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. 

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As the Chinese government has set out to harness the growing strength of the Chinese technology sector to bolster its military, policymakers in the United States have reacted with mounting alarm. U.S. officials have described Beijing’s civil-military fusion effort as a “malign agenda” that represents a “global security threat.” And as China’s defense capabilities have grown, some Western policymakers have started to wonder whether the United States needs to adopt its own version of civil-military fusion, embracing a top-down approach to developing cutting-edge technologies with military applications.

Read more at Foreign Affairs 

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A new shadow war is underway within the International Telecommunication Union, one of the obscure organizations that sets global technical standards.

International standard-setting is a morass of positive intentions and poor execution. When the process works well, it selects the best technologies based on merit and, for example, allows people to use their personal cellphone numbers anywhere on Earth. When the system fails, we end up with different electrical outlets in each country and scramble for adapters.

Read more at The Los Angeles Times

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Prime Minister Theresa May’s political fortunes may be waning in Britain, but her push to make internet companies police their users’ speech is alive and well. In the aftermath of the recent London attacks, Ms. May called platforms like Google and Facebook breeding grounds for terrorism. She has demanded that they build tools to identify and remove extremist content. Leaders of the Group of 7 countries recently suggested the same thing. Germany wants to fine platforms up to 50 million euros if they don’t quickly take down illegal content. And a European Union draft law would make YouTube and other video hosts responsible for ensuring that users never share violent speech.

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Daphne Keller
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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event:

On November 3, in the midst of a pandemic, America elects its next President. CDDRL scholars will discuss the election results (or election challenges), Trump and Biden, key Congressional races, and what to expect between November and Inauguration Day. Join Bruce Cain, Nate Persily, Hakeem Jefferson, and Didi Kuo.

About the Speakers:

Bruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph D from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and Executive Director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform.

Hakeem Jefferson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research interests move at the intersection of American politics and social psychology. In particular, his current work examines the conditions under which members of stigmatized groups punish group members who transgress social norms. Moving beyond a study of identity that centers largely on the attitudes and predilections of dominant social groups, his work explores the psychological and instrumental considerations stigmatized individuals bring to bear in response to “bad” (negatively stereotyped) behavior from within their own group. Using African-Americans as the test case, this work builds on scholarship about the politics of respectability and in-group policing to inform conversations about Blacks’ attitudes toward punitive social policies.

Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law 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. Her recent work examines changes to party organization, and the impact these changes have on the ability of governments to address challenges posed by global capitalism. She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines the role of business against clientelism and the development of modern political parties in the nineteenth-century.

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

Bruce Cain Professor of Political Science at Stanford University
Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875
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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
Professor, by courtesy, Communication
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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Hakeem Jefferson Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University

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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Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.
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Daphne Keller's work focuses on platform regulation and Internet users' rights. She has testified before legislatures, courts, and regulatory bodies around the world, and published both academically and in popular press on topics including platform content moderation practices, constitutional and human rights law, copyright, data protection, and national courts' global takedown orders. Her recent work focuses on legal protections for users’ free expression rights when state and private power intersect, particularly through platforms’ enforcement of Terms of Service or use of algorithmic ranking and recommendations. Until 2020, Daphne was the Director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. She also served until 2015 as Associate General Counsel for Google, where she had primary responsibility for the company’s search products. Daphne has taught Internet law at Stanford, Berkeley, and Duke law schools. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, Brown University, and Head Start.

Daphne blogs about platform regulation and Internet users' rights.

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We are happy to share that Oriana Skylar Mastro, an incoming FSI Center Fellow at APARC, has been awarded the 2020 America in the World Consortium Prize for Best Policy Article on U.S. Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy for her article, “The Stealth Superpower: How China Hid Its Global Ambitions” in Foreign Affairs. The award is given annually by the Consortium — which includes the Kissinger Center and Johns Hopkins SAIS, Duke University, and the University of Texas at Austin — for research articles by pre-tenure scholars addressing a major issue of American foreign policy.

Mastro's winning article provides an insightful analysis of the careful, deliberate efforts the PRC has undertaken to obscure its growing global influence. “Although Beijing has pursued an indirect and entrepreneurial strategy of accumulating power,” she writes, “make no mistake: the ultimate goal is to push the United States out of the Indo-Pacific and rival it on the global stage.” Her research as an academic and a United States Air Force Reserve officer focuses on rising global powers and how perceptions of power impact the process and precursors to conflict, particularly in regards to China and East Asian security. As an FSI Center Fellow, she will be based at APARC and also work with CISAC. 

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Mastro describes how the current administration in China epitomizes Deng Xiaoping’s counsel to “Hide your strength, bide your time” by exploiting gaps in international policy and American attention. Rather than compete outright, China leverages ambiguities in existing policies and practices in order to further its agenda and ambitions while still remaining within the rubric of international order. This strategy has allowed it to continue in its assertions in the South China Sea, establish rules on technology like AI that favor Chinese companies while stalling consensus on other issues like cybersecurity and “cyber-sovereignty,” and create a network of economic and political partnerships with nations traditionally outside the United State’s purview.

The result is that China is carefully cultivating a quiet but hugely impactful influence across the globe. To counter this strategy, Mastro urges the United States to lead out on the world stage by increasing its participation in international institutions and agreements, and through deepening and diversifying its relationships with allies and partners. In a time when international tensions are increasing and a pivotal election looms, these perspectives couldn’t be more timely.

Congratulations, Oriana, on the recognition for your excellent research and insight!

Read Oriana’s award-winning article here >>

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Portrait of Oriana Mastro with text: "Q&A with Oriana Skylar Mastro"
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FSI’s Incoming Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro Discusses Chinese Ambitions, Deteriorating U.S.-China Relations

Mastro, whose appointment as a Center Fellow at Shorenstein APARC begins on August 1, considers the worsening relations between the world’s two largest economies, analyzes Chinese maritime ambitions, and talks about her military career and new research projects.
FSI’s Incoming Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro Discusses Chinese Ambitions, Deteriorating U.S.-China Relations
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APARC Announces Diversity Grant to Support Underrepresented Minority Students Interested in Contemporary Asia

To encourage Stanford students from underrepresented minorities to engage in study and research of topics related to contemporary Asia, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is offering a new Diversity Grant opportunity. Application reviews begin on September 1, 2020.
APARC Announces Diversity Grant to Support Underrepresented Minority Students Interested in Contemporary Asia
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[left: image] Oriana Skylar Mastro, [right: text] Congratulations, Oriana Skylar Mastro, Recipient of the 2020 America in the World Consortium Prize for 'Best Policy Article' from Duke University, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Texas University at Austin
Oriana Skylar Mastro, recipient of the 2020 America in the World Consortium Prize for 'Best Policy Article' from Duke University, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Texas University at Austin.
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Mastro, who begins her role as FSI Center Fellow on August 1, has won the AWC Best Policy Article on U.S. Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy award for her insights on how China leverages ambiguity to gain global influence and what the United States can do to counter the PRC’s ambitions.

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Concluding Chapter of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, forthcoming September 2020)

Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A. Tucker

To some extent, it has been the best of times and the worst of times when it comes to social media research. As the first half of this book reveals, we are beginning to gain important insights into the dynamics of the communication revolution underway. However, despite these achievements and the widely recognized importance of this research, unique constraints have hindered the necessary concerted academic effort to answer the most important empirical questions. The key social media datasets to answer these important questions are not as readily available as were politically relevant datasets of years past. Moreover, unique legal barriers prevent analysis of such data, and related ethical and privacy concerns have arisen that have chilled academic inquiry...

For the full chapter, download below:

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This event will take place on Zoom. Registration is required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Gx87y_GDR7aZmt74JWKosg

Recent commentary about what the Intelligence Community told or should have told the President about Russian support to the Taliban has presented a distorted and incomplete view of the roles of intelligence and intelligence professionals. FSI Fellow Thomas Fingar will describe how the process of providing intelligence to policy makers is supposed to work and who decides what intelligence is given to which senior officials. As Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, Fingar was in charge of the President’s Daily Brief from 2005-2008. From 1994 through 2005, he was responsible for the Secretary’s Morning [Intelligence] Summary and other analytic products for the Secretary of State. FSI Senior Fellow Amy Zegart will serve as commentator and moderator. Zegart is a professor of political science (by courtesy), and served on the Clinton administration’s National Security Council staff and as a foreign policy adviser to the Bush‑Cheney 2000 presidential campaign.

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