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. 

General C. Robert "Bob" Kehler

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This event is now full. We cannot accept any more RSVP's, but you can e-mail Zhila Emadi (zemadi@stanford.edu), if you would like to be placed on a waitlist.

 

About the Speaker:

General C. Robert Kehler is the commander of U.S. Strategic Command. He provides the President and Secretary of Defense with a broad range of strategic capabilities and options. He is responsible for the plans and operations for all U.S. forces conducting strategic nuclear and conventional deterrence and Department of Defense space and cyberspace operations.

General Kehler entered the Air Force in 1975 as a distinguished graduate of the Pennsylvania State University Air Force ROTC program. He has commanded at the squadron, group, wing and major command levels, and has a broad range of operational tours in ICBM, space launch, space control, space and missile warning operations.

General Kehler's staff assignments include tours with the Air Staff and Strategic Air Command headquarters. He was also assigned to the Secretary of the Air Force's Office of Legislative Liaison, where he was the point man on Capitol Hill for matters regarding the President's ICBM Modernization Program. As director of the National Security Space Office, General Kehler integrated the activities of a number of space organizations on behalf of the Under Secretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office. He has also served as deputy director of operations, Air Force Space Command, and as deputy commander, U.S. Strategic Command.

CISAC Conference Room

General C. Robert "Bob" Kehler Commander, United States Strategic Command Speaker
Seminars

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Taiwan's Future Development Strategy

Abstract:

On October 11 and 12th, the Democracy in Taiwan Project at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, in cooperation with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, will hold its 8th annual conference, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated by at least nine Pacific Rim countries that has the potential to re-shape economic relations in the region for the coming decades. This conference will bring together policymakers and scholars from Taiwan with leading specialists from other Asian countries and the U.S. to examine the evolution, geopolitics and future of the TPP, and also to consider how Taiwan is responding to the challenge of freer trade and what its strategy for deepening its trade relations and maintaining its economic development should be.

 

Among the issues to be addressed are:

  • How the economic and trading environment of East Asia is evolving, and what Taiwan’s future place will be in that regional environment.
  • The development of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a potentially far-reaching new economic and strategic framework for the region, including the origins and evolution of the TPP, US participation and China’s response, and the implications for the balance of power in East Asia.
  • Taiwan’s response to the challenge of freer trade to date, including the impact on US-Taiwan relations and domestic constituencies for free trade in Taiwan.
  • The perspectives of other key countries in the region toward the TPP, including Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China.

This event is co-sponsored by The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

 

Conference Resources

 

Agenda

Speaker Bios

Presentations

Conference Papers

Conference Report (full report, abridged report)

 

 

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CDDRL Conferences

Troy Stoner

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C235
Stanford CA 94305-6165

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Senior Military Fellow

Measuring NSA Surveillance

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About the Topic: What do the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programs reveal about Americans?  This talk presents ongoing studies of Internet and telephone metadata.  Preliminary results suggest that technical restrictions are far less effective than many observers have assumed. 

If you would like to read about the topic before the seminar, Jonathan’s work on the subject is available at http://bit.ly/1iMdkkM and http://stanford.io/1iMdjNM.

Speaker bio:

Jonathan Mayer is a Ph.D student in Computer Science and a J.D. student in Law at Stanford University. He joined CISAC as a predoctoral cybersecurity fellow in 2012, and continued as a cybersecurity fellow at CISAC for 2013-2014.

His research aims to advance difficult problems in technology policy. His recent work has focused on how to protect consumer privacy while promoting online innovation. In one line of studies, Jonathan has used web measurement to shed light on the information collected about consumers online. Another project aims to develop third-party web services that deliver functionality without tracking users.

Jonathan completed his undergraduate degree at Princeton University in 2009, with a concentration in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. 

CISAC Conference Room

Jonathan Mayer Cybersecurity Fellow, CISAC Speaker
Seminars

Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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The Hidden Dangers of Chop-Shop Electronics

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John Villasenor, a CISAC affiliate and professor of electrical engineering and public policy at UCLA, writes in this IEEE SPECTRUM article with Mohammad Tehranipoor, that counterfeiters sell old components as new, threatening both military and commercial systems.

They explain that the global trade in recycled electronics parts is enormous and growing rapidly, driven by a confluence of cost pressures, increasingly complex supply chains, and the huge growth in the amount of electronic waste sent for disposal around the world. Recycled parts, relabeled and sold as new, threaten not only military systems but also commercial transportation systems, medical devices and systems, and the computers and networks that run today’s financial markets and communications systems.

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John Villasenor

Brenda Jarillo Rabling

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford CA 94305-6055

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Brenda Jarillo Rabling is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Program of Poverty and Governance. She received her Ph.D. in international and comparative education from the Stanford Graduate School of Education (2013), and, graduated cum laude with a B.A. in economics from the Center for Research and Teaching of Economics (CIDE) in Mexico (2004).

Brenda’s primary fields of interest are economics of education and education policy in United States and Latin America. Her research focuses on (a) interventions to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged populations; (b) the impact of poverty and violence on educational outcomes (c) and issues related to young children’s health, development and learning.

Her dissertation consists of three-related research papers that investigate the role of the timing, type and quality of early childhood education programs in reducing the school readiness gap in the United States. Using a novel strategy to account for dynamic selection bias, she estimated the differential effect of the age of entry into preschool, and the effect of switching from one type of care to another on children’s cognitive and socio-behavioral outcomes. Her second paper utilizes a matching estimator approach to evaluate the effectiveness of after-school child care programs to reduce the differences in academic achievement between low-income minority children and their more affluent peers. The last paper estimates how much of the social-class gradient in cognitive and socio-behavioral outcomes is explained by socio-economic disparities in the quality of child care environments. Her dissertation work was supported by the American Educational Research Association Dissertation Grants Program and the Stanford Graduate School of Education Support Grant.

Brenda is currently working on three main projects related to violence and education in Mexico. One investigates the impact of exposure to violent crime on educational outcomes. The second is an assessment of a government-sponsored violence prevention program implemented in public schools since 2007. The third one is an evaluation of a community-based program targeting training and educational opportunities for school dropouts who are unemployed and live in areas where crime, violence and vandalism are common.

PovGov Postdoctoral Fellow, 2013-16

Technology, accountability and democracy in South Asia and beyond

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Vivek Srinivasan
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Technology, accountability and democracy in South Asia and beyond

Location: University of Mumbai, India

Dates: January 17-18, 2014

Over the last few years, there has been unprecedented focus on corruption and accountability across South Asia.  Accountability movements have resulted in a variety of initiatives including special monitoring bodies, transparency laws, monitoring mechanisms, judicial reforms and refining government processes.  These initiatives bring different understandings of problems and approaches, with varied strengths and weaknesses.  Despite these differences, they are increasingly converging on the use of technology to augment a growing set of accountability strategies.

The availability of new devices, the power of the Internet, the reach of mobile phones, and citizen activism give us reason to believe that the use of technology has real promise in advancing the accountability agenda. Yet the claim of technology’s promise is not without its critics. The use of technology has created new avenues for corruption despite claiming to combat it. Technologies rolled out in the name of advancing citizenship also create avenues for greater surveillance and disenfranchisement.  Many initiatives are not controversial, but their effectiveness is yet to be evaluated rigorously. Finally marginalized people, who need tools for accountability more than anyone else, have significantly lower levels of engagement with it.  The promises and problems of technology’s relationship with accountability require closer examination.

This conference proposes to bring together people who are engaged in these questions as activists, officials, academics and innovators to examine how technology is currently being used for accountability projects and to build meaningful platforms for the future. We specifically seek to bring together people with experience in accountability movements (with or without the use of technology), young innovators and researchers in order to promote rich multidisciplinary conversation and to build new collaborations.

One of the most persistent criticisms of technology for democracy projects is that they focus heavily on the tools without paying attention to the complexity of their use and the fact that accountability is a political project steeped in power relations.  In order to ensure that technical imagination goes hand in hand with a sophisticated understanding of the problems and strategies necessary to make technology a tool for progressive change, we propose to invite seasoned civil society activists and leaders from the government who have had a successful track record in managing positive change to meet individuals who are just beginning to consider technology as a response to the same problems. The conference will thus foster an exchange of ideas between innovators and experienced activists so that innovators can share their tools and experiences while also deepening their understanding of technology’s relevance and challenges for potential uses on the ground.  In turn, experienced political, social and economic leaders will gain ideas on how elements of technology can be introduced into in their work.  With this in mind, the conference format provides for opportunities to learn about technology projects, meet with platform creators, and participate in workshops to gain tools suitable for diverse campaign needs. 

The conference will be based on four broad themes: (1) Citizen activism for free and fair elections (2) Combatting “last-mile” corruption in public services (3) Gender, technology and accountability and (4) Building safeguards around India’s Aadhar project.  For further details including application, please download the call for papers here.

 

Organization:

The conference is led by the Center for South Asia and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) both at Stanford University.  It will be organized in partnership with Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai and the Stanford Alumni Association of India.

 

DOWNLOAD CALL FOR PAPERS

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Technology, Accountability and Democracy in South Asia and Beyond

Over the last few years, there has been unprecedented focus on corruption and accountability across South Asia.  Accountability movements have resulted in a variety of initiatives including special monitoring bodies, transparency laws, monitoring mechanisms, judicial reforms and refining government processes.  These initiatives bring different understandings of problems and approaches, with varied strengths and weaknesses.  Despite these differences, they are increasingly converging on the use of technology to augment a growing set of accountability strategies.

The availability of new devices, the power of the Internet, the reach of mobile phones, and citizen activism give us reason to believe that the use of technology has real promise in advancing the accountability agenda. Yet the claim of technology’s promise is not without its critics. The use of technology has created new avenues for corruption despite claiming to combat it. Technologies rolled out in the name of advancing citizenship also create avenues for greater surveillance and disenfranchisement.  Many initiatives are not controversial, but their effectiveness is yet to be evaluated rigorously. Finally marginalized people, who need tools for accountability more than anyone else, have significantly lower levels of engagement with it.  The promises and problems of technology’s relationship with accountability require closer examination.

This conference proposes to bring together people who are engaged in these questions as activists, officials, academics and innovators to examine how technology is currently being used for accountability projects and to build meaningful platforms for the future. We specifically seek to bring together people with experience in accountability movements (with or without the use of technology), young innovators and researchers in order to promote rich multidisciplinary conversation and to build new collaborations.

One of the most persistent criticisms of technology for democracy projects is that they focus heavily on the tools without paying attention to the complexity of their use and the fact that accountability is a political project steeped in power relations.  In order to ensure that technical imagination goes hand in hand with a sophisticated understanding of the problems and strategies necessary to make technology a tool for progressive change, we propose to invite seasoned civil society activists and leaders from the government who have had a successful track record in managing positive change to meet individuals who are just beginning to consider technology as a response to the same problems. The conference will thus foster an exchange of ideas between innovators and experienced activists so that innovators can share their tools and experiences while also deepening their understanding of technology’s relevance and challenges for potential uses on the ground.  In turn, experienced political, social and economic leaders will gain ideas on how elements of technology can be introduced into in their work.  With this in mind, the conference format provides for opportunities to learn about technology projects, meet with platform creators, and participate in workshops to gain tools suitable for diverse campaign needs. 

The conference will be based on four broad themes: (1) Citizen activism for free and fair elections (2) Combatting “last-mile” corruption in public services (3) Gender, technology and accountability and (4) Building safeguards around India’s Aadhar project.  For further details including application, please download the call for papers below.

 

Organization:

The conference is led by the Center for South Asia and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) both at Stanford University.  It will be organized in partnership with Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai and the Stanford Alumni Association of India.

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University of Mumbai, India

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CDDRL Conferences

Ana Gonzalez

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Visiting Student Researcher, The Europe Center
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Ana Gonzalez is a doctoral candidate in International Law at the University Juan Carlos I in Madrid.  She is also the Academic Secretary of the Robert Schuman Institute for European Studies at the University Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid and also coordinates the Europe Office at this University.  She holds a LL.M from the Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin, Germany in European and German Law, and a Master Degree in European Law from the Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain. She also has expertise on project building and execution around stable collaboration partnerships in European Projects.

Ana Gonzalez's main focus of research is on the European Neighbourhood Policy, Enlargement Policy, Strategic Partnerships and the future of these policies in the European Union. She works regularly with the Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defence to incorporate the study of these policies into Spanish academics and courses and seminars.

Ms. Gonzalez also works directly with the Research and Faculty Vice Dean at the University Francisco de Vitoria developing research and teaching innovation at the University.  She is in charge of the ERASMUS-Prof., and has participated in different conferences.

Between 2007 and 2009 she worked in different think tanks including the International Crisis Group in Brussels and INCIPE and the Spain-Russia Council in Madrid.

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