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

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/VJgMJyNz3F4

 

About the Event: Join David Sanger, National Security Correspondent for the New York Times, Amy Zegart, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Monica M. Ruiz, Program Fellow for the Cyber Initiative and Special Projects at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Alex Stamos, Adjunct Professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Michael McFaul, Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Herb Lin, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, for a panel discussion of The Perfect Weapon, an HBO documentary special based on the best-selling book by New York Times national security correspondent David E. Sanger, which is now available to stream on HBO Max. Directed by John Maggio, the film explores the rise of cyber conflict as a primary way in which nations now compete with and sabotage one another. Cheap, invisible and devastatingly effective, cyber weapons are the present and future of geopolitical conflict – a short-of-war pathway to exercising power. The Perfect Weapon draws on interviews with top military, intelligence and political officials for a comprehensive view of a world of new vulnerabilities, particularly as fear mounts over how cyberattacks and influence operations may affect the 2020 U.S. election, vulnerable power grids, America’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and the global networks that are the backbone of private enterprise. The film also explores how the U.S. government is struggling to defend itself from cyberattacks while simultaneously stockpiling and using the world's most powerful offensive cyber arsenal.

Watch the film trailer HERE.

 

About the Speakers: 

Dr. Herb Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.  His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy and in the security dimensions of information warfare and influence operations on national security.  In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In 2016, he served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.  Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

 

Dr. Michael McFaul is Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995.

Dr. McFaul also is as an International Affairs Analyst for NBC News and a columnist for The Washington Post. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). Continue Reading >>>

 

Monica M. Ruiz is the Program Fellow for the Cyber Initiative and Special Projects at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In her work on the Cyber Initiative, she supports efforts to build a more robust cybersecurity field and improve policy-making. She also manages the foundation’s portfolio of Special Projects grants, part of a pool of flexible funds that allow the foundation to respond to unanticipated opportunities, explore potential initiatives, collaborate with other funders and facilitate cross-pollinating work across the foundation’s programs.

Prior to joining the foundation, Monica was the first recipient of the Boren Fellowship to travel to Estonia, where her research focused on cybersecurity issues and she studied the Russian language. Earlier in her career, she worked at U.S. Southern Command in the J9 Partnering Directorate, where she served as the military education coordinator between the Command and partners in the region.

Born in Ecuador and raised in Miami, she holds a bachelor’s degree from Florida International University and a master’s degree from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

 

David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent and  senior writer for the New York Times, a contributor to CNN and an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government. In a 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His latest book, “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age,’’ published in 2018, examined the emergence of cyberconflict as the primary way large and small states are competing and undercutting each other, changing the nature of global power. An HBO documentary based on the book will air in the Fall of 2020.

He is also the author of two Times best sellers on foreign policy and national security: “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,” published in 2009, and “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” published in 2012. For The Times, Mr. Sanger has served as Tokyo bureau chief, Washington economic correspondent, White House correspondent during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and chief Washington correspondent. He co-teaches “Central Challenges in American National Security, Strategy and the Press” at Harvard.

 

Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader and entrepreneur working to improve the security and safety of the Internet through his teaching and research at Stanford University. Stamos is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the Chief Security Officer of Facebook. In this role, Stamos led a team of engineers, researchers, investigators and analysts charged with understanding and mitigating information security risks to the company and safety risks to the 2.5 billion people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. During his time at Facebook, he led the company’s investigation into manipulation of the 2016 US election and helped pioneer several successful protections against these new classes of abuse. As a senior executive, Alex represented Facebook and Silicon Valley to regulators, lawmakers and civil society on six continents, and has served as a bridge between the interests of the Internet policy community and the complicated reality of platforms operating at billion-user scale. In April 2017, he co-authored “Information Operations and Facebook”, a highly cited examination of the influence campaign against the US election, which still stands as the most thorough description of the issue by a major technology company. Continue Reading >>>

 

Dr. Amy Zegart is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI), professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University, and a contributing editor to The Atlantic. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she directs the Robert and Marion Oster National Security Affairs Fellows program. From 2013 to 2018, she served as co-director of the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and founder and co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Program. She previously served as the chief academic officer of the Hoover Institution.

Her areas of expertise include cybersecurity, US intelligence and foreign policy, drone warfare, and political risk. An award-winning author, she has written four books. These include Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (2019) coeditor with Herb Lin; Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (2018) with Condoleezza Rice; Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and Origins of 9/11 (2007), which won the National Academy of Public Administration’s Brownlow Book Award; Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (1999); and Eyes on Spies: Congress and the US Intelligence Community (Hoover Institution Press, 2011). She has also published in leading academic journals, including International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and Political Science Quarterly. Continue Reading >>>

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC's fall webinar series "Shifting Geopolitics and U.S.-Asia Relations."

This panel will review and assess various aspects of the relationship between the United States and South Korea under the leadership of President Donald Trump and President Moon Jae-in. The two leaders appeared able to work together quickly and make some bold moves on issues like North Korea, but the differences between the two have been stark on issues such as military burden sharing and policies toward China. The discussion will also compare the current dynamics of U.S.-ROK relations with that of during the George W. Bush and Roh Moo-hyun period (2003-2008), which is often referred to as the most turbulent yet the most transformative era in the history of the security relationship between the two countries.

Panelists:

Laura Bicker, BBC Seoul Correspondent
Ms. Bicker has been a BBC Correspondent for 20 years. She is currently based in Seoul where she reports on both North and South Korea. She is known for her interviews with President Moon Jae-in and her coverage of the inter-Korean and US-North Korean summits. This year she has produced a number of reports on South Korea’s battle with Covid19 including the documentary "How to Fight Coronavirus." In her previous role as North America Correspondent she followed Donald Trump’s election to the White House and his first years in office, as well as a host of deployments covering a number of issues and breaking news across the United States.

Mark Lippert, former US Ambassador to South Korea
A graduate of Stanford (BA, MA), Ambassador Lippert served as the United States ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Republic of Korea from 2014-2017. He previously held positions in the Department of Defense, including as chief of staff to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel (2013-2014) and as assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs (2012-2013). Lippert also worked in the White House as chief of staff to the National Security Council in 2009. Lippert served in the uniformed military as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy, he mobilized to active duty from 2009 to 2011 for service with Naval Special Warfare (SEALs) Development Group that included deployments to Afghanistan and other regions. From 2007 to 2008, he deployed as an intelligence officer with Seal Team One to Anbar Province, Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Myung Hwan Yu, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, South Korea
Minister Yu has 37 years of distinguished service with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, including Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 2008 to 2010.  Minister Yu started his foreign service in Japan in 1976 as a young diplomat and returned as Ambassador to Japan in 2007. He advised on various political and economic issues concerning both the private and public sector with a view to revamp bilateral relation until his departure from Japan to join President Lee Myung Bak’s administration as a cabinet minister in 2008. He also served as Ambassador to the State of Israel; Ambassador for Anti-Terrorism and Afghanistan Issues; and also Minister of the Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. His experience extends across a broad range of issues in the international relations including trade and security issues, and negotiations with North Korea in particular.

Moderator:

Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University
Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea; the founding director of the Korea Program; a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and a professor of sociology, all at Stanford University. As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, and international relations.

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

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/ryBtzvLI0QQ

 

About the Event: Despite the importance of understanding how refugee crises end, we know little about when and why refugees, who were forced to emigrate, return home. We study the drivers of refugees’ decision-making using original observational and experimental survey data from a representative sample of approximately 3,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that conditions in a refugee’s home country are much more important than the situation in the host country in shaping return intentions. Specifically, our findings suggest that refugees’ decisions are influenced primarily by safety and security in their place of origin, their economic prospects, the availability of public services, and their personal networks. Confidence in information is also important: we find that several drivers of return---safety, services, and networks---only impact intentions among people who have high confidence in their information. By contrast, the conditions in hosting countries–so-called “push'” factors–play a negligible role in the process of refugee return. Even in the face of outright hostility and poor living conditions, refugees are unlikely to return unless the situation at home improves significantly.

 

About the Speakers: 

Ala’ Alrababa’h is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University, a graduate fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab, and a junior scholar at the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network. His research combines fieldwork, machine learning, and experimental methods to study issues related to authoritarian media, political violence, and migration and refugees. His research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Research and Methods, and International Studies Quarterly. Prior to arriving at Stanford University, Ala’ was a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

 

Jeremy Weinstein is Professor of Political Science, Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He also is faculty co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab and the Data for Development Initiative. In addition, he is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.

His research focuses on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics; the political economy of development; democracy and accountability; and migration. He is the author of Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge University Press), which received the William Riker Prize for the best book on political economy. He is also the co-author of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage Foundation), which received the Gregory Luebbert Award for the best book in comparative politics.

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Most people attribute the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to Beijing’s imperialist ambitions. In her talk, Professor Min Ye will go beyond top-level rhetoric, however, and investigate BRI’s origins, its implementation, and its on-the-ground effects inside China. She will unpack different local governments' approaches to the BRI by discussing how subnational entities have leveraged Beijing’s grand strategy and how the implementation of projects and programs related to the BRI facilitate local economic agendas. China’s local developmentalism, which has undergirded not only the BRI but also other national-level strategies (like the Western Development Program and China Goes Global policy), has propelled the Chinese economy from a middle power in 1998 to a superpower in 2018. The talk will conclude with a discussion of COVID-19’s impact on China’s BRI as well as preliminary findings from Professor Ye’s current research into other state-mobilized development initiatives in China.
 

Min Ye is an Associate Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Her research lies in the nexus between domestic and global politics and economics and security, focusing on China, India, and regional relations. Her publications include The Belt, Road, and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China 1998 -- 2018 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and The Making of Northeast Asia (with Kent Calder, Stanford University Press, 2010). She has received a Smith Richardson Foundation grant (2016-2018), the East Asia Peace, Prosperity, and Governance Fellowship (2013), Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program post-doctoral fellowship (2009-2010), and Millennium Education Scholarship in Japan (2006). In 2014-2016, Min Ye was an NCUSCR Public Intellectual Program fellow. Ye is currently the 2020 Rosenberg Scholar of East Asian Studies at Suffolk University.

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC’s fall webinar series "Shifting Geopolitics and U.S.-Asia Relations"

Co-sponsored with the Center for South Asia (CSA)

Since May 2020, Chinese troops have crossed the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC) and occupied positions in the Indian union territory of Ladakh. The Chinese troops crossed in multiple places and in large numbers, and have skirmished with Indian forces. Diplomatic channels are still open, but despite numerous pledges to disengage, this Chinese action appears to be an attempt to revise the LAC. This webinar will examine the crisis’ longer-term implications for China-India-U.S. relations. Can India and China reconcile their relationship or are they destined for a more antagonistic strategic rivalry? What tools and leverage does each side have in strategic competition? How does this affect U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific region, and what action can Washington take to advance its interests?

Joseph Felter is a William J. Perry Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and research fellow at the Hoover Institution.  From 2017 to 2019, Felter served as US deputy assistant secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, where he was responsible for defense strategies and plans in the region. He previously taught at West Point and Columbia University. A former US Army Special Forces and Foreign Area officer, Joe served in a variety of special operations and diplomatic assignments, and holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University. 

Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program, and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Madan’s work explores India’s role in the world and its foreign policy, focusing in particular on India's relations with China and the United States. Madan is the author of the book "Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations during the Cold War," and researching her next book on the China-India-US triangle. She holds a PhD in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin.

Yun Sun is a Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the East Asia Program and Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center. Her expertise is in Chinese foreign policy, U.S.-China relations and China’s relations with neighboring countries and authoritarian regimes. She has previously held positions at the Brookings Institution, where she focused on Chinese national security decision-making processes and China-Africa relations, and at the International Crisis Group, specializing in China’s foreign policy towards conflict countries and the developing world. She earned her master’s degree in international policy and practice from George Washington University.

Moderator:

Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. Tarapore’s research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, the Observer Research Foundation, and the East-West Center in Washington, and served in the Australian Defence Department. Tarapore holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

This event has been rescheduled to October 14, 2020

It is a good time to be interested in Southeast Asia-China relations. In addition to the three new books referenced in this webinar, additional books on the subject are forthcoming from other authors.  The timing is all the more propitious in view of the current animosity between Beijing and Washington as it may implicate Southeast Asia and American policy toward the region, depending in part on who wins the 3 November US election.  These books are both sweeping and granular.  Hiebert’s and Strangio’s country-focused chapters cover all ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), while Emmerson and his co-authors mix country studies with thematic arguments about China’s relations with its neighbors.

Given China’s clearly superior size and power, is Beijing’s incremental domination of its neighbors foreordained? Strangio says no: “Southeast Asia’s future will not be one of linear and inexorable Chinese advance, but rather one in which past dynamics and contradictions reproduce themselves over time at varying pitches of tension.” Is he right? Hiebert calls for the US “to support the region as it faces a rising and more assertive China”—to “remain an actively engaged partner that shows up, brings some resources, and rewrites the perception that it is often unreliable and missing in action.” Is that good advice?  For Emmerson, “strategic autonomy necessarily begins at home. Outsiders can help or hurt. But nothing can substitute for the creativity of Southeast Asian states in individual and joint pursuit of their own and their region’s security.” Is that true, and even if it is, so what?

The webinar will explore these and other aspects of Sino-Southeast Asian relations.

Murray Hiebert, in addition to his position at CSIS, is research director for BowerGroup Asia. Before joining CSIS, he was senior director for Southeast Asia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Earlier, he was a journalist in the China bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Prior to his posting to Beijing, he reported from Washingon on US-Asia relations for the Wall Street Journal Asia and the Far Eastern Economic Review. In the 1990s he worked for the Review while based in Kuala Lumpur and, earlier, in Hanoi, having joined the Review's Bangkok bureau in 1986 to cover developments in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He is also the author of two books on Vietnam, Chasing the Tigers (1996) and Vietnam Notebook (1993). He has a master’s degree in news media studies from American University.

 

Sebastian Strangio has written from and on Southeast Asia for many publications including Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Economist, Forbes, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times. In addition to living and working in Cambodia, where he spent three years with The Phnom Penh Post, he has reported from Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and China, among other countries. Other previous affiliations include New America’s International Reporting Project; the Future Forum, a policy institute in Phnom Penh; and Chiang Mai University’s Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development. Foreign Affairs named his first book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia, a 2015 Book of the Year. He has a master’s degree in international politics from the University of Melbourne.

 

Donald K. Emmerson, in addition to his position in APARC, is a faculty affiliate of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. So far in 2019-2020 he has spoken on Southeast Asian topics to audiences in Bangkok, Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, New York, Singapore, and Washington, DC.  Recent publications include “‘No Sole Control’ in the South China Sea,” Asia Policy (2019) and ASEAN @ 50, Southeast Asia @ Risk: What Should Be Done? (edited, 2018). Before moving to Stanford in 1999, he taught political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Australian National University, among other institutions.  His doctorate in political science is from Yale University.