Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Jonas Tallberg

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Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2018
Professor of Political Science, Stockholm University
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Jonas Tallberg is Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University, where he directs the research group on global and regional governance, selected as a leading area of research at SU. His primary research interests are global governance and European Union politics. His most recent book is the The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013), co-authored with Thomas Sommerer, Theresa Squatrito and Christer Jönsson. Earlier books include Leadership and Negotiation in the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Organizations, and Journal of Common Market Studies.

Tallberg has won numerous awards for his research, including the Forskraft Award for the best Swedish dissertation on international relations, the JCMS Prize for the best article in Journal of Common Market Studies, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the German Humboldt Foundation. He has been awarded research grants from, among others, the European Research Council, Fulbright Commission, Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and Nordic Research Academy.

Tallberg has been a visiting researcher at, among other institutions, Harvard University, McGill University, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and European Commission. He currently directs the six-year research program “Legitimacy in Global Governance” (statsvet.su.se/leggov) and the four-year research project “The Performance of International Organizations” (statsvet.su.se/forskning/forskningsprojekt/pio).

Circles of Compensation: Economic Growth and the Globalization of Japan

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Japan grew explosively and consistently for more than a century, from the Meiji Restoration until the collapse of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. Since then, it has been unable to restart its economic engine and respond to globalization. How could the same political–economic system produce such strongly contrasting outcomes?

This book identifies the crucial variables as classic Japanese forms of socio-political organization: the "circles of compensation." These cooperative groupings of economic, political, and bureaucratic interests dictate corporate and individual responses to such critical issues as investment and innovation; at the micro level, they explain why individuals can be decidedly cautious on their own, yet prone to risk-taking as a collective. Kent E. Calder examines how these circles operate in seven concrete areas, from food supply to consumer electronics, and deals in special detail with the influence of Japan's changing financial system. The result is a comprehensive overview of Japan's circles of compensation as they stand today, and a road map for broadening them in the future.

 

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Kent Calder is currently Director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at SAIS/Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. Before arriving at SAIS in 2003, he taught for twenty years at Princeton University, and has also been Distinguished Visiting Professor at Seoul National University, Visiting Professor at Yangon University, and Lecturer on Government at Harvard University. Calder, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1990, served as Special Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan (1997-2001), Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (1989-1993 and 1996); and as the first Executive Director of Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations (1979-1980). Calder received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1979, where he worked under the director of Edwin O. Reischauer. He is the author of ten books on East Asian political economy, energy geopolitics, Japanese politics, and US-Japan relations, including most recently Singapore: Smart City, Smart State (Brookings, 2016) Asia in Washington (Brookings, 2014), The New Continentalism (Yale, 2012); Ten of these books have been translated into Japanese. Calder was recently awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, for his contribution to Japan-US relations, and to the academic study of Japan.

 

Kent Calder Director, Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies; and Director of Japan Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)
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Japan Colloquium Series

Featured Faculty Research: Dan Edelstein

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Dan EdelsteinDan Edelstein earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and came to Stanford in 2004. He is William H. Bonsall Professor of French, chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and director of the Summer Humanities Institute. Dan's research is focused on eighteenth-century France, with interests at the crossroads of literature, history, political theory, and digital humanities. His most recent book manuscript, On the Spirit of Rights, concerns the history of natural and human rights from the wars of religion to the age of revolution (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2018). Currently, Dan's two main projects are On Permanent Revolution and Digital Humanities.

On Permanent Revolution, a book-length project, explores how revolution went from being the means toward a constitutional settlement, to becoming an end in and of itself. Stretching from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, it focuses in particular on the transformation of revolutionary authority during the French Revolution; on Marx's development of the concept of a "revolution in permanence"; and finally on the relation between this new model and the political violence that has often accompanied revolutions. 

Dan Edelstein, Nicole Coleman, Paula Findlen
Dan is a PI on the NEH-funded Digital Humanities project Mapping the Republic of Letters. This project, which brings together other scholars at Stanford and around the world, aims to map the correspondence and social networks of major intellectual figures. In an interview for the Stanford Report, Dan said, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others. We've known about these correspondences for a long time – some of them have been published – but no one has been able to piece together how these individual networks fit into a complete whole, something we call the Republic of Letters." The tool-building part of this project has now been subsumed in the Humanities + Design Research Lab, of which he is the founding faculty director. The work of Dan and his colleagues on the correspondence of figures as diverse as Voltaire and Athanasius Kircher a century earlier "really reconfigures the map of Enlightenment Europe." Dan and his co-writers received another NEH grant to develop Palladio, a tool for visualizing complex historical data, and an ACLS grant to develop a new social network grap visualization, Fibra. This Lab is itself part of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, or CESTA.

More recently, he has been working on the project "Writing Rights," and published an article exploring the potential of JSTOR's data portal for exploring the "great unread" of scholarship. He was also the faculty advisor for Stanford's French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA), and collaborates regularly with the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL). At Stanford, Dan teaches courses on the literature, philosophy, culture, and politics of the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century novels; the French Revolution; early-modern political thought; and French intellectual culture (“Coffee & Cigarettes”).

 

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Dan Edelstein
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Colin H. Kahl

Encina Hall 
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
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Colin Kahl is director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow. He is also the faculty director of CISAC’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and a professor of political science (by courtesy).

From April 2021-July 2023, Dr. Kahl served as the under secretary of defense for policy at the U.S. Department of Defense. In that role, he was the principal adviser to the secretary of defense for all matters related to national security and defense policy and represented the department as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies’ Committee. He oversaw the writing of the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which focused the Pentagon’s efforts on the “pacing challenge” posed by the PRC, and he led the department’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and numerous other international crises. He also led several other major defense diplomacy initiatives, including an unprecedented strengthening of the NATO alliance; the negotiation of the AUKUS agreement with Australia and the United Kingdom; historic defense force posture enhancements in Australia, Japan, and the Philippines; and deepening defense and strategic ties with India. In June 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III awarded Dr. Kahl the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest civilian award presented by the secretary of defense.

During the Obama Administration, Dr. Kahl served as deputy assistant to President Obama and national security advisor to Vice President Biden from October 2014 to January 2017. He also served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East from February 2009 to December 2011, for which he received the Outstanding Public Service Medal in July 2011.

Dr. Kahl is the co-author (along with Thomas Wright) of Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021) and the author of States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). He has also published numerous article on U.S. national security and defense policy in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, the Los Angeles Times, Middle East Policy, the National Interest, the New Republic, the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, and the Washington Quarterly, as well as several reports for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a non-partisan think tank in Washington, DC.

Dr. Kahl previously taught at Georgetown University and the University of Minnesota, and he has held fellowship positions at Harvard University, the Council on Foreign Relations, CNAS, and the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and International Engagement.

He received his B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan (1993) and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University (2000).

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Inviting Intervention

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Foreign intervention sometimes enters by domestic invitation. Recently, the Malian government asked international actors to send troops to help stabilize and strengthen its rule of law, specifically as it faltered after the country’s coup. In this case, explanations for the intervention by invitation tend to revolve around the relative strength of the government, which was weak compared to the somewhat sophisticated militants that opposed it. Such an explanation, however, is unlikely shed much light on the situation since there are many weak governments with faltering or failing rule of law that do not request or receive such governance assistance, at least as far as reporting on these cases suggests. As the United States and its allies withdraw from the major conflicts of the past decade, the focus of international intervention in conflict and post-conflict contexts is likely to occur in cooperation with host states. This project examines an important set of arrangements for weak states: it identifies and explains when states invite other states to intervene for governance assistance—agreements between sovereign entities—specifically with regard to the security sector. These illustrations and tests draw on new quantitative and qualitative data.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Aila M. Matanock is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research addresses the ways in which international actors engage in conflicted and weak states. She uses case studies, survey experiments, and cross-national data in this work. She has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Central America, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. She has received funding for these projects from many sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Minerva Research Initiative, the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START), and the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her 2017 book, Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation, was published by Cambridge University Press. It is based on her dissertation research at Stanford University, which won the 2013 Helen Dwight Reid award from the American Political Science Association. Her work has also been published by Governance, International Security, the Journal of Politics, and elsewhere. She has worked at the RAND Corporation before graduate school, and she has held fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UCSD since. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University.

Aila Matanock Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
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Navigating the challenges of alliance management in Korea

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In advance of talks between North Korea and South Korea, APARC’s Daniel Sneider says the most immediate threat on the peninsula actually comes from the latter.

In a piece for The Hill, Sneider writes that by embracing North Korea’s offer for dialogue, South Korean President Moon Jae-in—who seeks a peaceful Olympic Games, good relations with China, and reduced tensions with the North—risks diminishing America’s presence in the region.

The challenge for the U.S. administration, accordng to Sneider, is to afford South Korea freedom to explore opportunities for dialogue, while ensuring that such freedom does not result in driving the United States off the peninsula.

The full article is available at The Hill

 

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Joint Security Area; Panmunjom, DPRK (North Korea) Flickr/John Pavelka
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Ending Civil Wars: Constraints & Possibilities

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Part of an eighteen-month Academy project on Civil Wars, Violence, and International Responses, the essays in the Winter 2018 issue of Dædalus consider the impediments to ending civil wars and offer policy recommendations for states involved in conflict and for the international community. The companion Fall 2017 issue of Dædalus describes the causative factors of civil wars in the modern era, examines the security risks posed by intrastate violence, and explores the challenges confronting external actors.

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Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations

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Abstract: Rising powers often seek to reshape the world order, triggering confrontations with those who seek to defend the status quo. In recent years, as international institutions have grown in prevalence and influence, they have increasingly become central arenas for international contestation. In this seminar, Phillip Lipscy will describe the main findings from his book, which examines how international institutions evolve as countries seek to renegotiate the international order. He offers a new theory of institutional change and explains why some institutions change flexibly while others successfully resist or fall to the wayside. The book uses a wealth of empirical evidence - quantitative and qualitative - to evaluate the theory from international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Union, League of Nations, United Nations, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The book will be of particular interest to scholars interested in the historical and contemporary diplomacy of the United States, Japan, and China.

Speaker bio: Phillip Y. Lipscy is the Thomas Rohlen Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His fields of research include international and comparative political economy, international security, and the politics of East Asia, particularly Japan.

Lipscy’s book from Cambridge University Press, Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations, examines how countries seek greater international influence by reforming or creating international organizations. His research addresses a wide range of substantive topics such as international cooperation, the politics of energy, the politics of financial crises, the use of secrecy in international policy making, and the effect of domestic politics on trade. He has also published extensively on Japanese politics and foreign policy.

Lipscy obtained his PhD in political science at Harvard University. He received his MA in international policy studies and BA in economics and political science at Stanford University. Lipscy has been affiliated with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University, the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for International Policy Studies.

For additional information such as C.V., publications, and working papers, please visit Phillip Lipscy's homepage.

Phillip Lipscy Thomas Rohlen Fellow Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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Bargaining in Baghdad: Iraqi signaling between the wars (1991-2003)

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Abstract: This paper explores Iraqi signaling after the 1991 Gulf War. The conventional wisdom argues that Iraq sent mixed signals to the outside world due to Saddam’s desire to balance deterrence and compliance with Security Council resolutions. Drawing on Iraqi primary sources, I explore how Iraqi officials debated their options, crafted signals, and how they interpreted the reception of these signals in the outside world. I argue that Iraqi regime was more rational, but also more dysfunctional, than previous work suggests.
  
Speaker bio: Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. She has previously been a Junior Faculty Fellow at CISAC, Stanford University, and a pre- and post-doctoral fellow at the Belfer Center, Harvard University. She received her doctoral degree from London School of Economics in 2009, which received the Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize from BISA in 2010. She recently published Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya failed to build nuclear weapons (Cornell University Press, 2016), which was reviewed in The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, Survival, International Affairs, HDiplo, Babylon, and Internasjonal Politikk. Her work has been published in International Security, The Middle East Journal, the New York Times (online), International Herald Tribune, Monkey Cage and War on the Rocks.

Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer

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Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. She first joined CISAC as a visiting associate professor and Stanton nuclear security junior faculty fellow in September 2012, and was a Stanford MacArthur Visiting Scholar between 2013-15. Between 2008 and 2010 she was a predoctoral and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Braut-Hegghammer received her PhD, entitled “Nuclear Entrepreneurs: Drivers of Nuclear Proliferation” from the London School of Economics in 2010. She received the British International Studies Association’s Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize that same year for her work.

 

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Associate Professor of Political Science University of Oslo
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Parallel power play: building nuclear cooperation in Argentina and Brazil

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Abstract: In the fifty years following World War II, Argentina and Brazil constructed advanced nuclear energy programs that far outpaced those of other countries in Latin America. However, their more memorable and lasting contribution to nuclear energy history may well be diplomatic, rather than technical. Beginning in 1974 with an Argentine delegation’s tour of carefully selected Brazilian nuclear facilities, and vice versa, the two countries – under military rule and in a centuries-long competition for regional influence and dominance – began a rapprochement around nuclear energy as gradual as it was unlikely. A watershed presidential summit in 1980 pledged the neighbors to cooperation in specific areas of nuclear energy. It took until 1991, however, for a growing system of informal inspections to coalesce into the world’s only bilateral nuclear safeguards organization, known as ABACC. This talk will focus primarily on the contributions of the scientific and technical communities, and their close work with the two foreign ministries, within this delicate seventeen-year process.

Speaker bio: Chris Dunlap is a Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. His research is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. His book project, developed from his dissertation, focuses on the fundamental role of nuclear energy technology and diplomacy in shaping modern Brazil and Argentina and their bilateral relationship. The paths taken to develop nuclear energy in the South American neighbor countries also illustrate the impact that these nations and their key actors, often left out of global energy history, made upon the physical, legal, and diplomatic structures of the Atomic Age. By 1995, both nations had ceased early-stage efforts toward a nuclear explosion, accepted full safeguards and international verification of all fuel cycle activities, and transformed the "imported magic" of nuclear technology into their own. How this happened, and why, is the history at the heart of the parallel power play that defined Brazil and Argentina's engagement with Atomic Age diplomacy and technology.  

Chris received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 2017, and also holds a B.A. in history with high distinction, B.S. in biochemistry, and M.A. in history from the University of Virginia.
Christopher Dunlap CISAC Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow
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