About the Event: Authoritarian regimes have sought to broadcast their power and influence—and it often seems that there is a pattern of autocratic diffusion, the “Illiberal International.” The Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, has been the darling of the American Right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to fund and influence anti-democratic politics in Europe and elsewhere.  Yet such diffusion has often been limited—and this talk explores the political and institutional reasons why there are limits to such influence. 

About the Speaker: Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor in the Department of Political Science, the director of the Europe Center, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford. Her research focuses on religion and politics, authoritarian political parties and their successors, and the historical development of the state. She is the author of four books: Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Successor Parties; Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Development in Post-Communist Europe; Nations Under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Politics; and Sacred Foundations: The religious and medieval origins of the European State. She is the recipient of the Carnegie and Guggenheim Fellowships. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Nations and international organizations increasingly turned to sanctions as a coercive policy tool against other countries to influence their behavior without relying on the use of force. Sanctions are the most common nonviolent geopolitical tool, and their use is expanding with explosive frequency. However, decades of health research on sanctions plead for the cessation of this tool because of the widespread human suffering caused by certain types of sanctions.

Dr. Ruth Gibson considers sanctions as the equivalent of a chemotherapy drug––one that should be planned, titrated, and continually evaluated to determine if the treatment is having the intended consequence or killing off essential functioning for sustaining life.

The goal in this work is to improve human health, minimize humanitarian harm, and design systems for monitoring sanctions that are realistic for use by the United Nations and the main sanction-sending nation-states.

This talk presents the developments of Stanford Medicine’s work with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to develop an analytic system capable of assessing the potential and actual humanitarian effects of sanctions in different international settings. For the last three decades UN monitors and lawyers have called for the development of a universal system of agreed-upon metrics for human health. A team of scholars and doctors at Stanford Medicine is responsible for guiding the developments related to human health, specifically maternal and child health. There is an urgent need for a framework that would allow both sanctioning countries and international monitors to foresee and document the impacts of specific sanctions on human rights, including health, so that those impacts can be avoided or mitigated. Dr. Gibson will outline how we are designing the maternal and child health system of indictors for monitoring sanction regimes.

The goal of the question-and-answer period is to actively debate and brainstorm how to improve this work to balance preservation of human rights with the strategic goals of the US Department of State.

Dr. Gibson welcomes input from diverse communities and academic disciplines at Stanford and looks forward to the discussion.

About the Speaker: Ruth Gibson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford Medicine. She is cross appointed by courtesy as a postdoctoral trainee at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spoli Institute. She is supported by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, the most prestigious postdoctoral award given by the Government of Canada to future global leaders in medicine, engineering, and the humanities. Ruth spent ten years living abroad doing humanitarian and global health work in eight countries on five continents, focusing on fragile nations struggling with poverty, human rights abuses, and civil conflict. She then completed her PhD in Global Health and Strategic Studies at the University of British Columbia, where she was named a Killam Laureate, Canada’s highest honor for doctoral scholars. She is currently working with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to develop a universal system of monitoring to assess the impacts of unilateral sanctions on human rights. Ruth, Prof. Paul Wise, and Senior Associate Dean of Global Health Michele Barry are leading the maternal and child health component of this project. Ruth is co-PI on a SEED grant investigating the impact of humanitarian aid sanctions on maternal and child health. Ruth is also a research affiliate with the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, where she is assisting Dr. Daryn Reicherter with the preparation of expert reports on the mental health impacts of war crimes for the International Criminal Court. Her research is funded by the Center for Innovation in Global Health and the Maternal and Child Health Research Institute at Stanford Medicine.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: One of the most consistent critiques of the Anthropocene among humanities scholars has been that its putative Anthropos ignores difference to encompass all human beings universally in terms of their essential human nature. Trace the conceptual history of the term, however, and it quickly becomes clear that the Anthropos of the Anthropocene takes shape as not simply a sly return of Enlightenment Man (with all of his characteristic hierarchies and exclusions), but something far stranger. This talk works backwards from Paul Crutzen’s public introduction of the term in 2000 through the Earth System science of the 1980s and the systems ecology of the 1960s, to contend that the conceptual precursors of the Anthropocene arose in the crucible of the 1950s. It was there that the unprecedented possibility of ‘universal death’ by thermonuclear weapons fused with the new science of cybernetics to produce a paradigmatically distinct approach to conceiving human beings in their totality. Born under the shadow of its own extinction, the Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene does not seek to define what all human beings essentially are (as Enlightenment Man did), but to account for what it is that all human beings collectively do. Rather than claim that this is inherently better or worse, the talk concludes by arguing that this approach to human universality is categorically different, introducing new kinds of conceptual and political challenges that urgently warrant being treated on their own terms.

About the Speaker: Dan Zimmer is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC and the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, where he researches the challenges that anthropogenic existential threats pose for the foundations of Western political thought. He holds a PhD in political science from Cornell University.
 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Why do states pursue chemical and biological weapons (CBW), despite their limited strategic utility and their prohibition (during some time periods) under international law? Utilizing original quantitative data, I find that internal threats to a state’s governing regime, while of- ten neglected in theories of arming and weapons proliferation, play a significant role in driving states’ choices to pursue chemical and biological weapons. Regimes may pursue CBW in response to two types of domestic threats: coup risk, and the risk of domestic rebellion or civil conflict. In particular, I find that governing regimes facing increases in the risk of a coup may be more likely to initiate chemical and biological weapons programs, and that regimes experiencing domestic unrest may be more likely to begin pursuing chemical weapons. I also examine evidence for external security pathways motivating weapons pursuit, and find that proliferators treat biological weapons more like other ‘strategic weapons’ than they do chemical weapons. These findings have important implications for counterproliferation policy, deterrence, and our theoretical understanding of arming and arms racing.

About the Speaker: Miriam Barnum completed her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). Her research is focused on understanding the motivations and constraints that shape states’ arming choices. In her book project, she examines the role that internal security threats play in driving choices between nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons pursuit options. Other ongoing projects relate to arming choices more generally, international conflict, and nonproliferation and arms control, with a focus on applying computational measurement models to enhance our understanding of these substantive areas.

While pursuing her Ph.D., Miriam was a US-Asia Grand Strategy predoctoral fellow at USC's Korean Studies Institute, and Director of Data Science for the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab. Before coming to USC, she worked as a research assistant in the National Security Office at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: This book project is about the history, politics, and law of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal after World War II—the Asian counterpart to Nuremberg. From 1946 to 1948, the victorious Allies put on trial the senior leadership of Imperial Japan, including former prime ministers, generals, and admirals, for war crimes from Nanjing to Bataan. The project considers the Tokyo trial as a defining political event in the making of modern Asia, spanning the democratization of Japan, impending Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, decolonization in India and elsewhere, and the onset of the Cold War.

About the Speaker: Gary Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is the author of The Blood Telegram (Knopf), Freedom’s Battle (Knopf), and Stay the Hand of Vengeance (Princeton). The Blood Telegram was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won book awards from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, and other awards. He has written articles for Ethics, International Security, Philosophy and Public Affairs, The Yale Journal of International Law, and other journals. A former reporter for The Economist, he writes often for The New York Times.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.