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.

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For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

                                                                                  


About the Event: The war that Russia inflicted on Ukraine is now well into its third month, with little sign the Kremlin has given up on its hope of achieving a victory on the battlefield.  Ukraine has impressed the world with the determination and tenacity of its resistance to the Russian invasion.  Vitaliy Sych, a long-time Kyiv-based journalist, will share his perspective on how the Ukrainian government, military and people are holding up in the face of Russia’s aggression.  

About the Speaker: Vitaliy Sych launched his career as a journalist with the Kyiv Post, Ukraine’s English-language newspaper in 1997, becoming business editor, then nation editor in 2000.  He later moved to the Korrespondent weekly magazine, helping to build it into one of the most respected media outlets in Ukraine.  He and a large part of the editorial team left Korrespondent in 2013 when a new owner imposed a stifling editorial policy, and they founded NV, a new weekly magazine that quickly earned a reputation for reliable and accurate reporting.  In addition to the magazine, NV now manages a news site and talk radio. 

Virtual 

Vitaliy Sych
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J. Luis Rodriguez
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Abstract

Why did Latin American states exclude a prohibition on maritime nuclear transit from their regional nuclear weapon-free zone (NWFZ)? Latin American countries and nuclear powers shared common anxieties about the dangers of the nuclear arms race in the early 1960s. Thus, they decided to craft a regional nuclear non-proliferation mechanism. Latin American states favoured limiting maritime nuclear transit as part of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco. However, they disagreed on defining transit and the zone of application of a ban, and they faced US opposition. This article identifies issue bracketing as a negotiating tactic Latin America used to ensure a successful treaty codification. It argues that Latin American states bracketed the maritime nuclear transit issue out of the NWFZ discussions and onto the agenda of the negotiations establishing ocean governance rules in the 1970s. The Latin American construction of a NWFZ questions assumptions in international law and nuclear politics studies about the agency of the global South in the global nuclear order. Latin American concessions in Tlatelolco were not impositions from nuclear powers. Their compromises were strategic decisions that helped them promote their governance preferences.

Read the rest at International Affairs

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Guided-missile destroyer USS Higgins (DDG 76) pulls alongside nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68 United States Navy
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Why did Latin American states exclude a prohibition on maritime nuclear transit from their regional nuclear weapon-free zone (NWFZ)?

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For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Arzan Tarapore
Seminars
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For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Frances Butcher
Sigrid Lupieri
Seminars
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For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Karen Miller
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“There’s a lot of planning and thinking going on behind the scenes,” Sagan said.

Read the rest at the Financial Times

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Despite sabre-rattling US and allies believe deploying such weapons would be too risky for Moscow

Audio Transcript of "Catalonia: A European Fight for Democracy."
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In the past five years, the Catalan independence movement has fought in courts and tribunals throughout Europe to confront impositions and restrictions from Spain. Following the referendum in 2017, Spain implemented massive surveillance programs in an effort to defeat the movement for Catalan independence. But the will of the Catalans for independence is apparent in the ongoing legal battles.

A light lunch will be provided.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 12, 2022.

Organized by Professor Joan Ramon Resina, Director of the Iberian Studies Program at The Europe Center.

Gonzalo Boye is a European lawyer working on several cases related to the defence of human and civil rights. He has written several books about his legal work and experiences with high profile clients.
Gonzalo Boye
Gonzalo Boye, lawyer and author
Gonzalo Boye, lawyer and author
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headshots of Kate Klonick and Nate Persily on a blue background with text that reads Big Speech, May 10ths 12-1 pacific

Join us on Tuesday, May 10 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “Big Speech” featuring Kate Klonick of St. John’s University Law School, in conversation with Nate Persily of the Cyber Policy Center. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

About the Seminar:

Technology companies seem omnipotent, omnipresent, and without accountability for their harms to society. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of Big Speech—the firms who control and profit from large scale user-generated content platforms. With reform through direct regulation likely foreclosed by the First Amendment, recent intervention has focused instead on breaking up these platforms under antitrust law. These proposals tap into both the pragmatic and emotional frustration around the power of private firms over freedom of expression and the public sphere. But while break up might be valuable in other areas of big tech, its effect on Big Speech is less certain.

Will breaking up Big Speech make individual user experience and the digital public sphere better or worse? Join us for insight on the nature of Big Speech and the challenges of reform.

About the Speakers:

Kate Klonick is an Associate Professor at St. John's University Law School, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her writing on online speech, freedom of expression, and private governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, theWashington Post and numerous other publications.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.

 

Nathaniel Persily
Kate Klonick
Seminars
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For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

REGISTRATION

(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)

                                                                                           

About the Event: As constitutional democracies in the United States and around the world struggle to cope with a rising wave of authoritarian challenges, many pro-democracy scholars and advocates in the United States have looked to law reform as a means of bolstering substantive and structural checks on executive power - from anti-corruption measures to limits on the President’s ability to invoke emergency authorities or deploy military force. But these reform efforts arise against a wholly unsettled debate about the function and effectiveness of existing institutional and legal checks, many of which proved deeply vulnerable to evasion during the presidency of Donald Trump.  Using the example of domestic and international laws designed to regulate presidential recourse to military force, Pearlstein will discuss her findings on the operation of existing legal constraints inside the executive branch, and suggest broader lessons for calibrating our understanding of law’s ability to constrain the impulses of authoritarian leaders.

About the Speaker: Deborah Pearlstein is Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Co-Director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.  Her work on national security and structural constraints on state power has been the subject of repeated testimony before Congress from war powers to executive branch oversight, and she today serves on the U.S. State Department Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, an expert board that helps ensure the timely declassification and publication of government records surrounding major events in U.S. foreign policy. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Professor Pearlstein clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, then for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before embarking on a career in law, Pearlstein served in the White House from 1993 to 1995 as a Senior Editor and Speechwriter for President Clinton.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Deborah Pearlstein
Seminars
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Text on blue background showing speaker headshots for bridging the gap event

Join us on Tuesday, May 24 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “Bridging the Cybersecurity Data Gap with Privacy Protected Data Sharing” featuring Taylor Reynolds of MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative, Megan Stifel of the Institute for Security and Technology, and Klara JordanChief Public Policy Officer of the Cyber Peace Institute, in conversation with Kelly Born of the Hewlett Foundation. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

About the Seminar:

Cyber attacks are increasing over time and useful insights into the causes and impact of successful attacks could help all organizations better understand the harm caused by such incidents, and improve their defenses. However, organizations currently have little incentive to report attempted or successful attacks if sharing such sensitive information could invite regulatory scrutiny, create reputational harm for the company, or provide an advantage to their competitors. The result is an environment where attacks happen on a regular basis, but collectively we learn very little from them. Today, neither the public nor policy makers fully understand the impact and risks of cyber-attacks - a gap that needs to be addressed to inform policy making, resiliency measures, and individual empowerment to seek redress.  Join Taylor Reynolds of MIT, Klara Jordan of the Cyber Peace Institute, and Megan Stifel of the Institute for Security and Technology, in conversation with Kelly Born of the Hewlett Foundation, to explore the problems posed by underreporting, the promise of new “privacy enhancing technologies” and the real-world challenges of deploying these technologies at scale. 

About the Speakers:

Taylor Reynolds is the research director of MIT's Internet Policy Research Initiative (IPRI) which collaborates with policymakers and technologists to improve the trustworthiness and effectiveness of interconnected digital systems like the Internet. Taylor's current research focuses on three areas: cyber security, cyber risk and the future of data. Taylor was previously a senior economist at the OECD and led the organization’s Information Economy Unit covering policy issues such as the role of information and communication technologies in the economy, digital content, the economic impacts of the Internet and green ICTs. His previous work at the OECD concentrated on telecommunication and broadcast markets with a particular focus on broadband.Before joining the OECD, Taylor worked at the International Telecommunication Union, the World Bank and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (United States). Taylor has an MBA from MIT and a Ph.D. in Economics from American University in Washington, DC.

Megan Stifel is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Institute for Security and Technology, where she also leads the organization’s cyber-related work. Megan previously served as Global Policy Officer at the Global Cyber Alliance and as the Cybersecurity Policy Director at Public Knowledge. She is a Visiting Fellow at the National Security Institute. Megan previously served as a Director for International Cyber Policy at the National Security Council. Prior to the NSC, Ms. Stifel served in the U.S. Department of Justice as Director for Cyber Policy in the National Security Division and as counsel in the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. Before law school, Ms. Stifel worked for the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She received a Juris Doctorate from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame.

Klara Jordan is Chief Public Policy Officer of the Cyber Peace Institute. Prior to that, Klara was the Director for Government Affairs and Public Policy for the UK at BlackBerry and the Executive Director for the EU and Africa at the Global Cyber Alliance. She also served as the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council think tank, and worked in the policy and privacy division of FireEye. Her background also includes work on international law issues at the American Society of International Law and at NATO’s Allied Command Transformation.

Kelly Born (moderator) is the Director of the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She leads a ten-year, $130 million grantmaking effort that aims to build a more robust cybersecurity field and improve policymaking. Previously, Kelly was executive director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Prior to that, she was a Program Officer for the Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, an 8-year, $150 million portfolio focused on improving U.S. democracy. Kelly oversaw Madison’s grantmaking on campaigns and elections, and digital disinformation.

Seminars
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