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.
Spillover from the Iraqi Civil War
This is a joint Science, Technology, and Security Seminar and CISAC Directors' Seminar. Lunch will be served, and RSVP is required.
Daniel Byman is the director of Georgetown's Security Studies Program and the Center for Peace and Security Studies as well as an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service. He has served as a professional staff member with the 9/11 Commission and with the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Before joining the inquiry staff he was the research director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation. He is the author of Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism; Keeping the Peace: Lasting Solutions to Ethnic Conflict; and co-author of The Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might. He has also written widely on a range of topics related to terrorism, international security, and the Middle East.
CISAC Conference Room
The Wars on Three Fronts: Iraq, the Pentagon, and Main Street
Drell Lecture Recording: NA
Drell Lecture Transcript:
Speaker's Biography: Thom Shanker is the national security and foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. He joined the Times in 1997 and began covering the Pentagon in May 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks. Previously, Shanker was foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune. From 1992 to 1995, as the Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, he covered the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the departure of American, British, French, and Russian forces from Berlin; and emerging cases of nuclear smuggling in Central Europe.
Shanker spent two years in the master's degree program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, specializing in strategic studies and international law. He has written on foreign policy, military affairs, and the intelligence community for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and American Journalism Review.
Oak Lounge
Conventional and Dual Use Technology Export Control Legislation in the European Union and the United States: How Legislative Convergence Is Being Undermined by Administrative and Strategic Divergence
Noah Richmond (speaker) is a CISAC Zukerman Fellow and a Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation fellow. His research has focused on the structure and management of the U.S. officer corps, organizing the U.S. military for new domains of warfare including space and cyberspace, and ballistic missile defense. His current research focuses on international, supra-national, and national control regimes for dual-use technologies. Most recently he co-chaired the working group on new domains of warfare for the Beyond Goldwater-Nichols Study conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Richmond has previously consulted for the Institute for Defense Analyses, RAND, and Strategic Decisions Group. He received his BS in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MS in engineering-economic systems and operations research from Stanford, and a PhD in management science and engineering from Stanford. Richmond is currently a law student at Stanford Law School (class of 2008), where his studies focus on intellectual property and international trade.
David Elliott (respondent) was staff director for science and technology at the National Security Council (NCS) and then vice president at SAIC and SRI. At NCS his portfolio included export control matters, which included the international coordination of our policy. During his time at NCS, major emphases emerged on civilian nuclear issues after the Indian nuclear test and on computer technology as its importance became evident. At CISAC he has contributed to work in cyber security and information technology. Elliott received his BS in physics from Stanford University and both his MS and PhD in experimental high energy physics from the California Institute of Technology.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Committing to War: Political Exclusion and Indiscriminate Violence in Africa
Philip Roessler (speaker) is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC and in 2007 will be the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in comparative government at the University of Oxford. His PhD dissertation examines the effects of political authority on conflict initiation and escalation in Africa, with a focus on Sudan, where he conducted field research between March 2005 and April 2006. His article, "Donor-Induced Democratization and Privatization of State-Violence in Kenya and Rwanda," was published in Comparative Politics in January 2005 and his article (co-authored with Marc Morjé Howard), "Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes," appeared in the American Journal of Political Science in April 2006. Roessler is a PhD candidate in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland and he received his BA in political science from Indiana University.
Macartan Humphreys (respondent) is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting professor at CISAC. He is a research scholar at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute at Columbia and a member of the Millennium Development goals project poverty task force, where he works on conflict and development issues. Overall his research is on African political economy and formal political theory. His dissertation on the politics of factions developed game theoretic models of conflict and cooperation between internally divided groups. More recent research focuses on rebellions in West Africa, where he has undertaken field research in the Casamance, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Ongoing research now includes experimental work on ethnic politics, econometric work on natural resource conflicts, game theoretic work on ethnic politics and large N survey work of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Humphreys' work is motivated by concerns over the linkages between politics, conflict and human development. He received his PhD in government from Harvard in 2003 and his MPhil in economics from Oxford in 2000.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Rules of Engagement: The U.S. Military, Iraqi Civilians, and the Law of War
Colin Kahl is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses in international relations, international security, American foreign policy, civil and ethnic conflict, and terrorism. He will be joining the faculty in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in the fall of 2007. His current work focuses on U.S. military compliance with the Law of War in Iraq. His research on the topic has been published in Foreign Affairs ("How We Fight," November/December 2006) and International Security ("Rules of Engagement: Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq," forthcoming). His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in March 2006, and related articles have appeared in International Security and the Journal of International Affairs. From January 2005 to August 2006, Kahl was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow conducting research on Law of War issues at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he worked in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations. He has also been a consultant for the U.S. government's Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999. He received his BA in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993, and his PhD from Columbia University in 2000. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at Harvard University's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American studies).
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Sensors, Search and Seizure
A major component of the strategy to prevent attacks with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) by transnational terrorist groups requires the widespread utilization of chemical, biological and radiological detection systems. Whether or not one can actually deploy these sensors may well depend on the public perception of the sensor's invasion of their privacy and the court's interpretation of the sensors' challenge to the Constitution's search and seizure protections. However, if scientists and engineers designing new sensors take cognizance of the perspective taken by courts in the past, they will stand a much better chance of providing technical solutions that will balance the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties against the modern realities of terrorist threats. This seminar will discuss and solicit ideas on how legal interpretations of the fourth Amendment can be used to help design modern sensor systems.
Don Prosnitz is currently the deputy drector (programs) for nonproliferation, homeland and international security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is responsible for overseeing all of the directorate's technical programs. He received his BS from Yale University and his PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then spent two years as an assistant professor in the Engineering and Applied Science Department at Yale before joining Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as an experimental laser physicist. Over the next three decades, he conducted research on lasers, particle accelerators, high-power microwaves, free-electron lasers, and remote sensing, and managed the design, construction, and operation of numerous research facilities. In 1990, he was awarded the U.S. Particle Accelerator Award for Achievement in Accelerator Physics and Technology; in 2002, he was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has served on multiple technical panels, including a Defense Science Board study and various intelligence committees. He is currently a member of the National Academies of Science Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology. In 1996, Prosnitz was briefly detailed to the Department of Energy where he provided technical support to the Office of Nonproliferation and National Security. In 1999, Prosnitz was named the chief science and technology advisor for the Department of Justice (DOJ) by Attorney General Janet Reno. In this newly created position, he was responsible for coordinating technology policy among the DOJ's component agencies and with state and local law enforcement entities on science and technology projects and programs. He served on numerous interagency working groups and federal committees, including the National Science and Technology Council, the Data Management Improvement Act Task Force (immigration systems), and the National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee. He advised the attorney general and DOJ officials and component agencies, such as the FBI, DEA, and former INS (Immigration and Nationalization Service), on such technical matters as weapons of mass destruction, forensics, human subject protection, immunization policy, immigration policy, biometrics, border protection, and information technology. In 2003 he returned to LLNL where he promotes continuing education of the workforce with a special emphasis on the interaction of society and technology.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Feeding the World in the 21st Century: Exploring the Connections between Food Production, Health, Environmental Resources, and International Security
This project involves political scientists, economists, and medical researchers to address the question of whether hunger, poverty, disease and agricultural resource constraints foster civil conflict and international terrorism. Economists have elucidated the links between agricultural stagnation, poverty, and food insecurity, and political scientists have empirically analyzed the role of poverty in facilitating civil conflict.
Shorenstein APARC participates in the first Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum held in Seoul
Executive Summary
The first Korea - West Coast Strategic Forum held in Seoul on December 11-12, 2006, convened policymakers, scholars and regional experts to discuss the North Korean nuclear issue, the state of the U.S.-ROK alliance, and notions of a formalized mechanism for security cooperation in Northeast Asia. Participants engaged in lively and frank exchanges on these issues. Gi-Wook Shin, Daniel C. Sneider, Siegfried S. Hecker, and Kristin C. Burke represented the Freeman Spogli Institute.
Participants were concerned that North Korea's drive toward nuclear weapons has exposed disparate interests among the five parties committed to arresting this ambition, including differences in threat perception between the United States and South Korea. But they also believed that multilateral dialogue still offers the best possibility for resolving the DPRK nuclear issue through peaceful means. Participants argued that in the wake of the nuclear test, pressure and use of force should be discounted as viable options and "rollback" through negotiations should be pursued. Such an approach necessitates clearer articulation of North Korea's options, a new consensus on mutual priorities, hard work on sequencing, and a more developed vision for alternative policies should diplomacy fail.
The U.S.-ROK alliance has entered a new era characterized by new American security imperatives, such as nonproliferation and counterterrorism, as well as a new Korean policy of engagement toward the DPRK. These factors, coupled with domestic political challenges and an evolving regional security environment, call for serious, strategic discussions on the state of the alliance. Though the U.S. and the ROK have exhibited diverging threat perceptions of North Korea the - core of the strategic rationale for the alliance - the instructive precedent set by NATO demonstrates that alliances can survive redefinition of the primary security threat, though not the absence of a common threat.
Participants discussed the prospects for greater regional cooperation in Northeast Asia, including the possibility of converting the six-party talks into a new institutional mechanism for multilateral security cooperation. However, there are serious obstacles to deeper integration in the region, not least unresolved historical issues that still elicit passionate responses. But if understandings on these issues can be reached, a regional security organization could address critical traditional and non-traditional security issues and mitigate uncertainty about China's rise.
The full text of the report can be found at The First Korea-West Coast Strategic Forum.