About the Event: Systemic risks derive from a mix of economic, technological, socio political, and ecological factors. Inherently interdisciplinary, the study of systemic risk draws on financial shock models, operations research, global health, foresight, management, military strategy, risk assessment, risk sociology, disaster research, security studies, science and technology studies, existential risk research, as well as the AI risk and biorisk communities. Pulling together core insights from those fields, the talk presents the argument that even mid-range (meso level) risks may become systemic, and so might contribute to catastrophic or even existential outcomes, depending on the order and magnitude of the interaction effects between them. However, the study of systemic risk requires developing transdisciplinary tools that can better integrate the insights drawn from these disparate fields despite high uncertainty. Nevertheless, apart from a tiny literature on risk assessment of rare events (black/grey swans), and embryonic efforts at the the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) at a high level of abstraction, there is still no overarching framework specifically formulated for systemic risks beyond economics.

This talk seeks to promote the integrated study of systemic risk by offering a snapshot of five risk scenarios for 2075 (in video format), a custom-created board game, a transdisciplinary approach, conceptual clarifications, risk factor identification heuristics, and early results from an ongoing survey. The talk includes a novel attempt to structure and visualize systemic risk factors. It also sketches a notation that enables a simple way to annotate relationships between systemic risks and the cascading effects and relationships between them. Lastly, the case is made that we need a dual notation (scientific and lay) for any scenario models used in scientific results meant to also be consumed by the public.

About the Speaker: Dr. Trond Arne Undheim (see his Stanford profile), Ph.D is a Research Scholar in Global Systemic Risk, Innovation, and Policy at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford. He leads a research project on Global Systemic Risk Scenarios for 2075, addressing the fact that humanity faces a myriad of existential risks of technological, sociopolitical, and ecological origin. The project involves developing a set of audiovisual scenarios, quantitative online surveys, technology reviews (generative AI, immersive AR/VR, quantum tech, synthetic biology platforms), and regional case studies (Nigeria, Mexico, USA, Scandinavia, India). He is also developing a framework to analyze cascading risks, assembling a set of risk factors and associated mitigation strategies, which is intended as a resource towards transdisciplinary collaboration. At Stanford, he teaches STS 156 The Future Of Global Systemic Risk (EARTHSYS 156, SOC 128) and is working on a 2024 course (STS X) tentatively called From Regenerative Entrepreneurship to Giga Projects. His next book, Eco Tech: Investing in Regenerative Futures comes out in the fall and will be on pre-order starting Aug 2, 2023 from Routledge.

Trond Arne Undheim is a futurist, scholar, podcaster, and venture partner and an expert on the evolution of technology and society. He is a Research Scholar in Global Systemic Risk, Innovation, and Policy at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University. He is also a venture partner at Antler, and a co-founder of technology foresight consulting firm Yegii. Formerly with Tulip Interfaces, Hitachi Ventures, MIT, WPP, Oracle, and the EU, he’s a co-author (with Natan Linder) of Augmented Lean (Wiley 2022), and is the author of Health Tech (Routledge 2021), Future Tech (Kogan Page 2021), Pandemic Aftermath (Atmosphere Press 2020), Disruption Games (Atmosphere Press 2020), and Leadership From Below (Lulu Press 2008). In addition, he hosts the Futurized podcast, and is a Forbes columnist. Trond's work has featured in a variety of business, industrial, and mainstream media, including in The Boston Globe, NPR's Cognoscenti, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, IndustryWeek, and MIT News. He holds a Ph.D. on the future of work and artificial intelligence. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The U.S. Foreign Service faces one of the most difficult times in its history while dealing with a growing array of challenges around the world. In order to more effectively advance U.S. political, economic and security interests in a time of rapid change, America’s diplomats require additional resources, better training and stronger leadership.

Ambassadors Marc Grossman and Marcie B. Ries, working with a team of career diplomats on the American Diplomacy Project, have produced blueprints for modernizing the U.S. diplomatic service, focusing on four key areas:  a renewed and revised mission and mandate for America’s diplomats; expanded opportunities for professional education and training; a modernized and more flexible personnel system; and a Diplomatic Reserve Corps. 

Ambassadors Grossman and Ries will discuss this important report and its key recommendations on Wednesday, March 29 from 10:00-11:15 am in the Perry Conference Room at Encina Hall at Stanford University.

About the Speakers:

Ambassador Marc Grossman served as the under secretary of state for political affairs, the State Department's third highest position, until his retirement in 2005 after 29 years in the Foreign Service.  As under secretary, he helped marshal diplomatic support for the international response to the September 11 attacks.  He also managed U.S. policies in the Balkans and Colombia and promoted a key expansion of the NATO alliance.  As assistant secretary of state for European affairs, he helped direct NATO's military campaign in Kosovo and an earlier round of NATO expansion.  Ambassador Grossman served as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey 1994–1997.

Ambassador Marcie B. Ries retired after more than 35 years of diplomatic experience in Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East.  She is a three-time chief of mission, serving as head of the U.S. mission in Kosovo (2003–2004), U.S. ambassador to Albania (2004–2007) and U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria (2012–2015).  She also played a key role in the negotiation of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

The fourth installment in a special event series on the occasion of Shorenstein APARC's 40th Anniversary, "Asia in 2030, APARC@40"

Hosted by APARC's Southeast Asia Program

2023 marks the 40th anniversary of APARC. Four decades ago, in 1983, the repercussions of Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia and China's 1979 invasion of Vietnam were still underway. Those intermestic wars interactively implicated both international and domestic relations. Interstate relations in Southeast Asia have been essentially peaceful ever since, despite some domestic conflicts, as in Myanmar now — but will they remain so?

Join the Southeast Asia Program at APARC’s 40th Anniversary for an expert panel discussion examining this and a host of other questions. Will ASEAN thrive, or merely survive? Will ASEAN's ten countries together constitute the world's fourth-largest economy by 2030 — below the United States, China, and the EU, but above Japan — as predicted by Singapore's prime minister and others? Will ASEAN refuse to choose between the United States and China? Or choose them both? Or somehow choose itself instead? And what would each scenario mean Will minilateralism erode ASEAN's centrality?

Moreover, will the differences between mainland and maritime Southeast Asia split the region into respectively Sinic and Pacific spheres of influence? Is the Indo-Pacific concept dead in the water or gaining ground? Will disinformation fed by social media speed autocratization? How would that matter for foreign policy? Will artificial intelligence help the region or hurt it, or both, and how? In the South China Sea, will the ASEAN claimants resolve their differences for the sake of unity against Beijing, or is it too late for that? How relevant to Southeast Asia's future are the futures of Taiwan and Ukraine likely to be? What are Southeast Asia's greatest strengths/weaknesses and opportunities/challenges going forward?

Speakers:

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Richard Heydarian, Senior Lecturer, Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, is a Manila-based scholar and columnist. His academic career has included professorial positions in political and social science at the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, and a visiting fellowship at National Chengchi University.  His university lecture venues have included Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford.  A columnist for The Philippine Daily Inquirer, he has also written for leading publications such as Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, and The New York Times, and has regularly contributed, for example, to Al Jazeera English, Nikkei Asian Review, The South China Morning Post, and The Straits Times. His books include The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery (2019); The Rise of Duterte: A Populist Revolt against Elite Democracy (2017), and Asia's New Battlefield: The USA, China and the Struggle for the Western Pacific (2015).

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Elina Noor, Senior Fellow, Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC. She has written and spoken widely on a range of matters related to Southeast Asia, including currently as a podcaster on Southeast Asia Radio (produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies). Before joining the Carnegie Endowment, she was the Asia Society Policy Institute's Director for Political-Security Affairs, and Deputy Director of its office in Washington, DC. She has held academic and policy positions in the Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (Hawaii), the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (Malaysia), and the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP), and has served on the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. Her degrees are from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LLM with distinction), Georgetown University (MA), and Oxford University (BA).

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Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Professor, Faculty of Political Science, and Senior Fellow, Institute of Security and International Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. While leading his university's Institute of Security and International Studies, he has written on Southeast Asia in books, journals, and media, including more than a thousand op-eds in local, regional, and global media outlets.  His opinion pieces were commended for excellence by the Society of Publishers in Asia. He serves on the editorial boards of South East Asia Research, Asian Politics & Policy, and the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs. Schools where he has held visiting positions include Stanford University (2009-2010), the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (US), Tubingen University (Germany), Victoria University (New Zealand), and Yangon University (Myanmar). His degrees are from the London School of Economics and Political Science (PhD), the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (MA), and the University of California at Santa Barbara (BA).

Moderator:

Don Emmerson, Director, Southeast Asia Program, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University

Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran – the two preeminent centers of Twelver Shi‘ite legal education and learning in the world – are typically described as being in competition with one another for ideological influence and to host the most widely followed ayatollahs.

This talk offers a different interpretation of Shi‘ite religious authority. The relationship between Najaf and Qom is analyzed as a duopoly, a market structure in which two interdependent firms dominate. These seminaries compete to prevent either from monopolizing Shi‘ite religious authority. But they also collude to 1) protect their market share by preventing the emergence of rival centers, and 2) preserve Shi‘ite clerics’ exclusive authority to extract religious rents from believers by suppressing doctrinal and popular movements that might challenge the Usuli school that dominates Twelver Shi‘ism today. This collusive behavior in the religious marketplace stifles innovation and explains why no Shi‘ite version of salafism has developed.

This talk is hosted in partnership with CDDRL's Program on Arab Reform and Democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

David Siddhartha Patel is a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. His research focuses on religious authority, social order, identity, and state-building in the contemporary Middle East. His first book, Order Out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and the Rise and Fall of Social Orders in Iraq (Cornell University Press), examines the role of mosques and clerical networks in generating order after state collapse and is based upon independent field research he conducted in Basra. Patel’s second book project, Defunct States of the Middle East, chronicles the more than two dozen territorial polities that disappeared from the map of the region after 1918: how they came to be, how they died, and how they are remembered today. Patel has also published articles or chapters on the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood; ISIS; Iraqi politics; and the transnational spread of protests during the Arab Uprisings. Before joining the Crown Center, Patel was an assistant professor of government at Cornell University. Patel holds a BA in economics and political science from Duke University and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Nora Fisher-Onar will present an original and timely key to (Turkey’s) politics as driven not by any perineal conflict between “Islamist vs. secularist,” “Turk vs. Kurd,” or “Sunni vs. Alevi.” Rather, she argues, the driving force of political contestation is shifting coalitions of moderates across camps who seek to pluralize public life, versus coalitions of those who champion ethno- and ethno-religious nationalism. Using the key to retell Turkey’s political history from the late Ottoman empire through to the present, she concludes with insights for coalition dynamics today. The talk emanates from her book, Contesting Pluralism(s): Islam, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

This talk is hosted in partnership with CDDRL's Program on Turkey.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nora Fisher-Onar is Associate Professor and Director of the Masters of Arts in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, as well as coordinator of Middle East Studies. Her research interests include IR and social theory, comparative politics (Turkey, Middle East, Europe), foreign policy analysis, political ideologies, gender, and history/memory.

She received a doctorate in IR from Oxford and holds master's and undergraduate degrees in international affairs from Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and Georgetown universities, respectively.

Fisher-Onar is the lead editor of the volume, Istanbul: Living With Difference in a Global City (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and author of Contesting Pluralism(s): Islam, Liberalism and Nationalism in Turkey (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

She has published extensively in academic journals like the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), Conflict and Cooperation, Global Studies Quarterly, Millennium, Theory and Society, Women’s Studies International Forum, and Turkish Studies.

Fisher-Onar also contributes policy commentary to platforms like the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Guardian, and OpenDemocracy, and fora like Brookings, Carnegie, and the German Marshall Fund (GMF). At the GMF, she has served as a Ronald Asmus Fellow, a Transatlantic Academy Fellow, and a Non-Residential Fellow.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

In 1985, James A. Baker III's “Program for Sustained Growth” proposed a set of economic policy reforms, including inflation stabilization, trade liberalization, greater openness to foreign investment, and privatization, that he believed would lead to faster growth in countries then known as the Third World, but now categorized as emerging and developing economies (EMDEs).

A country-specific, time-series assessment of the reform process reveals three clear facts. First, in the 10-year-period after stabilizing high inflation, the average growth rate of real GDP in EMDEs is 2.6 percentage points higher than in the prior ten-year period. Second, the corresponding growth increase for trade liberalization episodes is 2.66 percentage points. Third, in the decade after opening their capital markets to foreign equity investment, the spread between EMDEs average cost of equity capital and that of the US declines by 240 basis points. The three central facts of reform provide empirical support for the Baker Hypothesis.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and dean emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Henry has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.