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.
Several aid groups have proposed strategies for allocating ready-touse (therapeutic and supplementary) foods to children in developing countries. Analysis is needed to investigate whether there are better alternatives. We use a longitudinal dataset of 5,657 children from Bwamanda to construct a bivariate time-series model that tracks each child’s height-for-age z score (HAZ) and weight-forheight z score (WHZ) throughout the first 5 y of life. Our optimization model chooses which individual children should receive readyto-use therapeutic or supplementary food based on a child’s sex, age, HAZ, and WHZ, to minimize the mean number of disabilityadjusted life years (DALYs) per child during 6–60 mo of age [which includes childhood mortality calculated from a logistic regression and the lifelong effects of stunting (i.e., low HAZ)] subject to a budget constraint. Compared with the strategies proposed by the aid groups, which do not use HAZ information, the simple strategy arising from our analysis [which prioritizes children according to low values of a linear combination of HAZ, WHZ, and age and allocates the entire budget to therapeutic (i.e., 500 kcal/d) food for the prioritized children] reduces the number of DALYs by 9% (for the same budget) or alternatively incurs the same number of DALYs with a 61% reduction in cost. Whereas our qualitative conclusions appear to be robust, the quantitative results derived from our analysis should be treated with caution because of the lack of reliable data on the impact of supplementary food on HAZ and WHZ, the application of our model to a single cohort of children and the inclusion and exclusion errors related to imperfect food targeting.
This report by scholars and policy experts at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is based in part on (1) their research for a Yonhap News Agency-sponsored symposium on Northeast Asia security in Seoul in early February, when they also held meetings with then-President Lee Myung-bak and President-elect Park Geun-hye and her chief foreign policy advisers, as well as with leading South Korean progressive intellectuals; and (2) a workshop on North Korea policy at Stanford University on February 14–15, supported by the Koret Foundation of San Francisco, which included top current and former U.S., South Korean, and UN officials and leading academic experts on the Korea problem.
The publication of "The North Korea Problem" was made possible by the generosity of the Koret Foundation of San Francisco, CA.
Many Stanford computer science majors hope to land coveted jobs in Silicon Valley upon graduation. Parth Bhakta or Ben Rudolph aren't so sure. They first want to take their skills far afield of the storied technology hub.
Bhakta and Rudolph joined two other Stanford students earlier this month to travel to Ethiopia, making their way to remote refugee camps along the Sudanese border. They are researching ways in which technology and design innovation can help improve conditions for refugees and their surrounding communities.
“As a computer science student, I feel that a lot of Silicon Valley is focused on solving trivial problems,” said Bhakta, a senior from Palm Desert, Calif., who graduates this year with an undergraduate degree in symbolic systems and a master’s in computer science. “I hope to apply my skills toward something that has a meaningful impact. I want this experience to help me better understand how to tackle big, tangible problems.”
The students worked with the UNHCR and International Rescue Committee in the Bambasi and Sherkole refugee camps in western Ethiopia to test out ideas they’ve been working on with the goal of improving camp communications; food security and economic self-sufficiency; host community relations; and the often difficult process of setting up camps to house arriving refugees.
The idea for the trip emerged from a dialogue and collaboration between Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). An official from the UN agency approached CISAC Co-Director Tino Cuéllar last spring, and encouraged CISAC to explore ideas to better protect and support the care of more than 42 million refugees, internally displaced and stateless people worldwide.
These early discussions led to a multidisciplinary partnership involving CISAC, students from across the Stanford campus and at the Hassno-Platner Institute of Design – better known as the d.school – as well as professors, NGOs, physicians, officials with experience in humanitarian settings, architects and other professionals eager to volunteer their time and expertise.
Among those professionals is Jeffrey Geisinger, an architect with Ennead Architects in New York. The firm, which designed the new Stanford Law School wing and the recently inaugurated Bing Concert Hall, is doing pro bono work on the project through its advocacy lab.
Geisinger hopes to start designing modules that might be used in shared spaces. To do this, he said, he must see what construction materials are available, what deficiencies typically exist out in the field and which social networks and local skills might be tapped to help the UN build more innovative structures shared by both communities.
“From an architect’s perspective, we’re interested in some kind of design solution,” said Geisinger. “But before we can even begin to put pencil to paper, it’s important to really define the problem.”
For CISAC, the project represents a further effort to bridge the gap between scholarship and practice.
“This is an extraordinary manifestation of CISAC’s mission to help shape public policy,” said Liz Gardner, CISAC’s associate director for programs. “This project marries up scholarship, teaching and close interaction with policymakers – with the ultimate goal of improving the lives of refugees.”
The project also led to dozens of students from a variety of majors to enroll in the Law School class, “Rethinking Refugee Communities,” co-taught by Cuéllar and Leslie Witt of the global design consultancy, IDEO. The students have been brainstorming and investigating, then hammering out concepts and prototypes they hope might one day be implemented by the United Nations.
Now, they want to put those ideas to the test.
Rudolph, a senior from Chicago, is working with his team to build a software platform that would enable early camp registration and provide two-way communication between the UNHCR and refugees, using mobile technology. RescueSMS is software designed to better profile each refugee and alert them to upcoming events or emergencies in the camp, as well as give them a voice to express concerns or ask questions of the UN.
“I’m excited about applying my computer science knowledge to humanitarian efforts, where I think software is underused,” said Rudolph, who has had a string of internships at Silicon Valley startups. “I wanted a change of pace from the corporate world; I was tired of working for traditional software startup companies.”
So he’s taking an untraditional route. Rudolph’s interest in the project has led to an internship with the UNHCR’s innovation lab in Geneva after he graduates this summer.
One of Cuéllar’s goals is to build long-term relationships with organizations such as the UNHCR so that the work by Stanford students becomes embedded in the innovation process of public organizations.
Devorah West’s team is looking at infrastructure in the space that is shared by refugees and the indigenous people from the surrounding community. When thousands of refugees stream into border communities in neighboring countries, resources become scarce and tensions run high. West is representing the team looking at ways to build schools, medical facilities and marketplaces that could be shared by both communities.
“My team will use this trip to get a better understanding of realities on the ground,” said West, a second-year master’s student in international policy studies from Santa Fe, N.M., who graduates this summer. “We hope to find ways to defuse tensions over scarce resources and allow both communities to satisfy social and physical needs.”
West said she was drawn to the project by the interdisciplinary nature of the teams.
“Having worked in the policy world, I was really interested in using design thinking to fuse together academic research and policy development in order to have a concrete impact on refugee communities,” she said.
Jessica Miranda is representing the team focused on food security and economic self-sufficiency. They are working on understanding how to encourage small-scale mobile farming. During her visits to the camps, she will investigate the challenges that affect small-scale gardening and learn more about the terrain, the nutritional status of vulnerable households and what the cultural views are on agriculture.
“I know how it feels to leave your country behind,” said Miranda, a second-year master’s student in international policy studies from Toluca, Mexico. “And I want to help. But it’s difficult to think about refugee camps from the comfort of my couch. It’s time to go and see how these ideas might work on the ground."
Beth Duff-Brown, CISAC’s communications manager, traveled with the students and will be reporting from the field.
Many of my colleagues and fellow investigators in the life sciences were surprised in late 2011 to hear about the deliberate laboratory manipulation of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses for the purpose of creating derivative strains with enhanced capacity for respiratory transmission among mammals— strains with pandemic potential and serious global consequence. More importantly, few were prepared to undertake a reasoned and dispassionate assessment of the risks and benefits of such research and of its publication. This is unfortunate, not only because the resulting paucity of scientific leadership on this topic led to emotional and often unproductive discourse, but because new instances of concerning research will be increasingly frequent and ever more consequential as the ongoing revolution in the life sciences unfolds.
The Center on Food Security and the Environment's 2012/13 brochure provides an overview including FSE's mission, research, faculty, and program development.
It has been said that constitutional court judges around the world increasingly participate in a "global judicial dialogue" that causes judges to make increased use of foreign law. This is a dialogue, however, from which the members of the Taiwanese Constitutional Court are largely excluded. Taiwan’s precarious diplomatic situation and intense lobbying by China have effectively prevented the members of Taiwan's Constitutional Court from participating in international judicial gatherings and official visits to foreign courts. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese Constitutional Court routinely engages in extensive consideration of foreign law, either expressly or implicitly, when deciding cases. This fact casts doubt on the notion that "global judicial dialogue" explains judicial use of foreign law. Comparison of the Taiwanese Constitutional Court and U.S. Supreme Court demonstrates that “global judicial dialogue” plays a much smaller role in shaping a court’s utilization of foreign law than institutional factors such as (a) the rules and practices governing the composition and staffing of the court and (b) the extent to which the structure of legal education and the legal profession incentivizes judges and academics to possess expertise in foreign law.
Speaker Bio:
David Law is Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He works in the areas of law and political science, public law, judicial behavior, comparative constitutional law, and comparative judicial politics. Born and raised in Canada, he holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford, a B.C.L. in European and Comparative Law from the University of Oxford, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has previously taught at the University of San Diego School of Law and the University of California, San Diego political science department and has been a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University College of Law, Seoul National University School of Law, and Keio University Faculty of Law in Tokyo, and a visiting scholar at the NYU School of Law. His current research focuses on the identification, explanation, and prediction of global patterns in constitutional law, and his recent scholarship on constitutional globalization and the declining influence of the U.S. Constitution has been featured in a variety of domestic and international media.
CISAC Conference Room
David Law
Professor of Law and Political Science
Speaker
Washington University in St. Louis
He broke the news to the world that North Korea had built a modern uranium enrichment plant. He’s helped the Russians secure their vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. And Stanford students routinely rank him as one of their favorite professors.
Siegfried Hecker, one of he world’s top nuclear scientists and co-teacher of the popular course, “Technology and National Security,” has completed his five-year tenure as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Though Hecker is stepping down from the leadership role, he’s not walking away.
“He’s not going anywhere,” emphasized his successor, Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity specialist, David Relman, as he opened a seminar in Hecker’s honor on Feb. 25. The panel discussion, “Three Hard Cases: Iran, North Korea and Pakistan” featured Scott Sagan, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Abbas Milani, Robert Carlin and Feroz Khan.
“He’ll be back this summer with his infectious energy and unswerving dedication for which he is so well known,” Relman said.
Hecker, 69, is taking a sabbatical in New Mexico – where he was director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for more than a decade before coming to Stanford – and then at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, run by the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He’ll continue work on his book about his historic efforts to foster collaboration between U.S.-Russian nuclear labs and do some travel to meet his nonproliferation counterparts in other parts of the world.
“CISAC is part of my heart and soul now,” Hecker told a reception in his honor after the seminar. “Los Alamos was in my blood and bones. Today, Stanford is part of that too.”
Hecker will return to CISAC this summer to resume his writing and research projects as a senior fellow at CISAC and its umbrella, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He’ll head back to the classroom as well.
“What I found out is that teaching is so much harder than just giving a lecture, because you really have to pay attention to what the students have actually absorbed,” Hecker said. “You need to be able to communicate with each and every one of them.”
Among the many national honors that Hecker has received over the years, the one he treasures most is the 2010 Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an honor voted on by the students.
Lauren Cipriano, a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Science and Engineering, has been Hecker’s teaching assistant for four years. She noted his class co-taught with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – also a senior FSI fellow and CISAC faculty member – is routinely attended by hundreds of students and rated among the best.
“He shares his own stories of how developing personal relationships with Russian nuclear scientists in the wake of the Cold War helped overcome diplomatic challenges, and how he continues those efforts today in Russia and North Korea to make the world a safer place,” she said in her reception toast. “Sig also has a scary ability to predict the future. Several times our policy paper assignments have nearly come true.”
One of those dramatic examples unfolded in 2010. While the students were writing a paper about how they would respond to the discovery that North Korea had established a uranium enrichment facility, Sig was traveling to Pyongyang.
“Our students were some of the first to hear the stunning news of the uranium enrichment facilities the North Koreans revealed to him on his trip,” she said. “The students couldn’t have been more excited to feel like insiders in the national security policy arena.”
Hecker said he is particularly proud of the bright young scientists who have come through as CISAC fellows during his tenure.
“I think we’ve been able to build a really strong science component to support CISAC’s mission of building a safer world,” Hecker said. “We’ve been able to attract a lot of very good young scientists and then send them on to good careers from here.”
He said that working with these pre- and postdoctoral fellows and visiting faculty and scholars from the life sciences and political sciences “has helped me to better understand how important it is to bring the technical and social sciences together when looking at problems of international security.”
Hecker, who moved to the United States with his family from Austria when he was a boy, received his Ph.D. in metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University and began his professional career as a senior research metallurgist with the General Motors Research Laboratories in 1970. He joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1973, became its director in 1986 and served for more than a decade.
Hecker came to CISAC in 2005 as a visiting professor, having been recruited by Sagan, who was then the social science co-director of CISAC.
“Sig first became involved with CISAC when he was still at Los Alamos, through participating in our Track II nuclear diplomacy efforts with John Lewis in North Korea and with me in a Five Nations project meeting in Thailand,” recalled Sagan. The Five Nations Project on Asian Regional Security and Economic Development focused on new challenges to nuclear nonproliferation by the U.S., China, Russia, India and Pakistan.
“I first broached the possibility of his coming to Stanford as a visiting professor when he and I were in the back seat of a taxi in Bangkok after giving a joint lecture at the Royal Thai Military Academy,” in July 2004, Sagan said. “He has been a stellar leader and now that he is stepping down from administrative responsibilities, he will have even more time to be involved in CISAC’s nuclear nonproliferation activities around the globe."
CISAC co-director, Tino Cuéllar, called himself a “charter member of the national federation of the Sig Hecker fan club.”
“In his eventful, five-year tenure, Sig has been an extraordinary leader,” Cuéllar said. “He’s been a visionary about its future, an endlessly enthusiastic supporter of its varied missions and a role model of excellence combined with the collegiality that CISAC prizes so dearly.
Emeritus History professor Barton J. Bernstein will present a lecture on the U.S. decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan in August 1945. The hour-long lecture will be followed by a Q&A session.
Professor Bernstein's lecture is planned as a response-- partly in agreement and partly in disagreement-- to the noted filmmaker Oliver Stone's documentary, "The Bomb."
History Building (Building 200)
450 Serra Mall
Stanford
Barton J. Bernstein
Professor of History, Emeritus
Speaker
Stanford University
There are three major components of Cyber security from China’s perspective: Internet information management, Civilian cyber security, and Cyber warfare.
The Chinese government worries that misinformation, dissent opinions and dissemination of rumors could cause social instability, and thus overthrow the regime. As a result, the government has taken many approaches to manage the information in cyberspace. Can the Chinese government fully control the information flow? If not, why?
China has 500 million netizens, more than any other country in the world. How do the government and companies deal with privacy and cyber crime?
Cyber attack from China is widely reported in US media. How do Chinese view US cyber warfare capability? Can "Pearl Harbor" happen in cyberspace?
A better understanding of these questions could be helpful for shaping US cyber policies on China.
Ting Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research concerns on space debris problems, ASAT weapons, and cybersecurity in China. Before coming to CISAC in 2011, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University. He received a PhD at the Beihang University in China. His PhD dissertation was titled "Orbital Debris Evolution and Threat to Spacecraft." He also holds a B.A. in aerospace engineering from Beihang University and has worked at the Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering. He was a visiting scholar at the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2003, where he began to be interested in security issues.
