About the Event: How do U.S. policy-makers develop national security strategy in the face of newly emerging dangers?  And why are many of these strategies deemed ineffective?  In my book project, Seeking Security: Threat Perception and Policy-Making in a Dangerous World, I examine the way in which the cognitive processes associated with threat perception influence policy-makers’ preferences for specific, but sometimes incompatible, national security policy measures.  My theory linking threat perception to policy preferences is grounded in an original meta-analysis of the neuroscientific literature on human threat perception, as well as in extensive evidence from biology and cognitive science on threat learning and threat response.  In this talk, I will discuss the theory alongside data from two chapters covering the design of NSC-68 and its successor national security strategies during the early Cold War.  I combine an original corpus of digitized archival documents and new tools from natural language processing to show that much of the individual-level variation in preferences for how best to counter Communism can be traced back to differences in beliefs about the kind(s) of threat that Communism posed.
 
About the Speaker: Marika Landau-Wells is an Assistant Professor in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.  She received a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the SaxeLab.  For the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Landau-Wells was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Her research is broadly concerned with the effects of cognitive processes - including perception, attention, learning, and memory - on political behavior and foreign policy decision-making.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: How does artificial intelligence shift power in international security? A burgeoning literature in international politics and security studies has documented its effects on the balance of power, strategic stability, and the future of warfare. In this work, power is largely material, if not kinetic, and the specifics of technologies are treated mostly as peripheral. By recovering classical International Relations theory in the form of Hans Morgenthau’s work on the role of scientific rationalism in guiding political decision-making and combining it with insights from Science and Technologies Studies, this paper investigates the role of so-called intelligent technologies, in particular machine learning, in the knowledge production for conflict prevention. Such technologies are met with enthusiasm in the policy sphere, prompting a wide range of actors in the field of conflict prevention to integrate them into their analyses. Leveraging original elite interviews with conflict modelers, practitioners, and policymakers, this paper tentatively argues the rush towards integrating AI and ML is not primarily about improving predictive analytics in terms of scale, speed, and cost, but about creating options and justifications for (in)action. Due to the internal opacity (‘black-boxing’) of machine learning, policymakers can delegate the responsibility of the analysis from the human to the machine, thus transforming problems of politics and power into problems of process and technology. This research has implications for appreciating the internal mechanisms and characteristics of emerging technologies, as well as their  underlying rationalities, to understand how they shape actors’ options for decision-making.
 
About the Speaker: Johanna Rodehau-Noack is an International Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her current work investigates the role of (emerging) technologies in conflict prevention and anticipation, and in particular how the use and promise of artificial intelligence shapes conceptions of armed conflict. Previously, she was a Global Innovation Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House. She received her doctorate in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She also holds an MA in Political Science and a BA in International Development from the University of Vienna, Austria.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders’ Game sheds light on this enduring puzzle, arguing that the primary constraints on decisions about war and peace come from elites, not the public. Elizabeth Saunders focuses on three groups of elites—presidential advisers, legislators, and military officials—to show how the dynamics of this insiders’ game are key to understanding the use of force in American foreign policy. She explores how elite preferences differ from those of ordinary voters, and how leaders must bargain with elites to secure their support for war. Saunders provides insights into why leaders start and prolong conflicts the public does not want, but also demonstrates how elites can force leaders to change course and end wars. Tracing presidential decisions about the use of force from the Cold War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saunders reveals how the elite politics of war are a central feature of democracy. The Insiders’ Game shifts the focus of democratic accountability from the voting booth to the halls of power. 

The Insiders' Game by Elizabeth N. Saunders: 30% off with code P325 at press.princeton.edu

About the Speaker: Elizabeth N. Saunders is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  Her research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics of international security and U.S. foreign policy.  She is the author of Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2011) and The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press, 2024). She holds an A.B. in physics and astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard College; an M.Phil. in international relations from the University of Cambridge; and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

This event has reached capacity. Please email Kate Ter Wee at katecole@stanford.edu or register to attend online using the link above. 

About the Event: Russia’s war on Ukraine, Iran’s Proxy Wars in the Middle East as well as the support Russia and Iran receive from each other, China, and other states such as North Korea, have clarified the nature of geopolitical competition. It is important to understand both the history of how crucial challenges to international security developed and of the ideology, emotions and aspirations that drive the axis of aggressors if we are to prevent conflicts from cascading further and restore peace. 

Lunch to be provided for registered attendees.

About the Speaker:  LTG (ret.) H. R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Upon graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1984, McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years. He retired as a Lieutenant General in June 2018 after serving as the 25th assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. He holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. McMaster is the host of Battlegrounds: International Perspectives on Crucial Challenges and Opportunities and is a regular on Goodfellows. He is a Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: When a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure and urging reform. Yet many of the most egregious violations appear to go unpunished. In many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but also incites a backlash, provoking resistance and worsening human rights practices. The Geopolitics of Shaming presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.

Drawing on a wide range of evidence—from large-scale cross-national data to original survey experiments and detailed case studies—Rochelle Terman shows how human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relationships. Arguing that preexisting geopolitical relationships condition both the causes and consequences of shaming in world politics, she shows how adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response, while friends and allies are the most effective shamers but can be reluctant to impose meaningful sanctions.

Upending conventional wisdom on the role of norms in world affairs, The Geopolitics of Shaming demonstrates that politicization is integral to—not a corruption of—the success of the global human rights project.

About the Speaker: Rochelle Terman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She specializes in international relations, with an emphasis on international norms, human rights, and the Muslim world. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Naming the Russo-Ukraine War has been controversial since 2014.  Why did Russian diplomats deploy the term “civil war” as a preferred descriptor until 2022 — and why did Ukrainians insist that the phrase be taboo?  We assess four complementary logics for the use of the “civil war” descriptor by Russian diplomats before Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022.  First, calling the war “civil” implies military non-involvement by Russia.  Second, explanations putting causal weight on Ukrainian domestic variables allow Russia to blame the violence on Western intervention (e.g., the CIA coup, color revolutions, NATO expansion, etc.) or well-rehearsed tropes about Ukraine’s unfitness as a state (e.g., a “fascist coup,” east-west cleavages in the pre-2014 Ukrainian state, stereotypes of Ukraine as a corrupt/“weak”/non-democratic polity, etc.).  Third, the narrative accesses legal precedents, especially Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and self determination as justifications authorizing Russia’s use of force. Fourth, favored internationalist mechanisms developed for settling civil wars privilege the United Nations Security Council, the OSCE, and other consensus forums, thus redirecting energy to forums where Russians enjoy a veto.  This not only functionally de-linked Crimea (“peaceful self-determination”) from the war in the Donbas (“violent and tragic, requiring costly/sustained collective action…”), but also reified Russia as a great power with UNSC veto.

About the Speaker: Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015), Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021), and Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before The Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge, 2023, with Dominique Arel).  He received his PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2009.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: What are the political effects of nuclear weapons? What are the dynamics of territorial disputes and militarized crises between nuclear-armed states? As China continues with its unprecedented nuclear modernization program and U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreements are cast aside, these questions have taken on new urgency. We address these questions through a detailed reexamination of the 1969 border crisis between China and the Soviet Union. This crisis is a crucial case for both Cold War history and international relations theory. However, until recently, much of the evidence on this incidence remained either unused or inaccessible. Using hundreds of newly available and previously unused archival and primary sources from Albania, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and elsewhere, we shed light on new and important dynamics in the crisis including the role of psychological factors in interstate bargaining, elite politics in authoritarian states, and the impact of the strategic nuclear balance. The work has important implications for our understanding of the history of the Cold War, crisis escalation dynamics, state signaling and perception, and the political effects of nuclear weapons.
 
About the Speakers:

David Logan is Assistant Professor of Security Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He researches nuclear weapons, arms control, deterrence, and U.S.-China relations. He has conducted research for the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National Defense University, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He has published in International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Georgetown University Press, National Defense University Press, Foreign Affairs, and Los Angeles Times, among other venues. He holds a B.A. from Grinnell College and an M.P.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a global fellow in the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center, and a Center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. His book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was published in 2022 by Yale University Press, and he has a forthcoming biography on Xi Jinping’s father with Stanford University Press. He studies Chinese and Russian politics and foreign policy.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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 and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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In an era marked by rapid shifts in global power dynamics, the ascent of China as a formidable force on the world stage poses one of the most critical challenges to the international order of the 21st century. The prevailing notion that China is a revisionist power, intent on establishing a parallel international order to rival that of the United States and the West, raises pivotal questions. Is there truth to this belief? How did China and the United States lose their consensus over the desirable international order? Which elements are we satisfied or dissatisfied with? Towards what kind of order or orders are we moving?

Our upcoming webinar, "China, the US, and the International Order: Are We Moving Towards Parallel Systems?" aims to dissect the narrative of China's emergence as a power intent on sculpting a new world order—a vision that starkly contrasts with the U.S.-led system that has dominated global affairs for nearly a century. Join us on April 3 for an in-depth discussion of this critical issue with Wei Da, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua University.

Wei Da is the director of the Center for International Security and Strategy  (CISS) at Tsinghua University and a professor in the Department of International Relations, School of Social Science, Tsinghua University. Dr. Da’s research expertise covers China-US relations and US security & foreign policy. He has worked in China’s academic and policy community for more than two decades. Before his current positions, Dr. Da was the assistant president of University International Relations (2017-2020) and director of the Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (2013-2017). He has written hundreds of policy papers for the Chinese government and published dozens of academic papers in journals in China, the US, and other countries. He earned his BA and MA from UIR and his Ph.D. from CICIR. He was a visiting senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States from 2006 to 2007, and a visiting senior associate at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University from 2008 to 2009.

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 and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

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