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

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/sFsmjTf9xUg

 

About the Event: Contemporary global politics are marked by a renewed debate over the significance and limits of state sovereignty. In the eyes of many, the COVID-19 pandemic has reasserted the importance of territorial sovereignty as well as of national identity and citizenship. Populations have become more acutely conscious of their rights and responsibilities as members of a particular political community, and their ultimate reliance upon their governments to protect them from the virus. Well before the outbreak of this pandemic, however, many scholars, policy-analysts, and state officials had already been highlighting the ‘return’ of sovereignty, often in juxtaposition to either the transnational economic forces of globalization or liberal international norms. Powerful economic and political trends (including protectionism and populism) were casting doubt on the reach and impact of liberal ideals such as free movement and economic interdependence. In part, these trends reflected a structural shift in international order in which the relative position of the United States was declining, and the standing of non-Western powers with attachment to what is loosely referred to as “Westphalian” sovereignty was increasing. Although some IR scholars have argued that today’s great powers (Russia, China and the US) are espousing and practicing a new form of “extra-legal sovereignty” (Paris 2020), the former two states - in order to garner wider support for their respective world views - regularly appeal to an understanding of sovereignty that underscores long-standing principles of territorial integrity and political independence.

This book project takes a step back, to more critically analyse the period preceding our current debate. Before we can address the question of whether and how Westphalian sovereignty has returned to shape contemporary global order, we should examine more deeply why sovereignty was alleged to have been transformed in the first place. In other words, what was the nature and reach of the post-Westphalian order that was proclaimed by so many in the first decades of the post-Cold War period?  While analysts and commentators have pointed to several manifestations of this changed understanding of sovereignty, I focus on the liberal idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, which, inter alia, seemingly underpinned the articulation in 2005 of the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’. According to this liberal understanding, sovereignty can no longer be conceived as unrivalled control over a delimited territory and the population residing within it – ‘sovereignty as authority’ – but rather as a status and set of rights which are conditional upon certain behaviours and capacities of states. Sovereignty is thus not solely the right of the state to be “undisturbed from without” but the responsibility to perform certain roles and tasks within its frontiers.

The central aim of this study is to examine the rise, contestation, and potential fate of what some have called this “revolutionary” understanding of sovereignty.  I ask three more specific questions. The first is conceptual and draws upon the history of ideas relating to sovereignty. Was the post-Cold War articulation of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ really so novel? Or was it juxtaposing itself to a very particular historical period, during which non-intervention was championed by newly decolonized states? The second set of issues is empirical. How has sovereignty been understood in the post-Cold War period, particularly through practices of intervention and state recognition? Have the key actors in international society spoken and acted in ways consistent with the liberal understanding of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’? And the final set of questions is normative. Is it desirable to understand sovereignty in this way? What are the benefits and limitations of viewing sovereignty as deeply connected with responsibility?

While the book project is organized around these three central themes, my presentation will focus in, for purposes of illustration, on the ‘responsibility to protect’ (RtoP). This chapter assesses the degree to which ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ has been widely accepted and practiced by states in their interpretation and implementation of this principle and, in so doing, seeks to both account for and analyse the nature and impact of the contestation that surrounds RtoP.  The chapter’s findings suggest that a conditional understanding of sovereignty was not necessarily shared or practiced across international society, even during the height of liberal internationalist ‘moment’ of the post-Cold War period - thereby posing a challenge not just to the proponents of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, but also to some of its fiercest critics, who overstate its negative effects on international politics.

I begin by arguing that while the 2005 Summit Outcome Document (SOD) was a significant intergovernmental agreement that provided greater precision about the source, scope, and bearer of the responsibility to protect, its particular formulation indicates that the logic of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ was not fully embraced.  Instead, the text reflected a horizontal logic, associated with respect for sovereign equality and positive international law, rather than a vertical logic that places the international community in a position of authority over states. While the notions of sovereignty and responsibility did come together, they did so in a way that did not override or replace sovereignty in situations of humanitarian emergency, but rather aimed to reinforce sovereignty and support states in protecting their populations.

In a second step, the chapter analyses the types of contestation that have accompanied RtoP’s development, which relate both to procedural matters (such as the appropriate intergovernmental body that should ‘own’ RtoP’s development) and to substantive elements of the principle – including, most notably, the relationship between national and international responsibility. I suggest that RtoP is particularly susceptible to contestation, given its complex structure and inherently indeterminate nature. I also argue that, far from establishing an independent international authority that specifies and enforces state responsibility, the most that RtoP creates within its so-called third pillar is a responsibility to consider a real or imminent crisis involving atrocity crimes - what in legal literature is sometimes called a ‘duty of conduct’.

In the final section of the chapter, I contend that the contestation surrounding RtoP can be better understood by giving greater attention to the normative underpinnings of contemporary critiques of the principle, most notably those which stress the importance of sovereignty equality. Given that RtoP has continued to be associated – rightly or wrongly – with the use of military force, it has frequently generated sharp debate among states about the meaning of sovereignty, and efforts to assert the continuing power of the principle of non-intervention. The result of this contestation, and the reshaping of RtoP by non-Western states such as China, has been a dampening of the original cosmopolitan roots of the principle and an increased focus on maintaining strong and capable states. In short, while RtoP has created a linkage in international discourse and practice between sovereignty and responsibility, it has not given effect to the liberal understanding of sovereignty as responsibility.

 

 

 

About the Speaker: Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. She was previously Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect.

Professor Welsh is the author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on humanitarian intervention, the evolution of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ in international society, the UN Security Council, norm conflict and contestation, and Canadian foreign policy.

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

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/5616166186207/WN_Zdzl0PrwR7CXSPoASOs5Xg

 

About the Event: Conventional wisdom on proxy warfare exclusively focuses on explaining governments’ provision of military, logistical, and financial support to rebel groups involved in conflict abroad. In reality, foreign militant groups play a much larger role in these partnerships than recognized: foreign militants often provide government partners with intelligence, logistical support, access to their military infrastructure, and send elite units to train and supplement their state partner’s troops. Because armed non-state actors are smaller and face greater difficulties accessing resources, the fact that they provide any type of support – let alone deploying their forces to conduct joint combat operations with state armed forces abroad – is puzzling. In this presentation, I provide insights into the strategic benefits that foreign militants receive from supporting states, identify factors that influence the types of support foreign militants provide to government partners once the decision to provide support has been made, and highlight how foreign militants can constrain and influence their government partners’ future behavior. To do so, I conduct an in-depth examination of the overtime trends in the various types of support that Shia paramilitary groups from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan provided to the Syrian regime and Russian forces throughout the course of the decade-long Syrian conflict.

 

 

About the Speaker: Melissa Carlson is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s Middle East Initiative. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. Her research examines cooperation between states and non-state actors in conflict, and her book manuscript explains variations in the types of support that governments and foreign militants provide to each other. Previously, Melissa has worked with the International Organization of Migration’s Missions in Jordan and Iraq to examine relations between refugees, host governments, and aid organizations.

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

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/t4xteN7N99U

 

About the Event: In The State from Below, we seek to understand democracy through ground-up knowledge of the state. We use a new technology and civic infrastructure, Portals, to initiate conversations about policing in communities where these forms of state action are concentrated.  Portals are virtual chambers where people in disparate communities can converse as if in the same room.  Based on over 850 recorded and transcribed conversations across fourteen neighborhoods in five cities – the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of the police to date – we analyze patterns in political discourse.  We reveal four currents that challenge liberal-democratic framings of political life:  that an arrangement of distorted responsiveness characterizes the relationship between policed communities and the state; that the political desire of policed communities is not for greater engagement and responsiveness but for political recognition – to be known by the state; and that in contrast to prevailing wisdom about uninformed electorates, these citizens have too much knowledge of and too little power vis-à-vis state representatives.  Finally, we observe among policed communities an “ethics of aversion” in their political responses, a belief that power is best achieved by receding from state institutions in the short term and forging their own collective, community autonomy in the long term. At a broader level, we observe that it is not exclusion from democratic institutions that characterizes political inequality in our time, but inclusion in what we call racial authoritarianism, and the experience of misrecognition that results.

 

 

About the Speaker: Vesla Mae Weaver is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. 

She has contributed to scholarly debates around the persistence of racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons and police power for race-class subjugated communities. She is co-author with Amy Lerman of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, the first large-scale empirical study of what the tectonic shifts in incarceration and policing meant for political and civic life in communities where it was concentrated. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (with J. Hochschild and T. Burch). She is at work on a new book, The State From Below, based on the largest archive of policing narratives using an innovative civic infrastructure called Portals (https://www.portalspolicingproject.com).

China Chats with Stanford Faculty

The Rise of Robots in China with Professor Hongbin Li

China’s production and adoption of robotic technology have accelerated rapidly in recent years, surpassing Japan, US, and Germany. Stanford professor Hongbin Li and a team of scholars draw on multi-year field research data to show fresh insights into China’s aggressive push into automation—specifically, the increasing use of robots—to maintain its status as the “world’s factory.” His analysis offers an unprecedented look at what’s happening at the factory level, and fresh insight into how rising labor costs, an aging population and government policies are reshaping Chinese manufacturing.

In this Stanford alumni event, Hongbin Li, co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, was joined by Scott Rozelle, co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who moderated a discussion about the major themes of the research. 

Watch the event recording:

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About the Speakers:

Hongbin Li is the Co-Director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions (SCCEI) and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He also founded and served as the Executive Associate Director of the China Social and Economic Data Center at Tsinghua University. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world . He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

 

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the China Center for Agricultural Policy in Peking University. In recent years Rozelle spends most of his time co-directing the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premier Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner. 

This seminar has been cancelled. Please join us for our next seminar in the series with Professor Albert Park on April 27, 2021.

Controlling the Narrative with Professor Joseph Piotroski, Stanford University

This seminar provides an overview of corporate news reporting in China, with a focus on understanding the political and market-based incentives behind Chinese newspapers' biased coverage of China's listed companies. And, given these prevailing incentives, we will explore how politicians in China use the Party's flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily, to coordinate the reporting of corporate news in China.

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About the Speaker

Joseph Piotroski is the Robert K. Jaedicke Professor of Accounting at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and a Senior Fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER). Professor Piotroski earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999, an MBA from Indiana University in 1994, a BS in Accounting from the University of Illinois in 1989, and worked as a tax consultant for Coopers and Lybrand in Chicago. His research focuses on corporate transparency, governance, and regulation in a global context. His current research examines the impact of legal, political, and regulatory forces on capital market behavior and corporate decision-making, most notably in China and other emerging economies. His research has been published in scholarly journals in the areas of accounting, finance, and economics, and his research on value investing has been frequently cited in the popular press and is widely used in practice. 

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Seminar Series Moderators:

Scott Rozelle holds the Helen Farnsworth Endowed Professorship at Stanford University and is Senior Fellow in the Food Security and Environment Program and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies. For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In recent years Rozelle spends most of his time co-directing the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner. 

Hongbin Li is the James Liang Director of the China Program at the Stanford King Center on Global Development, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

 

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Register Here

Register once to receive the Zoom meeting link that will be used for all lectures in this series.

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

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/-hERfg-DCYw

 

About the Event: 

This presentation explores two topics at the nexus of technology and international security: interstate influence operations and technological revolutions.

After Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, influence operations have become a central focus among American policymakers, foreign policy pundits, and publics alike. Yet, Goldstein argues that they remain under-explored and under-theorized in international security studies, with disagreement over how to define the phenomenon implicit in the existing literature. Goldstein will introduce a conceptual framework for foreign influence operations and argue that security studies scholars should pay greater attention to the subject for two reasons. First, they are policy-relevant and likely to remain so; they are cost effective, propagandists are prone to inflate their impact, and they are difficult to deter. Second, studying influence operations can contribute to the academic discipline of security studies by helping to expand restrictive notions of state power and challenge dominant models of foreign policy decision-making.

How do emerging technologies affect the rise and fall of great powers? Scholars have long observed that rounds of technological revolution disrupt the economic balance of power, bringing about a power transition in the international system. However, there has been limited investigation of how this process occurs. The standard explanation emphasizes a country’s ability to dominate innovation in leading sectors, seizing monopoly profits in new, fast-growing industries centered around major technological breakthroughs. Investigating historical cases of industrial revolutions followed by economic power transitions, Ding will present an alternative mechanism based on the diffusion of general-purpose technologies. The findings have direct implications for how recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could affect the U.S.-China power balance.

 

About the Speakers: 

Jeffrey Ding is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Jeffrey’s current research is centered on how technological change affects the rise and fall of great powers. Through investigating historical cases of industrial revolutions, Jeffrey traces causal mechanisms that connect significant technical breakthroughs and economic power transitions — with an eye toward the implications of advances in AI for a possible U.S.-China power transition. Jeffrey’s previous research covered related topics, including China's development of AI, identifying strategic goods and technologies, and technical standards as a vehicle of AI governance.

 

Josh A. Goldstein is a PhD Candidate and Clarendon Scholar in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. For the 2020-2021 year, he is a pre-doctoral fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory and part of the inaugural class of non-resident Hans J. Morgenthau Fellows at the Notre Dame International Security Center. Josh’s 3-paper doctoral dissertation takes a multi-method approach to studying the challenges that democracies face from influence operations. His broader research interests lie in international security, political psychology, and foreign policy-decision making.

 

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

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/Mwjn39S48rE

 

About the Event: NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg will speak about how the transatlantic alliance is adapting to change in this turbulent period.  President Biden has clearly signaled that he is resolved to reach out to the NATO allies, working to repair the trans-Atlantic bond. To strengthen the bond between America and Europe and prepare the alliance for the future, the Secretary General has launched the NATO 2030 initiative.  This includes proposals on how NATO can better harness technology and innovation, tackle the security implications of climate change, and help make our societies more resilient. While NATO must continue to deter and defend against Russia, it is also keeping channels open to Moscow. The rise of China presents both challenges and opportunities that NATO has started to address. And missions in Afghanistan and Iraq are on the cusp of change, with decisions underway about what role NATO will play in the future. All in all, an exciting time to hear from NATO’s Secretary General.

This event is co-sponsored with The Europe Center.

 

About the Speaker: 

Jens Stoltenberg became NATO Secretary General in October 2014, following a distinguished international and domestic career. As a former Prime Minister of Norway and UN Special Envoy, Mr. Stoltenberg has been a strong supporter of greater global and transatlantic cooperation. Mr. Stoltenberg’s mandate as NATO Secretary General has been extended until the end of September 2022.

Under Mr. Stoltenberg’s leadership, NATO has responded to a more challenging security environment by implementing the biggest reinforcement of its collective defence since the Cold War, increasing the readiness of its forces and deploying combat troops in the eastern part of the Alliance. He believes in credible deterrence and defence while maintaining dialogue with Russia. He has also advocated for increased defence spending and better burden sharing within the Alliance, and a greater focus on innovation. NATO has also stepped up its efforts in the fight against terrorism. He strongly supports a partnership approach, with cooperation between NATO and the European Union reaching unprecedented levels.

Before coming to NATO, he was the UN Special Envoy on Climate Change from 2013 to 2014. He has also chaired UN High-level Panels on climate financing and the coherence between development, humanitarian assistance and environmental policies.

As Prime Minister of Norway, Mr. Stoltenberg increased the defence spending and transformed the Norwegian armed forces with new high-end capabilities and investments. He also signed an agreement with Russia on establishing maritime borders in the Barents and Polar Sea, ending a 30-years dispute.

Mr. Stoltenberg was also Prime Minister during the deadly terrorist attacks, which killed 77 people in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011, urging in response, “more democracy, more openness, and more humanity, but never naïvete”.

Mr Stoltenberg holds a postgraduate degree in Economics from the University of Oslo. After graduating in 1987, he held a research post at the National Statistical Institute of Norway, before embarking on a career in Norwegian politics.

• 2005-2013: Prime Minister of Norway
• 2002-2014: Leader of the Norwegian Labor Party
• 2000-2001: Prime Minister of Norway
• 1996-1997: Minister of Finance
• 1993-1996: Minister of Industry and Energy
• 1991-2014: Member of Parliament
• 1990-1991: State Secretary at the Ministry of the Environment
• 1985-1989: Leader of the Norwegian Labour Youth

Jens Stoltenberg was born in Oslo on 16 March 1959. He is married to Ingrid Schulerud. They have two grown-up children.