On April 26, 2023, Israel will mark its 75th birthday as a modern independent state. It is a bittersweet anniversary.

On the one hand, Israelis can (and do) look back at 75 years of remarkable socio-economic, technological, diplomatic, and political development achieved under conditions of extreme adversity. On the other hand, Israel is currently experiencing its worst constitutional crisis and is facing a number of internal and external challenges that threaten to unravel its political order, divide its people, distance it from its closest allies, empower its adversaries, and undermine its national security.

The occasion of this significant anniversary provides a unique opportunity to discuss the past, present, and possible futures of Israeli democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Amichai Magen is a visiting Associate Professor and visiting fellow in Israel Studies at Stanford University. In Israel he serves as the head of the MA Program in Diplomacy & Conflict Studies, and Director of the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development (PDRD) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University, Herzliya. Magen’s research and teaching interests include Democracy, the Rule of Law, Liberal Orders, and Political Violence.

Amichai Magen received the Yitzhak Rabin Fulbright Award (2003), served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Stanford University, and was the first Israeli to be awarded the prestigious National Fellow Award at the Hoover Institution (2008). In 2016 he was named Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, an award that recognizes outstanding thought-leaders around the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he was Principal Investigator in two European Union Horizon 2020 research consortia, EU-LISTCO and RECONNECT.

Amichai Magen is a Board Member of the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR), the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR), the Israeli Association for the Study of European Integration (IASEI), and the Institute for Political Studies at the Catholic University of Lisbon, Portugal. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (IJFA), published quarterly by Taylor & Francis.

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

Co-Sponsored by CISAC and the Stanford Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

The 3rd annual Stanford Existential Risks Conference aims to take stock of global catastrophic and existential risk studies. A special focus of this year's conference will be risk intersections, reinforcements, and cascades: how one risk may amplify (or diminish) another, and how multiple risks interact to create new concerns that may be larger than the sum of their parts. The conference will also feature discussions of the ethics of radical longtermism. 

The conference will take place at Stanford University in a hybrid format. It begins with a welcome dinner on April 20 for in-person participants. All of April 21 will be in-person, with all events broadcast online for remote participants. The morning of April 22 will feature remote presentations and participation, available to the in-person audience as well. For the remainder of April 22, we will close with in-person (and remotely available) events.

Space is limited and registration is required.  For more information visit https://sericonference.stanford.edu/

About SERI

Founded in 2019, the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative is a collaboration between Stanford faculty and students dedicated to mitigating existential risks, such as extreme climate change, nuclear winter, global pandemics (and other risks from synthetic biology), and risks from advanced artificial intelligence. Our goal is to foster engagement from both within and beyond the Stanford community to produce meaningful work aiming to preserve the future of humanity. We aim to provide skill-building, networking, professional pathways, and community for students and faculty interested in pursuing existential risk reduction.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Sponsored by CISAC and Stanford Health Policy

About the Event: Dean Winslow describes the challenges facing the US during the COVID-19 pandemic emphasizing the importance of diagnostic testing in responding to the pandemic.  He discusses the critical role of the US government in procuring and stockpiling  tests and providing them to areas experiencing hot spots and to schools, communities of high social vulnerability and other congregate settings.  In the second part of the talk Winslow describes how the CDC supported the care and resettlement in the US of more than 124,000 Afghan refugees who fled the country in August 2021 following the fall of Afghanistan to Taliban forces.  He also describes the CDC response and support of undocumented immigrants arriving at the Southwest Border.

About the Speaker: Dean Winslow, MD is Professor of Medicine with appointments in the Divisions of Hospital Medicine and Infectious Diseases and is a Senior Fellow (courtesy) at CISAC/Freeman Spogli Institute. He has served on the Stanford faculty since 1998 and served from 2003-2008 as Co-Director of Stanford's Infectious Diseases Fellowship Training Program. He was in private practice in Wilmington, Delaware where he started the state’s first multidisciplinary clinic for HIV patients in 1985. In 1988 he joined the DuPont Company where he worked both as a bench scientist on HIV drug resistance then later designed the clinical trials supporting FDA approval of efavirenz. In 1999 he became Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Visible Genetics Inc. and led the FDA clearance of the TRUGENE HIV-1 drug resistance test. Dr. Winslow joined the staff at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in 2003, where he served as Chief of the Division of AIDS Medicine and later as Chair of the Department of Medicine. In 2015 he was appointed Academic Physician-In-Chief at Stanford/ValleyCare and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine. He was a Resident Fellow in Robinson House 2013-2017 and was visiting faculty at Oxford University in 2017. He was Lead Physician for the US Antarctic Program of the National Science Foundation 2019-2020 based at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. In 2021 he took leave from Stanford to lead the US COVID-19 Testing and Diagnostic Working Group. He served as CDC Senior Advisor to Operation ALLIES WELCOME and Chief Medical Officer for the Southwest Border Migrant Health Task Force before returning to Stanford in July 2022.

Dr. Winslow is a Master of the American College of Physicians, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. He is the author of 87 papers. He is,a member of the IDSA Sepsis Task Force, and previously served as Chair of the Standards and Practice Guidelines Committee.

Colonel Winslow entered the Air National Guard in 1980 and was a Distinguished Graduate of the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine. He served as Commander of the 159th Medical Group 1992-1995 and was State Air Surgeon, Delaware Air National Guard 1995-2011. He served as ANG Assistant to the Commander, 59th Medical Wing, Joint Base San Antonio 2011-2014. Colonel Winslow deployed to the Middle East six times from 2003-2011 as a flight surgeon supporting combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Jan-April 2003 Colonel Winslow was the flight surgeon responsible for combat rescue operations from Tikrit to northern Iraq. In 2005 he coordinated military public health in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2006 Colonel Winslow served as an ER physician at the United States Air Force 447th EMEDS (combat hospital) in Baghdad and in 2008 he served as hospital commander during the Iraq surge. He is a 2007 graduate of Air War College. He served as an infectious disease consultant to the USAF Surgeon General. In 2017 Dr. Winslow was nominated by the President to serve as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. He has 1150 military flying hours including 431 combat hours and 263 combat sorties. He has extensive operational experience in fighter, tactical airlift, and combat rescue missions. He holds an FAA Airline Transport Pilot license.

Since 2006 Dr. Winslow has arranged medical care in the U.S. for 28 Iraqi children who have complicated medical conditions for which care is not available in Iraq. In 2015, Dr. Winslow and his wife, Dr. Julie Parsonnet, created The Eagle Fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which provides aid to middle eastern and central American refugees. In 2018 he co-founded Scrubs Addressing the Firearms Epidemic (SAFE), which unites health care professionals to address gun violence in the US as a public health issue and to advocate for education, research, and evidence-backed policy to reduce gun violence.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Hecker will discuss his new book, Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program, in which he describes how North Korea—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progressed from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of likely more than 50 such weapons today. He will also touch on how CISAC inspired his work on North Korea and what it was like in that environment to write the book. 

About the Speaker: Siegfried Hecker is professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and professor of practice in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University. He was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including serving as its fifth director from 1986 through 1997. He was at Stanford University for 17 years in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and CISAC, including serving as co-director from 2007 to 2012. Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea. Hecker is the editor of Doomed to Cooperate (2016), two volumes documenting the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation and Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program (2023) written with Elliot Serbin.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

The intensifying strategic competition between the United States and China has put substantial pressure on South Korea concerning several strategic issues. The U.S.-China rivalry is only likely to continue with the upcoming American presidential election in 2024.

As the South Korean government has recently tilted toward the United States, China wants South Korea to take a more balanced approach in its policies between the two countries. China is also expressing concern on matters of interest to it, such as the THAAD deployment, supply chain reset, and issues of the Taiwan Strait and the regional status of Xinjiang.

As Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin will argue, South Korean foreign policies should be based on its national interests and reflect its identity and the values its people share. Therefore, according to Shin, South Korea should not only make efforts to further strengthen the KORUS alliance for the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and the region, but to properly manage its relations with China.

Featured Speaker

Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin joins the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as Visiting Scholar and Payne Distinguished Fellow for the 2023 winter quarter. He previously served as Ambassador for the Republic of Korea to the People's Republic of China from 2008 to 2010, and currently serves as Chair Professor at the East Asia Institute at Dongseo University. While at Stanford, he will be conducting research on the strategic relationships between Korea, China, and the United States.

Discussant

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, nuclear dynamics, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she works as a strategic planner at INDOPACOM.

She has published widely, including in International Security, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Survival, and Asian Security. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member.

Moderator

Gi-Wook Shin is the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center; the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea; the founding director of the Korea Program; a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and a professor of sociology, all at Stanford University. As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, and international relations. 

Shin is the author/editor of more than twenty books and numerous articles. His recent books include South Korea's Democracy in Crisis (2022); The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security (2021); Demographics and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific (2021); and Shifting Gears in Innovation Policy from Asia (2020). His new research initiative examines potential benefits of talent flows in the Asia-Pacific region, where countries, cities, and corporations have competed with one another to enhance their stock of "brain power" by drawing on the skills of both their own citizens and those of foreigners.

This event is part of the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Lecture Series. 

The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. Their descendants endowed the annual lecture series at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and to increase support for informed international cooperation.

The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking, a broad, practical grasp of a given field, and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges.