About the Event: Why do states start conflicts they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Tyler Jost’s book, Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation (Cambridge Studies in International Relations series; Cambridge University Press, 2024) examines how national security institutions shape the quality of information upon which leaders base their choice for conflict – which institutional designs provide the best counsel, why those institutions perform better, and why many leaders fail to adopt them. Jost argues that the same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security. Employing an original cross-national data set and detailed explorations of the origins and consequences of institutions inside China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, this book explores why bureaucracy helps to avoid disaster, how bureaucratic competition produces better information, and why institutional design is fundamentally political.

About the Speaker: Tyler Jost is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University. He is currently on sabbatical leave as the David and Cindy Edelson Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on national security decision-making, bureaucratic politics, and Chinese foreign policy. His research has been published in International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Studies Quarterly. Dr. Jost’s first book, Bureaucracies at War (Cambridge University Press), examines how different types of bureaucratic institutions across the world lead to better and worse foreign policy decisions. He is currently working on a second book examining the domestic origins of international engagement. Dr. Jost completed his doctoral degree in the Department of Government at Harvard University and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Belfer Center International Security Program at the Kennedy School of Government, as well as in the China and the World Program at Columbia University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Can efforts to counter a revolution also be revolutionary? The Algerian War fractured the French Empire, destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, and helped launch the Third Worldist movement for the liberation of the Global South. In this discussion of his new book, Terrence G. Peterson highlights how the conflict also quietly helped to transform the nature of modern warfare.

The French war effort was never defined solely by repression. As this talk details, it also sought to fashion new forms of surveillance and social control that could capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Hygiene and medical aid efforts, youth sports and education programs, and psychological warfare campaigns all attempted to remake Algerian social structures and bind them more closely to the French state. In tracing the emergence of such programs, Peterson reframes the French war effort as a radical project of armed social reform that sought not to preserve colonial rule unchanged, but to revolutionize it in order to preserve it against the global challenges of decolonization.

As Peterson will make clear, French officers' efforts to transform warfare into an exercise in social engineering not only shaped how the Algerian War unfolded from its earliest months, but also helped to forge a paradigm of warfare that dominated strategic thinking during the Cold War and after: counterinsurgency.

About the Speaker: Terrence G. Peterson is a historian of modern Europe with a focus on decolonization, migration, and warfare. His first book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency (Cornell University Press, September 2024) examines how French officers sought to counter demands for Algerian independence from France by transforming war into an exercise in armed social reform. His current work examines the nearly seventy-year history of the Rivesaltes Camp in southern France to understand why migrant detention camps emerged as a quintessential tool of modern governance and remain so today.

Peterson’s work appears in a number of peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Contemporary History, French Politics, Culture & Society, and the Journal of North African Studies, as well as in a book for popular audiences in France entitled Colonisations: Notre histoire (Colonizations: Our History). He has also written for the popular outlets War on the Rocks and the Huffington Post.

Peterson’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the American Historical Association, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, and the Council for European Studies. In 2021, he received an FIU Top Scholar Award for teaching, and in 2024 he received a Society for Military History Vandervort Prize for outstanding journal article in the field of military history. He currently serves as Secretary for the Western Society for French History and Board Member of the Remembering Spaces of Internment (ReSI) research network.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers, Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

About the Speaker: Jeffrey Ding is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. He primarily researches U.S.-China competition and cooperation in emerging technologies. His book, Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition, was published in 2024 with Princeton University Press. Previously, Jeff was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.