Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Payne Distinguished Fellow Examines South Korea’s Strategic Path Amid U.S.-China Competition

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Michael Breger
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On April 26, 2023, in recognition of the 70th anniversary of the U.S.-Korea alliance, President Joe Biden will host President Yoon Suk Yeol for a State Visit to the United States. According to Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin, the fact that Yoon received the second such invitation of the Biden administration is a testimony to the centrality of the Korea-U.S. alliance to the peace and stability of the East Asian regions, especially at a time when the frayed U.S.-China relationship continues to degrade into a new Cold War, with a potential Taiwan contingency looming on the horizon. 

Shin, former South Korea's ambassador to China and former director general of the Asia Pacific Affairs Bureau at the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, is the Winter 2023 Payne Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a visiting scholar at APARC. He headlined this quarter’s Payne Lecture, speaking to an audience that gathered on March 1 for a timely discussion titled Sino-U.S. Relations and South Korea, co-hosted by APARC and FSI.

The Payne Lectureship at FSI, named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, aims to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community and advance international cooperation. The lectureship brings to Stanford internationally esteemed leaders from academia and the policy world who combine visionary thinking and a broad, practical grasp of their fields with the capacity to provide insights into pressing challenges of global concern. Throughout the 2022-23 academic year, the Payne Lectureship hosts experts from Asia who examine crucial questions in U.S.-China relations.

Ambassador Shin is uniquely qualified to offer insight into South Korea's response to the pressures created by the U.S.-China rivalry, said APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin, who chaired the event that included a discussion with Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro, an expert on Chinese military and Asia security.

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The strategic distrust and intensifying rivalry between the U.S. and China have put substantial pressure on South Korea, and South Korea's long-term policy to make a Korea-U.S. alliance compatible with its partnership with China is becoming more difficult.
Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin
Winter 2023 Payne Distinguished Fellow

China’s Dreams

Painting a picture of Chinese ambitions, Ambassador Shin enumerated China’s goals and the steps it has taken to achieve them. “The Chinese dream,” he said, “is to regain the colonial behavior of the Qing Dynasty, when China was a great power with about one-third of the global GDP.” To achieve this dream, China's leaders have pushed for its continued economic development while arousing patriotism and nationalism domestically. Through its military modernization campaign, China has rapidly shown its ambition to become the top-rated global military power by 2049, the centennial of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, he noted.

Ambassador Shin indicated that China has prepared for a long-term competition with the U.S. in the economic arena, as Xi Jinping introduced the dual circulation economic policy, which aims to reorient the country's economy by prioritizing domestic consumption while remaining open to international trade and investment. This policy, Shin argues, “is designed, in part, to make the [Chinese] economy less affected by external factors including the supply chain reset of the U.S.” As such, China has stressed the importance of innovation and has made massive investments in science and technology to reduce its reliance on Western economies. Moreover, China has promoted the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to expand its political and economic influence.

“China became the second largest economic power and began to show assertiveness in its foreign policy, particularly by emphasizing the safeguarding of Chinese interests, namely, sovereignty and territorial integrity, state security and development interest,” stated Shin. To achieve these goals, “Chinese diplomats have voiced their arguments in an abrasive style, ‘Wolf Warrior diplomacy’ as it is called by Westerners.” This form of proactive engagement with the rest of the world has resulted in an intensifying strategic competition between the U.S. and China, which has made it increasingly difficult for South Korea to maintain simultaneous ties with both great powers.

No Longer on the Fence

Shin noted that “The strategic distrust and intensifying rivalry between the U.S. and China have put substantial pressure on South Korea…and South Korea's long-term policy to make a Korea-U.S. alliance compatible with its partnership with China is becoming more difficult.” In recent years, South Korea has moved even closer to the U.S.

The joint communique issued when President Moon Jae-in visited Washington two years ago, already showed South Korea’s tilt toward the U.S. At the time, heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula by the North Korean nuclear and missile provocation necessitated the alliance. Now, an ascendant China, “together with the lessons of Ukraine, have made South Korean people pay close attention to the importance of the Korea-U.S. alliance,” stated Shin, noting that both nations openly stress the importance of freedom, democracy, and rule-based order. South Korea has become enthusiastic about tripartite cooperation among South Korea, the U.S., and Japan, in tune with American policies. 

On the other hand, China warned South Korea to respect China's core interests while expressing its concerns on several strategic issues. Shin stated that “China began to demand the Yoon government to continue the three policy positions of the previous government, namely, no more deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), no participation in the American missile defense system, and no military alliance among Korea, Japan, and the U.S.” However, the current Foreign Minister Park Jin made it clear to the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang that the policy positions of the previous government do not bind the new government, Shin indicated.
 

The Taiwan Contingency

China also demands that South Korea not interfere in the Taiwan issue, arguing that Taiwan is a part of China, and the Taiwan Strait is part of China's internal affairs. When the joint communique after the moon-Biden summit two years ago touched on the Taiwan Strait for the first time, “the Chinese spokesperson warned South Korea not to play with fire,” said Shin. The Taiwan Strait is also regarded as an important sea transportation lane for South Korean goods and energy supply. “It is in South Korea's interest to maintain the status quo in the Taiwan Strait,” he said.
Amb. Jung-Seung Shin at the Payne Lecture
Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin, the Winter 2023 Payne Distinguished Fellow, offers his insights into the dynamics of the trilateral U.S.-China-South Korea relationship.

Shin indicated the precarious nature of the contingency, stating, “South Korea has no intention of challenging the One China claim. However, the peace and stability of Taiwan Strait are also very important for South Korea, as the security situation of the Taiwan Strait is connected to the Korean peninsula.” Indeed, a military collision in the Taiwan Strait would be impossible to contain locally. “The U.S. and Japan are supposed to immediately help Taiwan to repel China’s military attack, and American bases are located in South Korea and Japan, including Okinawa,” he said.

Therefore, military conflict in the Taiwan Strait is likely to escalate to Northeast Asia, and a certain portion of American forces in South Korea could move to the Taiwan Strait in the contingency according to the strategic flexibility of forces, “which might induce North Korea's misjudgment to invade South Korea,” Shin predicted.
 

Looking to National Identity

According to Shin, South Korea’s foreign policies should be based on its national interests and reflect its identity and the values its people share. Therefore, South Korea should not only make efforts to further strengthen the KORUS alliance for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and the region, but to properly manage its relations with China, Shin indicated. “Under these situations, the best scenario for South Korea would be that there is no strategic rivalry between the U.S. and China, but rather proactive cooperation between them…But nobody in this room thinks it's realistic,” he said.
South Korea needs to have more consistent foreign policies based on its national interest in values shared by most South Koreans, and distance itself from polarized party politics.
Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin
Winter 2023 Payne Distinguished Fellow
Recognizing the difficulty in crafting a unified front in a time of deep political divides, Shin argued that “South Korea needs to have more consistent foreign policies based on its national interest in values shared by most South Koreans, and distance itself from polarized party politics. South Korean national interest is supposed to reflect its national identity. For example, South Korea is relatively small in the size of the land and population compared with neighboring countries.”
 
In addition to the geostrategic limitations of the nation, the Korean peninsula remains divided, and North Korea still holds weapons of mass destruction, representing a continual existential threat. “South Korea has been faced with constant challenges in the security and economic environments, yet the most important thing among others is that South Korea should further enhance its economic strengths, technological progress, and cultural power. South Korea is a democratic country with a market economy and it has been developed to the level of the Western countries, so there is a growing demand for more contribution to regional and global issues, particularly with human security in mind,” Shin stated.
 
However, Shin believes South Korea’s aims should not solely be limited to growth and alignment with the U.S., arguing that “Relations with China should be properly managed. China's cooperation is also needed for eventual peace and stability on the Korean peninsula…China is still the place with a considerable potential for South Korean trade and investment.”
 

The Cost of Deterrence

In her comments, Oriana Skylar Mastro agreed with Shin’s proposals and went on to suggest that it is in the best interest of all countries in the region to work together to try to enhance deterrence. In Mastro’s view, China is much more fearful of horizontal escalation, the involvement of other countries, than they are of vertical escalation, or increased violence with the U.S. While the South Korean role might not be a direct involvement, or fighting China, freeing up U.S. resources, or supporting the U.S. in more defensive or indirect roles could significantly tilt the balance such that China decides the use of force is not in its best interests.
 
Mastro described an ideal situation in which the U.S. and South Korea work together to enhance deterrence to the region, noting that “Deterrence is very costly, and it's very risky business for all the reasons that the professor laid out about the economic costs and peacetime potential downsides geopolitically of upsetting China or presenting a greater threat to China. But my own view is that while deterrence is difficult and costly, obviously war is even worse.”
 
Proceeding to examine the nature of the U.S.-South Korea alliance, Mastro proposed a broadening of the public conception of how alliances can work, stating that, “I like to think about how the two countries can work together to enhance South Korea's independent capacity and military capacity and ways that the U.S. and South Korea can fight together that aren't offensive in orientation.” Yet, the North Korea contingency remains an important and dangerous prospect. Mastro identified the persistent threat on South Korea’s border, stating that, “If U.S. forces get pulled off the peninsula, that could undermine deterrence vis-a-vis North Korea.”
 

Preventing Overextension

Overextension represents one of the largest limits on U.S. power projection. According to Mastro, one of the primary reasons that the Biden administration has not been talking about North Korea significantly, is the fact that the U.S. cannot fight a war on the Korean Peninsula and compete effectively with China.

The question is whether the U.S. could count on South Korea for some critical supplies during a conflict that could reduce the U.S. logistical burden.
Oriana Skylar Mastro
Center Fellow

Thus, Mastro proposes that the South Koreans play a greater role in their defense, a topic that comes up with NATO partners and allies in Europe as well. More specifically, Mastro suggests that the U.S. transfer operational command to South Korean forces, and that the South Korean military should allow the U.S. to practice greater strategic flexibility, to use its forces on the Korean Peninsula for operations or contingencies that are off the peninsula. Up until this point, that permission has been denied, but Mastro contends that it would be useful and could enhance deterrence. 

“If the South Koreans, along with their statements about wanting a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, also explicitly allowed for that strategic flexibility to take place to say that they understand that the role of U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula is primarily to deter and defend South Korea against North Korea, that could also play a potential role in wider contingencies,” she said.

Furthermore, Mastro believes that South Korea must play a greater role in the production and provision of certain types of munitions. “This is an area where the U.S. has struggled with its own manufacturing base that is considering licensing production and potentially doing it elsewhere. So the question is whether the U.S. could count on South Korea for some critical supplies during a conflict that could reduce the U.S. logistical burden,” she speculated.

South Korea is a small country, and it has limited resources, but it also has the second-largest reserve force and paramilitary force in the world, and the eighth-largest active duty force in the world. According to Mastro, “The South Korean military is technically 20 times larger than that of Japan's…it has punched above its own weight, like the Australian military has.”

It remains to be seen whether the U.S.-South Korea alliance will need to be tested in the coming years, but tensions with China will likely continue to define the two nation’s foreign policies. A potential Taiwan contingency remains one of the largest looming threats to the status quo and the most probable pathway to regional escalation, which, in Shin’s view, could draw North Korea and its nuclear arsenal into the fold.

The Payne Lectureship will return in the spring quarter, continuing with the theme of Asian perspectives on the U.S.-China relationship. We will be joined by Kokubun Ryosei, professor emeritus at Keio University and adjunct adviser at the Fujitsu Future Studies Center.

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Caught in the Middle: How Asian Nations Are Navigating the U.S.-China Competition

This fall, APARC brought together scholars and policy experts to examine the security competition that has come to define an era from the perspectives of Asian nations.
Caught in the Middle: How Asian Nations Are Navigating the U.S.-China Competition
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Gi-Wook Shin, Amb. Jung-Seung Shin, and Oriana Skylar Mastro at the Winter Payne Lecture
(L to R) Gi-Wook Shin, Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin, Oriana Skylar Mastro. | Mike Breger
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Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin, the Winter 2023 Payne Distinguished Fellow, offered insights into the dynamics of the trilateral U.S.-China-South Korea relationship, the impacts of the great power competition between the United States and China on South Korea, and the prospects for enhanced Korea-U.S. collaboration.

The Market for Ayatollahs

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David Patel seminar

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.

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

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David Patel
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Contesting Pluralism(s): A New Key to (Turkey's) Politics

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Nora Fisher-Onar seminar

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.

Ayça Alemdaroğlu
Ayça Alemdaroğlu

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Nora Fisher-Onar
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The Baker Hypothesis

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Peter Henry seminar

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.

Didi Kuo
Didi Kuo

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

Peter Blair Henry

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Dean Emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Peter served as Dean from January 2010 through December 2017 and doubled the school’s average annual fundraising. Formerly the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, from 2001–2006 Peter’s research was funded by an NSF CAREER Award, and he 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).

A Vice Chair of the Boards of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Economic Club of New York, Peter also serves on the Boards of Citigroup and Nike. In 2015, he received the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, and in 2016 he was honored as one of the Carnegie Foundation’s Great Immigrants.

With financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Peter leads the PhD Excellence Initiative, a predoctoral fellowship program in economics that identifies high-achieving students with the deepest commitment to economic research and prepares them for the rigors of pursuing a PhD in the field. For his leadership of the PhD Excellence Initiative, Peter received the 2022 Impactful Mentoring Award from the American Economic Association. Peter received his PhD in economics from MIT and Bachelor’s degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a reserve wide receiver on the football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam dunk competition.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. He lives in Stanford and Düsseldorf with his wife and four sons.

Class of 1984 Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Dean Emeritus, New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business
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Israeli Democracy at 75: Remarkable and Vulnerable?

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Amichai Magen seminar

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.

Didi Kuo
Didi Kuo

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

Amichai Magen

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Director, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program, CDDRL
Senior Research Scholar, CDDRL
Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies, FSI (2022-2025)
W. Glenn Campbell National Fellow, Hoover Institution (2008-2009)
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar, 2008-2009
CDDRL Predoctoral Fellow, 2004-2008
amichai_magen.jpg

Amichai Magen is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the founding director of the center's Jan Koum Israel Studies Program. Previously, he served as the visiting fellow in Israel Studies at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, 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, Israel. His research and teaching interests address democracy, the rule of law, liberal orders, risk and political violence, as well as Israeli politics and policy.

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, and was the W. Glenn Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2008-9). In 2016, he was named a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, an award that recognizes outstanding thought leaders around the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he served as principal investigator in two European Union Horizon 2020 research consortia, EU-LISTCO and RECONNECT. Amichai Magen served on the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and is a Board Member of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) and the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR).

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Stanford Existential Risks Conference

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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.

Seminars

Kate Tyminska

Encina Hall, C125H
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

650.721.3009
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Kateryna Tyminska is a former Ukrainian diplomat with wide experience in international affairs. She obtained her B.A. and M.A. degrees in International Relations and her Ph.D. Degree in Political Science from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine).

In 2008, Kateryna became the first Ukrainian legislative fellow to participate in the US Government-sponsored Legislative Education and Practice Program, serving with the Office of the Senate President of the Maine State Legislature. She also volunteered at Bangor Office for US Congressman Mike Michaud (D-ME). Upon finishing her fellowship, Kateryna wrote a book on US Federalism and presented it to Georgian, Russian, Turkish and Ukrainian local and state administrations, governmental agencies, and ministries. That legislative background was applied during Kateryna’s work as Legislative Fellows Program coordinator at American Councils for International Education in Kyiv, Ukraine and Washington, DC, USA.

For almost 10 years, Kateryna worked (part-time) as a Program Facilitator for the Open World Leadership Program under the US Library of Congress on professional exchange programs in the field of rule of law, human rights, and state and local legislatures.

From 2013-2016, Kateryna worked as Political Affairs Officer at Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry and served as an OSCE Task Force member. She contributed to the establishment of a platform monitoring the human rights situation in Russia’s occupied territories in Ukraine – the Crimean peninsula and Donbas.

From 2016-2020 she served as Press and Cultural Affairs Officer at the Embassy of Ukraine in Sweden. During that period, she also served for three years as elected Chairwoman of the Association of Diplomats in Stockholm.

In 2018 she was a Country rapporteur at the Swedish High-Level Conference on ‘Women.Peace.Security’ under the auspices of the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, Gen. Mikael Byden.

In 2020-2021 she received the Viktor Frankl academic fellowship at Paideia - The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Europe (Stockholm, Sweden) and fostered international dialogue on combatting religious intolerance and hate crimes.

Kateryna’s international exchange experience includes studies at Wroclaw Institute of International Relations and Torun Mikolaj Kopiernik Institute of International Relations (both in Poland), as well as training programs with the OSCE Summer Academy in Stadtschlaining (Austria), Strategic Communications in Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), and a Senior Policy Advisor Course at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm (Sweden).

In addition to being a native speaker of Ukrainian, she is fluent in English, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish, with intermediate command of Hebrew and Italian and basic levels of French and Turkish.

Israel Studies Program Manager, FSI
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CESTA Seminar Series | Simone Abbiati: Digital Sorrow: IRA Terrorism in fiction through the lens of Computational Literary Studies

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Simone Abbiati event

 

In this talk, Abbiati will explore how contemporary novels that depict the pain of IRA terrorism represent the perspective of victims. The talk will use computational methods to investigate the structural representation of pain in literary works dealing with "The Troubles", to then consider the emotional impact of using these methods to study politically engaged fiction. By analyzing the aesthetic experience of reading literature having it processed by algorithms, the presentation aims to shed light on the impact of computational literary analysis on the reader's empathetic response.

The presentation will include lunch and take place at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis in Wallenberg 433A. A Zoom link is available upon request from Center Manager, Jonathan Clark (jclark93@stanford.edu).

 

 

Simone Abbiati is a third-year PhD student in Transcultural studies in the humanities at University of Bergamo. His work relates to the hermeneutic rethinking of DH methodologies regarding fictional space, and he is particularly interested in combining text mining and digital cartography to reflect on politically debated spaces in literature. He is currently working on the British-Irish border and the Basque Country, with the aim of identifying how literature mirrored different border conceptions such as complex territorialization processes and terrorism.

Sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, co-sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and The Europe Center.

Encina Hall 2nd floor, William J. Perry Conference Room

Simone Abbiati, University of Bergamo
Seminars

Directing US COVID-19 Testing and Caring for Afghan Refugees and Unaccompanied Children at the Border | Dean Winslow

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Sponsored by CISAC and Stanford Health Policy

Seminar Recording

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.

William J. Perry Conference Room

Dean Winslow
Seminars

Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program | Siegfried Hecker

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Seminar Recording

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.

William J. Perry Conference Room

Siegfried Hecker
Seminars
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