* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/Ot8lMxDSb34

About the Event: This paper addresses a single question: What explains the lack of civil war recurrence in El Salvador since the 1992 Chapultepec Accords? This lack of recurrence presents a unique puzzle given the fact that the civil war’s underlying causes remain unresolved. A well-established body of scholarship has identified a host of variables critical in explaining civil war recurrence, but much less ink has been spilled to explain non-recurrence. As such, I examine the factors identified in scholarship to be correlated with civil war recurrence to determine what they might tell us about civil war non-recurrence. I argue that the civil war non-recurrence in El Salvador rests not only on the durability of the agreement’s coercive/military and political provisions but also on the rebel group’s organizational design. To test this argument, I process trace along the recurrence variables and find support for my argument.   

About the Speaker: Meg K. Guliford is a Penn Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in residence at Perry World House. Her broad research agenda reflects an interest in political violence, conflict processes, and U.S. foreign policy. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Eisenhower Institute. Guliford’s career in the federal government began as a Presidential Management Fellow for the U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters and has included a civilian deployment to Iraq and work for the Institute for Defense Analyses and the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Guliford will receive her Ph.D. in International Relations from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She received her M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the Communist Party of China (CCP) has been vexed by a simple question: What is it fighting for? As the country began to adopt market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, CCP theorists were forced into contortions providing ideological justifications for policies that appeared overtly capitalist. Deng Xiaoping’s concept of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” came to be seen as a theoretical fig leaf rather than a description of an egalitarian economic system, and by the 2000s, a consensus emerged that the CCP had completely abandoned any pretense of pursuing the Marxist vision it purported to hold. With the rise of Xi Jinping, however, the Party talks with renewed vigor about Marxism-Leninism and the goal of achieving actual, existing socialism. Has the CCP re-discovered communism?  In this talk, CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies Jude Blanchette will discuss the abandoned and existing legacies of Mao Zedong, Marxism-Leninism, and the CCP’s vision of socialism.
 

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Social media and digital technologies have come under fire for their contribution to the development of the groups that ultimately stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Following the insurrection attempt, Facebook, Twitter, Google and other major platforms have banned or suspended President Trump’s accounts. Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores, while Amazon removed the site from its cloud hosting service, putting an indefinite end to Parler’s reach. This panel will discuss the role of social media during the Trump presidency, including the role of platform policies in fomenting or responding to the recent violence, the benefits and risks posed by steps subsequently taken, and what this means for the future of speech online.

Panelists include:

• Nate Persily, faculty co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, director of the Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Professor at Stanford Law School
• Daphne Keller, Director of the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Platform Regulation
• Alex Stamos, Director of the Cyber Policy Center’s Internet Observatory
• Renee DiResta, Research Manager at the Cyber Policy Center’s Internet Observatory
• Moderated by Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
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As US-China competition intensifies, experts debate the degree to which the current strategic environment resembles that of the Cold War. Those that argue against the analogy often highlight how China is deeply integrated into the US-led world order. They also point out that, while tense, US-China relations have not turned overtly adversarial. But there is another, less optimistic reason the comparison is unhelpful: deterring and defeating Chinese aggression is harder now than it was against the Soviet Union. In this talk, Dr. Mastro analyzes how technology, geography, relative resources and the alliance system complicate U.S. efforts to enhance the credibility of its deterrence posture and, in a crisis, form any sort of coalition.

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Within FSI, she works primarily in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) as well. She is also a fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an inaugural Wilson Center China Fellow.

Mastro is an international security expert with a focus on Chinese military and security policy issues, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. Her research addresses critical questions at the intersection of interstate conflict, great power relations, and the challenge of rising powers. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Survival, and Asian Security, and is the author of The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019).

She also continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she works as a Strategic Planner at INDOPACOM. Prior to her appointment at Stanford in August 2020, Mastro was an assistant professor of security studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

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This event is being held virtually via Zoom. Please register for the webinar via the following link: https://bit.ly/3nNdqhW

With President Biden’s inauguration, a new era of US-Japan relations starts on January 20. Now that the cozy personal relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Abe is in the rearview mirror, what can we expect in the Biden-Suga era? While the Biden administration is widely expected to drop Trump’s America First foreign policy and return to multilateralism and alliance-based diplomacy, its foreign policy priorities in the Asia-Pacific are still largely unknown. What role will the US-Japan alliance play in the new geo-political landscape in the region, and how would it handle the growing influence of China and build partnerships with other players in the region? This panel, featuring a leading expert on US politics and US-Japan relations, Fumiaki Kubo (University of Tokyo), and a rising star in the Liberal Democratic Party and an alum of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rui Matsukawa (House of Councilors), examines these questions, moderated by the Director of APARC Japan Program, Kiyoteru Tsutsui.

SPEAKERS

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Fumiaki Kubo has been the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of American Government and History at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, the University of Tokyo since 2003. He is affiliated with the Nakasone Peace Institute as the Executive Research Director, the Japan Institute for International Affairs as a Senior Adjunct Fellow, the 21^st Century Public Policy Institute as the Director of the US Studies Project, as well as with the Tokyo Foundation as a Senior Research Scholar. He studied at Cornell University in 1984-1986, at the Johns Hopkins University in 1991-1993, and at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland in 1998-99. He was also an Invited Professor at SciencesPo in Paris in the spring of 2009, and a Japan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2014. Kubo received his B.A. in 1979 and Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Tokyo. He is the author of many books which include: Modern American Politics (with Hitoshi Abe), Ideology and Foreign Policy After Iraq in the United States ( editor ), A Study on the Infrastructure of American Politics( editor ). In 1989, he received the Sakurada-Kai Gold Award for the Study of Politics and the Keio Gijuku Award. Kubo was the President of the Japanese Association for American Studies from 2016 to 2018.

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Rui Matsukawa is a Member of the House of Councilors (Liberal Democratic Party), and her current responsibilities include Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Defense, Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Cabinet Office. She graduated from the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Law and earned an MS in Foreign Service from Georgetown. She joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1993, where she won the Southern Bluefin Tuna Case at the International Court of Justice, negotiated free trade agreements with Thailand, Philippines, and other countries, and worked on the negotiations for disarmament as a first Secretary of the Japan Delegation to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. She was in charge of analysis of China and the Korean Peninsula in the Intelligence and Analysis Service. She also promoted cooperation between Japan, China, and South Korea as Counsellor of the Embassy of Japan in Korea. In 2014, Ms. Matsukawa established WAW! (World Assembly for Women) to promote women’s empowerment and gender mainstreaming as the first Director of the Gender Mainstreaming Division in the Foreign Policy Bureau. In 2016, she left MOFA, and was elected to represent Osaka in the House of Councilors.

MODERATOR 

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Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he is also Director of the Japan Program, a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Professor of Sociology. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2021). 

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/JqN4Ga4DVss

About the Event: 

Much of the imagery and remote sensing analysis in the Open Source Community pertains to North Korea’s nuclear weapons pathway and military capability. However, many questions remain regarding economic and agricultural health in a nation known for denial of access to outside observation. But by applying emerging analytical and processing technology of satellite imagery and data, we can address the challenge of examining economic and environmental patterns in the North.

Machine Learning technology has been used to analyze rudimentary objects like roads or buildings on satellite imagery for years, but has yet to be successfully employed to better understand nuanced patterns of life. In our partnership with the analytics company Orbital Insight, we have undertaken a project of counting thousands of objects in satellite images taken over the past five years to uncover North Korea’s trade relationship with China.

This project includes counting number of trucks at each side of the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge as a measure of trade activity between North Korea and China. By applying artificial intelligence to more than 300 satellite images, we observed fluctuations of truck counts, which peak during the month of November. A significant drop in the truck counts during the year of 2020 is noticed as a result of restricted traffic from the global pandemic, although as much as 30 trucks were observed in the month of June on both sides of the border. The project demonstrates the utilities of machine learning in analyzing emerging datasets. Careful monitoring of trade between the two states can aid in better understanding the China-North Korea economic relationship and how it evolves over time.

CISAC is also partnering with international organizations and geospatial systems specialists to apply data derived from public space mapping systems to better understand macro-environmental, agricultural, and water security trends over the past twenty years in North Korea. For decades, scientists of every discipline have been analyzing remotely-sensed images and data sets to extract otherwise-imperceptible insight pertaining to broad aspects of environmental health including coastal erosion, deforestation, land subsidence, and global thermal changes. But because of a post-war technology vacuum and broadly-applied sanctions against space-derived information, North Korea has never had access to this data or the advanced software and data storage architecture necessary to support it. The potential for direct collaboration with the North on environmental analysis may enhance North Korea’s ability to mitigate its own agricultural risk and potentially facilitate informal international collaboration.

About the Speaker: Allison Puccioni has been an imagery analyst for over 25 years, working within the military, tech, media, and academic communities. After honorably serving in the US Army as an Imagery Analyst from 1991 - 1997, Allison continued the tradecraft as a civilian augmentee to US and NATO operations in the Kosovo airstrike campaign, and as a Senior Analyst and Mission Planner for Naval Special Warfare Group One. After earning her Master’s Degree in International Policy, Allison established the commercial satellite imagery analysis capability for the British publication company Jane's. In 2015, Allison joined Google to assist with the establishment of applications for its commercial small-satellites. Today, Allison is the Principal and Founder of Armillary Services, providing insight on commercial imaging satellites and associated analytics to the governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the commercial sector. Concurrently, Allison manages the multi-sensor imagery analysis team at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/TV8ye_OVdzY

About the Event: Proof that France had become the world’s fourth nuclear power exploded above the Algerian Sahara in February 1960, during the Algerian War for Independence (1954–62). Sixteen more blasts would take place before France abandoned its Saharan test sites in 1966, which had continued to host French explosions underground during the first years of Algerian Independence. Well before the first airborne detonation, and even after French testing went below ground, the likelihood that radioactive debris (known as fallout) would contaminate the desert environment and its human inhabitants animated an international controversy. Saharan fallout loomed at once as a new threat to Algerian and African sovereignty and to Cold War negotiations that promised to limit weapons testing, revealing historical intersections between African decolonization and the nuclear arms race.

About the Speaker: Austin Cooper is a Predoctoral Researcher at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a PhD Candidate in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.