Stanford University

Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

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The Europe Center recently initiated a distinguished annual lectureship named, The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World.  The lectures are intended to promote awareness of Europe's lessons and experiences with a goal of enhancing our collective knowledge of both contemporary global affairs and Europe itself.  Each year, faculty affiliates at the Center select a renowned intellectual to deliver the lectureship on a topic of significant scholarly interest.  The Europe Center invites you to the inaugural annual lectures of this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University.

 

“Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles”

Date: Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014

Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR

 

“Hegemony: Europe, America and the Problem of Financial Reconstruction, 1916-1933”

Date: Thursday, May 1, 2014

Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR

 

“Unsettled Lands: The Interwar Crisis of Agrarian Europe”

Date: May 2, 2014

Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Location: Bechtel Conference Center

Reception: 5:30 - 6:15 pm

 

RSVP by Apr 23, 2014

 

On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917.  Tooze advances a powerful explanation of why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States and the Pacific.  These lectures will present an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world today.

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.

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Global Europe, from the Atlantic to the Pacific

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Image of José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission
José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission, will be visiting Stanford to deliver his talk, "Global Europe, from the Atlantic to the Pacific."  President Barroso's political career began in 1980 when he joined the Social Democratic Party (PSD). He was named President of the party in 1999 and re-elected three times. During the same period, he served as Vice President of the European People's Party. As State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation he played a key role as mediator in the signing of the peace accords for Angola in Bicesse in 1991, and as Minister for Foreign Affairs he was a driving force in the self-determination process in East Timor between 1992 and 1995. Under his leadership, the PSD won the general election in 2002 and he was appointed Prime Minister of Portugal in April of that year. He remained in office until July 2004 when he was nominated by the European Council and elected by the European Parliament to the post of President of the European Commission. In June 2009 the European Council unanimously nominated him for a second term as President of the European Commission, and he was re-elected to the post by an absolute majority in the European Parliament in September 2009.

Please note:  this event is open to Stanford students, faculty, staff and invited guests.

Co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, The Europe Center and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

 

 

McCaw Hall, Arrillaga Alumni Center

 

José Manuel Durão Barroso President Speaker The European Commission
Lectures

The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

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Why have militarized interventions to curtail violence by drug cartels had wildly divergent results? In the past six years, state crackdowns drove a nine-fold increase in cartel-state violence in Mexico, versus a two-thirds decrease in Brazil. Prevailing analyses of drug wars as a criminal subtype of insurgency provide little traction, because they elide differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Cartels, I argue, fight states not to conquer territory or political control, but to coerce state actors and influence policy outcomes. The empirically predominant channel is violent corruption— threatening enforcers while negotiating bribes. A formal model reveals that greater state repression raises bribe prices, leading cartels to fight back whenever (a) corruption is sufficiently rampant, and (b) repression is insufficiently conditional on cartels’ use of violence. Variation in conditionality helps explain observed outcomes: switching to conditional repression pushed Brazilian cartels into nonviolent strategies, while Mexico’s war “without distinctions” inadvertently made fighting advantageous.

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A Hole at the Center of the State: Prison Gangs and the Limits to Punitive Power

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The state’s central function is to establish authority through its monopoly on violence; the very attempt, however, can be counterproductive. Punishment incapacitates and deters individuals, but can empower destructive collective forces. Prison gangs, their ranks swelled by mass incarceration, transform the core of the coercive apparatus into a headquarters for organizing and taxing streetlevel criminal activity, supplanting state authority in communities, and orchestrating mass violence and protest. Drawing on a formal model, fieldwork, and case studies from the US and Latin America, I show how gangs use control over prison life, plus the state-provided threat of incarceration, to project power. The model predicts that common state responses—crackdowns and harsher sentencing— can strengthen prison gangs’ leverage over outside actors, consistent with the observed expansion of prison gangs during mass-incarceration initiatives. These gang-strengthening effects of incarceration can have increasing returns, implying a point beyond which additional punishment erodes state authority.

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In the Eye of the Beholder: How Leaders and Intelligence Organizations Assess Intentions

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Abstract: How do policymakers infer the long-term political intentions of their states' adversaries? A new approach to answering this question, the “selective attention thesis,” posits that individual perceptual biases and organizational interests and practices influence which types of indicators a state's political leaders and its intelligence community regard as credible signals of an adversary's intentions. Policymakers often base their interpretations on their own theories, expectations, and needs, sometimes ignoring costly signals and paying more attention to information that, though less costly, is more vivid (i.e., personalized and emotionally involving). In contrast, intelligence organizations typically prioritize the collection and analysis of data on the adversary's military inventory. Over time, these organizations develop substantial knowledge on these material indicators that they then use to make predictions about an adversary's intentions. An examination of three cases based on 30,000 archival documents and intelligence reports shows strong support for the selective attention thesis and mixed support for two other approaches in international relations theory aimed at understanding how observers are likely to infer adversaries' political intentions: the behavior thesis and the capabilities thesis. The three cases are assessments by President Jimmy Carter and officials in his administration of Soviet intentions during the collapse of détente; assessments by President Ronald Reagan and administration officials of Soviet intentions during the end of the Cold War; and British assessments of Nazi Germany before World War II.

About the Speaker: Professor Keren Yarhi-Milo is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Politics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs. Her research and teaching focus on international relations and foreign policy, with a particular specialization in international security, including foreign policy decision-making, interstate communication and crisis bargaining, intelligence, and US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Professor Yarhi-Milo’s forthcoming book (Princeton University Press) titled, “Knowing The Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence Organizations, and Assessments of Intentions in International Relations,” explores how and why civilian leaders and intelligence organizations select and interpret an adversary’s signals of intentions differently. 

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Keren Yarhi-Milo Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs Speaker the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
Seminars

The Paradoxes Of Post-Mao Rural Reform: Initial Steps Toward A New Countryside, 1976-81

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The period from the arrest of the “gang of four” in October 1976 to the final step in the removal of Hua Guofeng in mid-1981 saw CCP rural policy go through a number of phases. The initial emphasis on a moderate version of the Dazhai model gave way to “traditional policies” (luoshi zhengce) by mid-1978; these policies were supplemented in 1979 by “responsibility systems,” the most radical of which, household contracting (baochan daohu), became a sharply divisive issue in 1980, but still not the main aspect of agricultural policy. The tide was moving strongly toward household contracting by mid-1981, but had not yet achieved unambiguous endorsement as the Party policy.

A number of inadequate approaches have dominated the literature, notably 1) a power/policy struggle between Hua Guofeng's neo-Maoists and Deng Xiaoping's reform coalition; 2) the power of the peasants; and 3) the leading role of provincial reformers. The first has no validity, the second and third must be viewed through more complex lenses. The talk will explicate the key factors and present an alternative explanation of the success of rural reform.

Frederick C. Teiwes is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney. He received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. He is the author of various books on Chinese elite politics including Politics and Purges in China (1979, 1993), Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conflict in China (1984), and Politics at Mao's Court (1990). Some of his most important work has been jointly authored with Warren Sun including The Politics of Agricultural Cooperativization: Mao, Deng Zihui, and the "High Tide" of 1955 (1993), The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1971 (1996), China’s Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Emergence of the Great Leap Forward, 1955-1959 (1999), and The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics during the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976 (2007).

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Frederick Teiwes Emeritus Professor of Chinese Politics Speaker University of Sydney
Seminars

Worst Practices Guide to Insider Threats: Lessons from Past Mistakes

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In this research paper published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Stanford Policeical Science Professor and CISAC Senior Fellow, Scott Sagan, and Matthew Bunn, a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School, write that insider threats are perhaps the most serious challenge that nuclear security systems face today.

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Scott D. Sagan

From Paris to Sacaca: A Human Rights Genealogy

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The trajectory of human rights in the contemporary world is one in which ideas and cultural practices constitute each other in ways that can bedevil theorists and empirical researchers alike. The conventional wisdom is that this dynamic interaction, or “vernacularization,” must be understood as the inevitable, if (to some) lamentable, result of the rapid expansion of international and transnational human rights after the end of the Cold War. This talk challenges the conventional wisdom by tracing the genealogy of one such idea—that of universality—from the work of a mysterious, though highly consequential, UNESCO committee in 1947 and 1948 to the practical human rights advocacy of a peasant intellectual living in a remote region of the Bolivian Andes. Doing so allows us to reframe a key moment in the history of the birth of the modern human rights movement after the Second World War; appreciate the extent to which the narrative of universal human dignity does important cultural work as a matter of practical ethics; and realize that a critical approach to both the promises and dilemmas of human rights does not stand apart from mainstream human rights advocacy, but is rather woven into the very fiber of its history.

 

Mark Goodale is currently Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Human Rights at the Crossroads (Oxford UP, 2013), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge UP, 2010), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell, 2009), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge UP, 2007). Forthcoming volumes include Human Rights Encounters Legal Pluralism (with Eva Brems and Giselle Corradi, Hart/Oñati International Series in Law and Society, 2014). His writings have appeared in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Social & Legal Studies, Current Legal Theory, and the Journal of Legal Pluralism, among others. He is at work on several new research projects, including an NSF-funded empirical study of the relationship between human rights and radical political and social change in Bolivia and a set of essays that examine the culture, contested politics, and phenomenology of human rights after the post-Cold War.

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Mark Goodale Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology Speaker George Mason University
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Program on Human Rights
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