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FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

Lunch Seminar Series | The DigiChina Project on Digital Policy and U.S.–China Relations

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Abstract:

China’s cyberspace and technology regime is going through a period of change—but it’s taking a while. The U.S.–China economic and tech competition both influences Chinese government developments and awaits their outcomes, and the 2017 Cybersecurity Law set up a host of still-unresolved questions. Data governance, security standards, market access, compliance, and other questions saw only modest new clarity in 2019. But 2020 promises new laws on personal information protection and data security, and the Stanford-based DigiChina Project in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, is devoted to monitoring, translating, and explaining these developments. From AI governance to the the nexus of cybersecurity and supply chains, this talk will summarize recent Chinese policymaking and lay out expectations for the year to come.

Graham Webster
About the Speaker:

Graham Webster is editor in chief of the Stanford–New America DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and a China digital economy fellow at New America. He was previously a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale Law School, where he was responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center’s U.S.–China Track 2 and Track 1.5 dialogues for five years before leading programming on cyberspace and technology issues. In the past, he wrote a CNET News blog on technology and society from Beijing, worked at the Center for American Progress, and taught East Asian politics at NYU's Center for Global Affairs. Webster holds a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Webster also writes the independent Transpacifica e-mail newsletter.

Graham Webster

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Research Scholar
Graham Webster

Graham Webster is a research scholar in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He researches, writes, and teaches on technology policy in China and US-China relations.

Before bringing DigiChina to Stanford in 2019, he was its cofounder and coordinating editor at New America, where he was a China digital economy fellow. From 2012 to 2017, Webster worked for Yale Law School as a senior fellow and lecturer responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center’s Track II dialogues between the United States and China and co-taught seminars on contemporary China and Chinese law and policy. While there, he was an affiliated fellow with the Yale Information Society Project, a visiting scholar at China Foreign Affairs University, and a Transatlantic Digital Debates fellow with New America and the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He was previously an adjunct instructor teaching East Asian politics at New York University and a Beijing-based journalist writing on the Internet in China for CNET News. 

In recent years, Webster's writing has been published in MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, Slate, The Wire China, The Information, Tech Policy Press, and Foreign Policy. He has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg and spoken to NPR and BBC World Service. Webster has testified before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and speaks regularly at universities and conferences in North America, East Asia, and Europe. His chapter, "What Is at Stake in the US–China Technological Relationship?" appears in The China Questions II (Harvard University Press, 2022).

Webster holds a bachelor's in journalism and international studies from Northwestern University and a master's in East Asian studies from Harvard University. He took doctoral coursework in political science at the University of Washington and language training at Tsinghua University, Peking University, Stanford University, and Kanda University of International Studies.

Editor-in-Chief, DigiChina
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Cyber Reading Group Seminar: Process and Prospects for the UN Group of Government Experts and the UN Open-Ended Working Group

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Multilateral Negotiations on ICTs (information and communications technologies) and International Security: Process and Prospects for the UN Group of Government Experts and the UN Open-Ended Working Group

Abstract: The intent of this seminar is to provide an update on recent events at the UN relevant to international discussions of cybersecurity (and a primer of sorts on current UN processes for addressing this topic).

In 2018, UN Member States decided to establish two concurrent negotiations with nearly identical mandates on the international security dimension of ICTs—a sixth limited membership UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and an Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) open to all governments. How did this happen? Are they competing or complementary endeavors? Is it likely that one will be able to bridge the longstanding divides on how international law applies to cyberspace or agree by consensus to additional norms of responsible State behavior? What would be a good outcome of each process? And how do these negotiations fit into the wider UN ecosystem, including the follow-up to the Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation.  

Kerstin Vignard
About the Speaker: Kerstin Vignard is an international security policy professional with nearly 25 years’ experience at the United Nations, with a particular interest in the nexus of international security policy and technology. Vignard is Deputy to the Director at UNIDIR, currently on temporary assignment leading UNIDIR’s team supporting the Chairmen of the latest Group of Governmental Experts (GGEs) on Cyber Security and the Open-Ended Working Group. She has led UNIDIR’s team supporting four previous cyber GGEs. From 2013 to 2018, she initiated and led UNIDIR’s work on the weaponization of increasingly autonomous technologies, and is the co-Principal Investigator of a CIFAR AI & Society grant examining potential regulatory approaches for security and defence applications of AI.

CNN Perspective with Andy Grotto: Why unlocking Apple iPhones for law enforcement isn't the answer

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Despite pressure from President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr, Apple continues to stand its ground and refuses to re-engineer iPhones so law enforcement can unlock the devices. Apple has maintained that it has done everything required by law and that creating a "backdoor" would undermine cybersecurity and privacy for iPhone users everywhere.

Apple is right to stand firm in its position that building a "backdoor" could put user data at risk.

At its most basic, encryption is the act of converting plaintext (like a credit card number) into unintelligible ciphertext using a very large, random number called a key. Anyone with the key can convert the ciphertext back to plaintext. Persons without the key cannot, meaning that even if they acquire the ciphertext, it should still be impossible for them to discover the meaning of the underlying plaintext.

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Andrew Grotto

Video: Thomas Fingar on Past and Present Milestones in U.S.-China Relations

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In a recent interview with People's Daily Online, APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar reflects on some of the milestones in the developing and diversifying relationship between the United States and China over the past forty years. The interview is part of a series of short documentaries produced by People's Daily Online West USA to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and China in 1979. The series was premiered at the San Francisco Public Library on January 18, 2020.

"So much of my career has been devoted to this relationship, [to] making this relationship work," says Fingar. He recounts how his own interest in China was sparked as a student in an anthropology class, where he began trying to understand why China and the United States "did things differently."

That initial question led him to a lifetime of building connections between the two countries, both in academia and government. Fingar was instrumental in launching Stanford's U.S.-China Relations Program in 1975, which promoted the exchange of learning, technology, and training between U.S. academics and students and their Chinese counterparts.

The focus on promoting U.S.-China engagement continues to inform Fingar’s perspectives today. "I'm concerned about the relationship [between the U.S. and China], but I'm not worried about it. I'm confident that both sides understand the stakes, [and] both sides understand the pressures to make this work".

Watch the interview below:

 

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Thomas Fingar in a People's Daily documentary
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The Rise of Women in Muslim Political Parties

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This event is co-sponsored with The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

ABSTRACT

Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Roza Otunbayva in Kyrgystan, Megawati Sukarno Putri in Indonesia: female Muslim leaders are seen as pioneers at the forefront of the empowerment of women in Muslim-majority countries and more generally the empowerment of women on a global scale. The younger generation of women Muslim leaders have forged their political struggle and discourse in the post-9/11 context. More recently, they have surfed the wave of hope and disillusion of the Spring revolution(s). A major difference with the first generation of female Muslim leaders is that the younger generation’s political identity is strongly grounded in Islamic references. They are (or have labelled themselves) as Islamists, Islamist democrats or Muslim democrats that propose an alternative to the exclusive secular discourse.

Through the experience of Sayida Ounissi, we explore the genuine and challenging role of a new generation of female leaders, in Muslim democrats or Islamist parties. This discussion goes beyond the common assumptions and clichés of the veil oppressed Muslim women, the question of the compatibility between Islam and democracy or Islam and feminism. It rather looks at the rise of young women Muslim democrats in Islamist or Muslim parties in a way to grasp the feminine, and sometimes feminist, re-definition of the Islamic tradition and Islamist or Muslim democrats discourse. It explores the modes of transmission of political struggle and ideologies, from fathers to daughters, and from mothers, whether passive or active Islamists, to daughters. Finally, it examines the challenges posed to their ascensions within their parties and society by analysing how these women are re-appropriating conservative Islamic codes, other cultural or religious practices, and the social and political concepts inherent to their respective local and global context, in order to secure legitimate ascension in their parties and societies.

SPEAKRER BIO

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Sayida Ounissi is a member of the Tunisian Assembly of People’s Representatives and Minister for Employment and Vocational Training.  She represents Tunisians living in the North of France for the Ennahdha Party and was first elected in October 2014 and reelected in October 2019.  In 1993, her family fled the dictatorship of Ben-Ali for France where she completed all of her schooling. In 2005, she joined the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne for a double degree in History and Political Science. She obtained her Masters at the Institute for the Study of Economic and Social Development, and completed her studies with an internship at the African Development Bank in Tunis. In 2016, she was recruited by Prime Minister Youssef Chahed to join his Cabinet as Secretary of State in the Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training, charged with vocational training and private initiative. In 2018, she was promoted as the Minister for Employment and Vocational Training, becoming the youngest minister in Tunisia.

MODERATOR BIO

Portrait of Sophie Lemiere
Sophie Lemiere is a Political Anthropologist and FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor, 2019-20, at Stanford University. She is a former Fellow for the Democracy in Hard Places Initiative at the Ash Center for Democracy, Harvard University. In 2014, she received her PhD from Sciences-Po, France. Her thesis was the first study on the political role of gangs through umbrella NGOs in Malaysia. In 2019-2020, Sophie has been awarded the Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellowship at the International Forum for Democratic Studies (National Endowment for Democracy-NED), in Washington, D.C.

Encina Commons Room 123
Encina Commons
615 Crothers Way
Stanford, CA

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Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Lunch Seminar Series | Algorithm Skills: What are They and How Do We Measure Them?

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Abstract:

Considerable scholarship has established that algorithms are an increasingly important part of what information people encounter in everyday life. Much less work has focused on studying users’ experiences with, understandings of, and attitudes about how algorithms may influence what they see and do. The dearth of research on this topic may be in part due to the difficulty in studying a subject about which there is no known ground truth given that details about algorithms are proprietary and rarely made public. In this talk, I will report on the methodological challenges of studying people’s algorithm skills based on 83 in-person interviews conducted in five countries. I will also discuss the types of algorithm skills identified from our data. The talk will advocate for more such scholarship to accompany existing system-level analyses of algorithms’ social implications and offers a blue print for how to do this.

Eszter Hargittai
About the Speaker:

Eszter Hargittai is Professor and Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Institute of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich. Previously, she was the Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department at Northwestern University. In 2019, she was elected Fellow of the International Communication Association and also received the William F. Ogburn Mid-Career Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on Communication, Information Technology and Media Sociology. For over two decades, she has been researching people’s Internet uses and skills, and how these relate to questions of social inequality.

 

CANCELED: The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West

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CISAC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 5th due to the ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

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About this Event: Just a few years ago, people spoke of the US as a hyperpower-a titan stalking the world stage with more relative power than any empire in history. Yet as early as 1993, newly-appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although Western powers had "slain a large dragon" by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a "bewildering variety of poisonous snakes."

In The Dragons and the Snakes, the eminent soldier-scholar David Kilcullen asks how, and what, opponents of the West have learned during the last quarter-century of conflict. Applying a combination of evolutionary theory and detailed field observation, he explains what happened to the "snakes"-non-state threats including terrorists and guerrillas-and the "dragons"-state-based competitors such as Russia and China. He explores how enemies learn under conditions of conflict, and examines how Western dominance over a very particular, narrowly-defined form of warfare since the Cold War has created a fitness landscape that forces adversaries to adapt in ways that present serious new challenges to America and its allies. Within the world's contemporary conflict zones, Kilcullen argues, state and non-state threats have increasingly come to resemble each other, with states adopting non-state techniques and non-state actors now able to access levels of precision and lethal weapon systems once only available to governments.

A counterintuitive look at this new, vastly more complex environment, The Dragons and the Snakes will not only reshape our understanding of the West's enemies' capabilities, but will also show how we can respond given the increasing limits on US power.

 

About the Speaker: 

David Kilcullen is a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales and a professor of practice in global security at Arizona State University. He heads the strategic research firm Cordillera Applications Group. A former soldier and diplomat, he served as a counterinsurgency advisor during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years he has supported aid agencies, non-government organizations, and local communities in conflict and disaster-affected regions, and developed new ways to think about highly networked urban environments. Dr. Kilcullen was named one of the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009 and is the author of the highly acclaimed The Accidental Guerrilla, Out of the Mountains, and Blood Year.

Dave Kilcullen University of New South Wales and Arizona State University

Demystifying China

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Livestream: Registration is required and will close 24 hours before the event. Click here to register.

This event is available only to CISAC faculty, fellows, staff, and honors students.

 

About this Event: Jeopardizing U.S. research enterprises, provoking regional nationalism, and building a technological panopticon to rate every citizen's behavior: these assumptions about China fuel US foreign policy shadow-boxing with misplaced concerns. Our panel challenges prevalent narratives on China, providing informed, nuanced investigations that cut across a range of research methods. Julien de Troullioud's argues that the rise of China in science and technology is not a threat to the US but instead an opportunity to jointly work to solve global issues. Data shows that the current policies to protect the US research enterprise in science is hurting American and international scientific research. Xinru Ma finds that nationalism in China and in Southeast Asia are not necessarily all anti-foreign, and is more of a liability rather than an asset for domestic regimes, according to evidences from formal modeling and social media data. Shazeda Ahmed's interviews with Chinese government officials, tech firm representatives, and legal scholars reveal that the Chinese social credit system is more limited in its data collection and fragmented in its on-the-ground implementation than the dystopic institution its foreign critics presume it to be. Our research presents new data and fresh perspectives for rethinking US-China dynamics.

 

About the Speakers:

Shazeda Ahmed is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley who researches how tech firms and the Chinese government are collaboratively constructing the country's social credit system. She will be joining CISAC and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in Fall 2019 as a pre-doctoral Fellow. Shazeda has worked as a researcher for the Citizen Lab, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, and the Ranking Digital Rights corporate transparency review by New America. In the 2018-19 academic year she was a Fulbright fellow at Peking University's law school.

 

Xinru Ma is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Political Science and International Relations (POIR) program at University of Southern California, and will join CISAC as a Postdoctoral Fellow for 2019-2020. Originally from China, Xinru is interested in combining formal modeling and computational social science with research on nationalist protests and maritime disputes, with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia. Her research is informed by extensive field research in Vietnam, Philippines and China, during which she interviewed protestors, think tanks, diplomats, government officials, and foreign business owners that were impacted by nationalist protests. In addition to informing her of the complicated strategic interaction between mass mobilization, government repression and foreign policy-making, the field research further motivated her to focus on the methodological challenges for causal inference that stem from strategic conflict behavior. More broadly, Xinru is interested in public opinion and new methods of measuring it, foreign policy formation, alliance politics, East Asian security dynamics, and the historical relations of East Asia. 

 

Julien de Troullioud de Lanversin will be joining CISAC as a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow. Julien is finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He is interested in how to verify and reconstruct past fissile material production programs with scientific tools. To that end, he developed innovative methods that use isotopic analysis from nuclear reactors to gain information on their past operation (nuclear archeology) and designed an open source software that can compute the istopic composition of fissile materials from nuclear reactors. His current research looks at the various modalities of the production of plutonium and tritium in production reactors and how transparency on tritium could be used to improve estimates on plutonium stockpiles. Julien also studies security questions related to civil and military nuclear programs in Northeast Asia through the lens of fissile material, with a focus on China and North Korea. Julien visited the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technologies at Tsinghua University for one semester in 2018 to collaborate with Chinese experts on work related to nuclear engineering and arms control. Julien’s work on nuclear archaeology has been published in the Journal of Science and Global Security. He received his Diplôme d’Ingénieur (M.Sc. And B.Sc.Eng.) from Ecole Centrale de Marseille in 2014. The same year he also obtained a M.Sc. in Nuclear Science and Engineering from the University of Tsinghua where he was a recipient of the Chinese Government Scholarship. Julien speaks and uses Chinese in his research and is a native French speaker.

Virtual Seminar

Shazeda Ahmed, Xinru Ma, Julien de Troullioud de Lanversin
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Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age | The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

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Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age | The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) pose difficult challenges for electoral integrity. In recent years foreign governments have used social media and the Internet to interfere in elections around the globe. Disinformation has been weaponized to discredit democratic institutions, sow societal distrust, and attack political candidates. Social media has proved a useful tool for extremist groups to send messages of hate and to incite violence. Democratic governments strain to respond to a revolution in political advertising brought about by ICTs. Electoral integrity has been at risk from attacks on the electoral process, and on the quality of democratic deliberation.

The relationship between the Internet, social media, elections, and democracy is complex, systemic, and unfolding. Our ability to assess some of the most important claims about social media is constrained by the unwillingness of the major platforms to share data with researchers. Nonetheless, we are confident about several important findings.

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Nathaniel Persily
Alex Stamos
Stephen J. Stedman

CANCELED: Human Rights in North Korea Policy: Human Rights and Security are not in Conflict

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THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED
In keeping with Stanford University's guidance to event hosts

 

Over the last three years, the United States has done an about-face in terms of engaging North Korea on human rights. Some have argued that if we are to make progress on denuclearization with North Korea, we cannot press Pyongyang on human rights issues because we must develop a cooperative relationship. Raising human rights abuses will only make it more difficult to deal with security issues they argue. On the other hand, Ambassador King believes that human rights are not an issue that we raise after we have achieved our security goals. It is not just the right thing to do, it is an important and critical part of achieving real progress with North Korea on security issues and it is key to a better relationship between Washington and Pyongyang. Internal pressure from the North Korean elites and the public is necessary for positive change on security issues by the North, and this will only come about if there is progress on human rights.  Furthermore, North Korea, like all UN member states, has agreed to observe UN human rights obligations. If the North fails to carry out its commitments on human rights, what assurance do we have that it will fulfill security obligations it accepts?

robert king
Ambassador Robert King is former Special Envoy for North Korean human rights issues at the Department of State (2009-2017).  Since leaving that position, he has been senior advisor to the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a senior fellow at the Korea Economic Institute (KEI), and a board member of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) in Washington, D.C.  Previously, Ambassador King served for 25 years on Capitol Hill (1983-2008) as chief of staff to Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California), and staff director of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (2001-2008). Most recently, he was a 2019-20 Koret Fellow for the fall quarter at Stanford University.

This public event is part of the 12th annual Koret Workshop, "The Role of Human Rights in Policy Toward North Korea," and open to the general public with registration.

The event is made possible through the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Advisory on Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)

In accordance with university guidelines, if you (or a spouse/housemate) have returned from travel to mainland China or South Korea in the last 14 days, we ask that you DO NOT come to campus until 14 days have passed since your return date and you remain symptom-free. For more information and updates, please refer to Stanford's Environmental Health & Safety website.

 

Robert R. King Former Special Envoy for North Korean Human Right Issues
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