks clear reform solutions, even when implemented by a well-respected IO like the UN.

About the speaker: Before coming to CISAC, Maya was a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago where she received her Ph.D. in Political Science in July, 2025. Maya holds an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and B.A. in Global and International Studies and Humanities from the University of Kansas. Maya's research combines critical and mainstream approaches to explore the legacies of empire in conflict dynamics and state-building. Specifically, she is interested in how international organizations and private firms collaborate with states for international security sector reforms in and outside of post-conflict contexts.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.