THIS EVENT STARTS AT 1:50PM. Introductions will start at 1:50pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes with a 10 minute discussion.

 

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

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Uoa_Nef3RAu1JAfPRDTg2A

 

About the Event: Russia harbors both real and imagined grievances against the West. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin has accumulated a litany of complaints – spanning NATO enlargement to liberal hegemony, economic sanctions to cultural degeneracy – and amplified them with renewed fervor at home and abroad. Despite the resurgence of resentment politics in Russia, China, and Iran, few studies have examined the phenomenon of national grievance narratives. This thesis fills the gap with a study on the sources and strategic aims of Russia’s grievances against the West. An original dataset of 471 grievances, created by surveying hundreds of Russian presidential speeches, interviews, and strategic documents, charts Russia’s grievance narrative since 1991. Contrary to conventional assumptions, grievance narratives do not reflect the genuine foreign policy interests of the state. A fifth of the grievances in the dataset are neither reliable nor merely rhetorical, but rather instrumental to a revisionist Russian foreign policy. Instrumental grievances, a term this thesis introduces, are tactical complaints that state actors exploit to undermine, challenge, or gain leverage over an adversary. An in-depth case study on Russia’s long-standing grievance against NATO suggests the Russian political elite inflate national security threats to serve their geopolitical ambitions and domestic political interests. Consequently, policymakers should interpret Russia’s grievance narrative with caution and skepticism. When policymakers mistake an instrumental grievance for harmless rhetoric or, worse, genuine offense, they overlook the subversive ways that Russia exploits the grievance to deceive and undermine the West.

 

About the Speaker: Yasmin is an international student from the UK studying History and Economics at Stanford. Since visiting Russia three times and studying the language, she has developed a deep interest in the country and turned to historical analysis to help make sense of Russian foreign policy.

Introductions will start at 2:40pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes with a 10 minute discussion.

 

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

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Y4kF9dTJTJinogbJqvNSpw

 

About the Event: How do Chinese state media partnerships impact perceptions of China in East Asia and the Pacific? Chinese state media groups form partnerships to publish content in local outlets, reaching foreign audiences through trusted sources. Previous scholars identify media partnerships as the most impactful form of Beijing’s public diplomacy, but do not investigate which factors moderate this influence. This thesis analyzes the relationship between partnerships and approval of China in 12 countries using an original dataset of 98 partnerships from 2006-2020. By recording the size of partner groups, strength of ties, and language of publication, this this investigation differentiates itself from previous studies. Partnerships are collectively associated with increasing approval and decreasing disapproval of China, but surprisingly the most influential partnerships are with small, Chinese language media groups. These results contradict the conventional logic that partnerships with larger, multilingual media would have greater impact. An interview with a Xinhua journalist and case studies of media organizations in Thailand and Australia suggest that small, Chinese language platforms are uniquely vulnerable to influence from PRC state media. Policymakers must support independent publishers to prevent the consolidation of the Chinese language media ecosystem.

 

About the Speaker: Dylan is a senior studying international relations and human rights. After researching disinformation for the Department of Defense and working for a journalism-tech startup, Dylan chose to investigate Chinese state media partnerships in East Asia and the Pacific. After graduation, he will move to D.C. and work as a Junior Fellow at the Stimson Center.

THIS EVENT STARTS AT 2:40PM. Introductions will start at 2:40pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes with a 10 minute discussion.

 

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

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Y4kF9dTJTJinogbJqvNSpw

 

About the Event: How do U.S. and UN targeted sanctions impact the behavior and strategies of militant groups? Despite several theories on the use of sanctions to punish non-state actors, scholars have largely neglected the impact of targeted sanction application on militant group behavior. This thesis combines an original dataset of 160 U.S. and UN sanction regimes with data on the activity of over 600 militant groups to examine the relationship between sanction imposition and militant activity. The results show mixed impact of sanctions on militant activity. While UN targeted sanctions precipitate falls in militant activity, unilateral U.S. sanctions are associated with a significant increase in violence committed by sanctioned groups. Comparative analysis of two militant groups in India –The National Democratic Front of Bodoland and Hizbul Mujahideen– explores the causality of this finding. U.S. sanctions strip militant groups of international legitimacy but often fail to limit their availability to resources. As a result, U.S. sanctions reduce the incentives of non-state actors to seek international recognition and constrain the forms of violence and insurgency they employ. This thesis illustrates the importance of international cooperation in ensuring targeted sanctions effectively limit the operating capabilities of militant groups.

 

About the Speaker: Nathalie is a senior from Kansas City, Kansas, studying Economics and Political Science. Her experiences working for the World Bank and studying at Oxford have made her passionate about the intersection of economic development, human rights, and violence prevention. After graduation, she plans on conducting economic analysis for the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity in Washington, D.C.

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
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The strategic competition between India and China has turned deadly in the Himalayas, but the stakes may be higher elsewhere, in the Bay of Bengal. While India gradually fortifies its island outposts in the Bay, China is preparing for a long-term naval presence there. Both countries are scrambling to build security cooperation with littoral states, especially Bangladesh and Myanmar. This webinar will explore what makes the Bay of Bengal a particularly important sub-region of the Indo-Pacific. It will consider how China’s growing political and military influence poses security risks for India, and how India and its partners – including the United States and the Quad – can build resilience and deterrence in the Bay of Bengal.  

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC's spring webinar series "The United States in the Biden Era: Views from Asia."

When this webinar is held, Joe Biden’s presidency will be exactly three months old. Enough time to allow for the evaluation of his administration, its policies, and his country by observers around the world, including in Southeast Asia. Ms. Ha will share and interpret the findings of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s latest annual survey of elite Southeast Asian opinions regarding the United States and other nations, which she co-led and co-wrote up with ISEAS colleagues.  Professor Liow will will share some observations on regional views on the Biden administration thus far, focusing on its evolving approach to the region .  Regional impressions and judgments of America now and prior to Biden’s term will also be contrasted, alongside the changing reputations of other countries such as China and Japan.  Policy implications will be drawn as well, especially in light of the unfolding political crisis in Myanmar.

Hoang Thi HA is Fellow and Lead Researcher on Political-Security Affairs at the ASEAN Studies Centre of ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. Her research focuses on political-security issues within ASEAN, including the South China Sea disputes, ASEAN human rights cooperation, ASEAN's relations with the major powers and ASEAN's institutional building. Ms. Hoang worked at the ASEAN Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam and the ASEAN Secretariat before joining ISEAS. She holds an MA in International Relations from the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam.

Joseph Chinyong Liow is Dean of College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he is also Tan Kah Kee Chair in Comparative and International Politics, and Research Advisor and former Dean at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He held the inaugural Lee Kuan Yew Chair in Southeast Asia Studies at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC, where he was also a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program.

Joseph’s research interests encompass Muslim politics and social movements in Southeast Asia and the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the Asia-Pacific region.

Joseph is the author, co-author, or editor of 14 books, has testified before the U.S. Congress, and has extensive teaching and consultancy experience. He sits on several editorial boards and governing boards of think tanks, and on the Social Science Research Council of Singapore.

 

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

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/L04_-G6N7Go

 

About the Event: What can wargames tell us about the ethics of decision-making under the threat of nuclear escalation? The “Cold War Game” (CWG) that took place from 1954-1956 at the RAND Corporation offers insights into the origins of deterrence and the dilemmas of contemplating the possible futures of war with rare events or little empirical data through the method of gaming. Based on extensive archival research at RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, this project identifies the methodological and epistemological issues faced by early systems analysts and social scientists in attempting to link political and economic issues to traditional military wargaming in the nuclear era. The CWG sought to both quantify the non-rational or social dimensions of nuclear decision-making as well as develop psychological insights, to recognize the ways that propaganda and psychology were used as techniques of warfare alongside the quantitative and rational analytics of game theory. I argue that discussions of the ethics of nuclear weapons were sidelined throughout the Cold War for nuclear strategists and my questions examine how ethics functioned even it its absence of explicit discourse. Nevertheless, a kind of ethical restraint became implicit throughout the CWG that tempered even the most bellicose players through the process of physical play by forcing strategists to face the weight of their decisions. Differing epistemological approaches to the game from the social science division and the mathematics/economics division at RAND offers a unique empirical test to compare qualitative and quantitative approaches to wargaming operating within the same context of uncertainty in the early Cold War period. The conclusions of this study offers insights for contemporary dilemmas of AI and wargaming the future of war today. Ultimately, the project offers both an in-depth look at the origins of the political-military wargames and interjects with the larger questions of how abstraction and technostrategic language enables and constrains the acceptable discourse for decision-making in the face of nuclear brinksmanship.

 

 

About the Speaker: John R. Emery is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine and then became a Tobis Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality at UC Irvine. His research agenda is at the intersection of security studies, ethics of war, and science and technology studies. His previous work on drones, ethics, AI, and counter-terrorism has been published in Law & Policy, Critical Military Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, and Peace Review. His current research agenda explores issues of human-machine interaction in the U.S. national security context analyzing both historical and contemporary cases.

On Wednesday, May 26 at 10 am pacific time, please join Andrew Grotto, Director of Stanford’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance, for a conversation with Nicole Perlroth, New York Times Cybersecurity Reporter, about the underground market for cyber-attack capabilities.

In her book “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race,” Perlroth argues that the United States government became the world's dominant hoarder of one of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, the zero-day vulnerability. After briefly cornering the market, in her account, the United States then lost control of its hoard and the market.

Perlroth and Grotto, a former Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the White House in both the Obama and Trump Administrations, will talk about the development and evolution of this market, and what it portends about the future of conflict in cyberspace and beyond.

This event is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Cyber Policy Center.

Praise for “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends”: “Perlroth's terrifying revelation of how vulnerable American institutions and individuals are to clandestine cyberattacks by malicious hackers is possibly the most important book of the year . . . Perlroth's precise, lucid, and compelling presentation of mind-blowing disclosures about the underground arms race a must-read exposé.” —Booklist, starred review

Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program, Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan

Shocking events obliterate context.  The coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 is a case in point.  Who could imagine the cruelty of the Burmese generals who on February 1^st 2021 grabbed power and proceeded to retain it by arresting thousands and murdering hundreds of its local opponents?  Who expected that on February 2^nd the country’s youth would launch a nonviolent Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) and keep it going and growing against such massively intimidating odds?  In this webinar, two experts will provide the essential but all too often missing contexts—current and historical, domestic and foreign, political and socioeconomic—within which the crisis can be understood, its future projected, and its implications assessed.  To those ends, the on-the-ground knowledge, personal experience, and close observer’s insights of Burmese scholar Moe Thuzar will interact with the insights of American professor David Steinberg based on his Burmese experiences and scholarship dating back into the 20^th century.

The webinar will consider in particular what the coup and its aftermath may imply for Southeast Asia and its relations with China.  Relevant in that regard is the involvement of all four panel members in a recent collection, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21^st Century—Steinberg and Ciorciari as authors, Emmerson as editor, and ­­Thuzar as an analyst who is using the book in her own research. 

David I. Steinberg is Distinguished Professor of Asian Studies Emeritus, Georgetown University, where he directed its Asian studies program (1997-2007). Other positions he has held include the presidency of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs and Southeast Asia-related US foreign-policy posts as a member of the Senior Foreign Service. He has also represented The Asia Foundation in South Korea, Burma, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.  His 15 books and monographs include one translation, more than 150 articles, and several hundred op-eds.. Among these books are: Myanmar: The Dynamics of an Evolving Polity (ed., 2015); Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013, 2^nd edition); Modern China-Myanmar Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual Dependence (with Fan Hongwei, 2012); Turmoil in Burma: Contested Legitimacies in Myanmar (2006); Burma: The State of Myanmar (2001); and Burma’s Road to Development (1981). His expertise includes the two Koreas, about which he has written widely. Professor Steinberg was educated at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Harvard University, Darmouth College, and Lingnan University in Canton (now Guangzhou), China.

Moe Thuzar joined the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore in 2008. Her responsibilities there have included managing or co-managing its Myanmar Studies Programme, serving as a lead researcher in its ASEAN Studies Centre, and helping the Centre engage with Myanmar regarding its turn to chair ASEAN in 2014. She spent the 2019-2020 academic year as a Fox International Fellow at Yale University's MacMillan Center researching the socio-cultural underpinnings of Burma’s Cold War foreign policy for her National University of Singapore PhD. Earlier she worked for a decade at the ASEAN Secretariat, where she headed its Human Development Unit. Her many publications include, as co-author, the 2020 and 2019 editions of ISEAS’s widely read State of Southeast Asia: Survey Report. Other recent writing includes chapters and articles in ASEAN-EU Partnerships: The Untold Story (ed., 2020); the Journal of Southeast Asian Economies (2019); Southeast Asian Affairs (ed., 2019); Human Security Norms in East Asia (ed., 2019); and, as co-author, ASEAN’s Myanmar Dilemma (with Lex Rieffel, 2018). Earlier works include Myanmar: Life After Nargis (with Pavin Chachavalpongpun, 2009).

Co-moderated by John Ciorciari, Director, Weiser Diplomacy Center, University of Michigan, and Donald K. Emmerson, Director, Southeast Asia Program, Stanford University