About the Event: While rebels' electoral participation has become a focal point of scholarship on post-conflict development, the drivers and process of rebels' organizational transformation into political parties have remained elusive. Organizational theory provides a novel, yet critical, point of entry to understanding rebel-to-party transformation and the actors at the heart of it. I look inside rebels' wartime organizations and identify a set of subdivisions (in some groups) that mirror the key structures of political parties: governance wings, political-messaging wings, and social service wings. I argue that variation in rebels' wartime organizational structures gives rise to different party-building mechanisms with distinct prospects for success.  To test this theory, I use intra-organizational comparative process tracing of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, I create sub-organizational biographies and trace their evolution from inception to transformation.  This approach allows me to exploit systematic differences in the organizational structures of the FMLN's subgroups—while holding equal other key variables like ideology, prewar networks, and state context—to demonstrate how the construction of proto-party structures during wartime facilitates party-building at the war's end. 

About the Speaker: Sherry Zaks is a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as an assistant professor of Comparative Politics and Methodology at the University of Southern California. Her substantive work examines the conditions under which rebel groups are able to transform into political parties in the aftermath of civil wars. She draws on organizational sociology to develop a comprehensive model of militant groups and trace how wartime structures either facilitate or inhibit rebel-to-party transformations. On the methods side, Sherry’s work focuses on conceptualization, measurement, and process tracing. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Debates on cohesion in the world’s most powerful alliance have largely overlooked NATO’s complex constellation of internal politics - instead overly focusing on US influence. While the US undoubtedly retains it outsized role in NATO, security scholarship offers few clues as to how or why Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine has affected NATO cohesion. Policymakers and pundits were quick to predict a long-lasting “NATO revival”, however, the aftermath has been a mixed bag: achievements (e.g. Swedish accession, augmented force posture) and setbacks (e.g. EU-NATO coordination on Ukraine, Russia-PRC responses, etc.). In this study, I argue that observed variation in NATO cohesion can best be explained by policymakers’ repeated use of internal, sticky narratives about other Allies’, which limit the number of issue areas on which formal agreements can occur. Even when Allies’ interests align, such pre-determined labeling of some Allies as spoilers and others as champions on specific issues constrains Allies’ outreach to one another. To test this narrative-focused argument, I conduct a discourse analysis of high-level, formally-agreed NATO documents (e.g. Strategic Concept, Communiqués and other NATO Summit “deliverables”), which are the products of months of intense negotiations, and leaders’ public statements immediately preceding and following the invasion. I also draw on interview evidence from several officials who were part of negotiations during this period. The study advances security scholarship by offering a new argument for why NATO cohesion has changed in the ways that it has, offers an explanation for observed disunity and updates negotiations literatures to stress the power of outgoing knowledge on coalition politics. The study’s empirical evidence also reveals that policymakers’ national narratives can both increase or decrease cohesion, depending on these narratives – even when the narratives themselves mischaracterize Allies’ actual bargaining space. The research advances existing security studies that find that individuals – and not just states – can play critical roles in alliance decision-making.

About the Speaker: Prof. Heidi Hardt is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. As a 2021-2022 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs TIRS fellow, she served the State Department (NATO Desk), a senator and congresswoman. She has authored articles, chapters and two books: NATO’s Lessons in Crisis: Institutional Memory in International Organization (Oxford, 2018) and Time to React: The Efficiency of International Organizations in Crisis Response (Oxford, 2014). Hardt examines transatlantic and European security, NATO, multilateral military operations, climate security, organizational change, learning, gender and elite decision-making. The NSF, Fulbright, NATO and Carnegie have funded her research.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: When and why do terrorist groups attack outside their local conflict ecosystems? In the last decade, the number of terrorist groups carrying out violence across international borders has increased. Many explanations of transnational terrorism focus on state-level factors that make some countries more attractive bases or targets for transnational attacks than others. However, state-centric explanations fail to consider the organizational characteristics of the groups carrying out this violence. Transnational terrorism demands significant resources, strength, and coordination as well as intent. At what point in a group’s campaign is it motivated and capable of carrying out attacks abroad? Why are some groups more likely to transition to transnational violence? In this paper, we study the conditions under which terrorist groups move from conducting attacks in their home country to carrying out violence across state borders. We employ data from the Mapping Militants Project to analyze which organizational traits are associated with this choice. Our findings emphasize the importance of group-level attributes in understanding broader patterns of terrorism and consider the implications for counterterrorism policies.

About the Speakers: 

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow emerita at the FSI Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and a professor of political science by courtesy, emerita, at Stanford University. She taught in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University from 1974 to 2007. She has published extensively on the subject of terrorism. In 2011, Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work. A book co-authored with Gary LaFree titled Countering Terrorism was published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2017. She is the founder and a Principal Investigator on the Mapping Militants Project, which traces the evolution of violent militant or extremist organizations across several different conflict theatres.

Kaitlyn Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2022, and she was an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University from 2022-2023. Her research seeks to explain how violent non-state actors organize, build relationships with foreign states, and carry out violence in armed conflict. In this work, she draws on original datasets, fieldwork interviews, and archival materials. She is a Principal Investigator on the Mapping Militants Project, which traces the evolution of violent militant or extremist organizations across several different conflict theatres.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The Missiles on Our Land investigates the human and environmental risks associated with the U.S. Air Force plans to replace its current fleet of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and maintain it well into the 2080s. It is the result of a two-year collaboration led by the Princeton University’s Program on Science & Global Security together with Nuclear Princeton, a group of Japanese and Native American researchers, and Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and published in partnership with Scientific American. This project combines state-of-the-art simulations of the consequences of nuclear war with ethnography and journalism, including narrative storytelling, podcasting, photography and cinematography to shed light on the consequences of the most significant nuclear weapon build-up since the end of the Cold War. This project aims to provide information that everyone in the United States and especially the communities living closest to the missile fields need to know so that they can understand and be part of the discussion as to the full extent of the risks associated with deploying new missiles for the next 60 years or more.

About the Speaker: Sébastien Philippe is a Research Scholar with Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, part of the School of Public and International Affairs where he holds a continuous appointment. His research includes nuclear non-proliferation, arms control, disarmament, and justice issues. He is the co-author of Toxique (French University Press, 2021), an investigation into the radiological and environmental impact of French nuclear tests in the Pacific, which was a Finalist for the 2021 Albert Londres Prize (the French equivalent of the Pulitzer) and won a 2022 Sigma Award for best data journalism in the world, among other accolades. Philippe received his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, was a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and has served as a nuclear weapon system safety engineer in France's Ministry of Armed Forces.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The future of technology is unknown. In some cases, however, the military accepts exceptional expectations about future technology. What technology hype is accepted? And why does the military accept some exceptional expectations but dismiss similar hype about other kinds of emerging technology? Paradoxically, despite discourse about “revolution” and “disruption,” I argue that the hype audiences accept depends on their established identities and interests. They choose to embrace technology hype so long as the imagined change is familiar. Unfamiliar change is rejected. To test my argument, I posit that the U.S. military’s established identities and interests favor offense over defense, and kinetic over non-kinetic capabilities. I then compare the military’s response to discourse about the Cyber Revolution versus the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The latter was familiar; the former was not. I find that the armed services were more willing to act on hype about the RMA. The military’s conservative bias is well documented in scholarship about bureaucratic politics and technological innovation. What makes the contrast between the RMA and Cyber Revolution so remarkable is how persistent that bias can be—even when the military thinks about revolutionary change and the future of war.

About the Speaker: Frank L. Smith III is a Professor and Director of the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. His interdisciplinary research and teaching examine how ideas about technology—especially bad ideas—influence national security and international relations. His current research examines international cooperation on military science, cyber wargames, and the impact of technology hype. Previous scholarship includes his book, American Biodefense, as well as articles published in Security Studies, Social Studies of Science, Security Dialogue, Health Security, Asian Security, and The Lancet. His policy work includes helping draft the 2023 National Defense Science and Technology Strategy. He has a PhD in political science and a BS in biological chemistry, both from the University of Chicago. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Join the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies Program for a discussion about the roots and causes of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news in times of war. Learn more about the informational contents of foreign and domestic actors when addressing the informational threats. How it must be faced for the future of democracy, and is at stake when protecting media freedoms and civil liberties in Israel.

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Omer Benjakob is an investigative journalist for Haaretz, Israel's sole newspaper of record, focused on the intersection of politics and technology. He covers disinformation, cyber, and surveillance and has participated in several international investigations, including the Project Pegasus — the misuse of spyware made by the NSO Group — and “Team Jorge,” a groundbreaking undercover investigation into the private disinformation market and digital mercenaries offering election interference as a service. His investigation into the sale of spyware to a militia in Sudan was shortlisted for the EU's European Press Prize for investigative journalism (2023).

He is also a researcher and his writing on Wikipedia has been published in Wired UK, the Columbia Journalism Review and MIT Press, as well as academic journals. Born in New York and raised in Tel Aviv, he lives in Jaffa with his wife and teaches in a local college in Israel. He is also an associate research fellow at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (LPI) in Paris, a research institute affiliated with the Université Paris Cité focused on open science.
 

Tomer Naor is a father, educator, lawyer, and a well-known social activist in Israel. Tomer holds an LLB in Law from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an LLM graduate degree in Public Law from Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University. For the past ten years Tomer has been working for The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, one of Israel’s leading grass roots organizations, fighting corruption and promoting the values of democracy, transparency, good governance and civic participation and volunteerism in Israeli society.

Tomer has led multiple legal cases discussed in the Supreme Court that are pertinent to the core issues of preserving democracy in Israel, and has frequently appeared before the Supreme Court to argue constitutional and administrative petitions as well as before Knesset committees on various issues. In 2020, Marker magazine named Tomer as one of their "40 Under 40" influencers, and he continues to feature as a regular guest in the Israeli and international media. In addition to his legal work, Tomer is involved in a variety of social initiatives in Israel and won the Civil Society Award in 2015.
 

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the The Europe Center (TEC) are pleased to host President Zuzana Čaputová of the Slovak Republic for a fireside chat with Michael McFaul, director of FSI, with welcome remarks by Anna Grzymała-Busse, director of TEC. 

President Čaputová will speak about the impact Russia's war on Ukraine is having on Central European countries.

About President Zuzana Čaputová 

Elected on June 15, 2019, Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová is the first woman to hold the presidency as well as the youngest president in Slovakia's history. President Čaputová's political career began in 1996, after graduating from the Comenius University Faculty of Law in Bratislava. After her studies, Čaputová worked in the local government of Pezinok and then transitioned into the non-profit sector working at the Open Society Foundations. At the Open Society Foundations, she worked closely on the issue of abused and exploited children. In 2017, Čaputová joined the Progressive Slovakian political party and was elected as a Vice-Chairwoman for the party. She also served as the Deputy Chair until 2019, when she resigned to launch her presidential campaign.

In 2016, she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work in addressing the toxic landfill in Pezinok. In addition, in 2020, Čaputová ranked #83 on the Forbes’ World's 100 Most Powerful Women list.