IMPORTANT EVENT UPDATE:

In keeping with Stanford University's March 3 message to the campus community on COVID-19 and current recommendations of the CDC, the Asia-Pacific Research Center is electing to postpone this event until further notice. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we do our best to keep our community healthy and well. 

Co-sponsored by Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and Center for South Asia (CSA).

When does mass nonviolent mobilization for political change occur, what prevents it from degenerating into violence, and when does it succeed in extracting concessions? We examine these questions in the context of India's movement for independence from Britain, and point to the key roles played by economic shocks and organization in the success of nonviolence.

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Rikhil R. Bhavnani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a faculty affiliate at the La Follette School of Public Affairs, the Elections Research Center and the Center for South Asia.

Professor Bhavnani’s research and teaching focus on inequalities in political representation, the political economy of migration, and the political economy of development. His research is particularly concerned with causal identification, and is focused on South Asia. Bhavnani is the co-author, with Bethany Lacina, of a book on the backlash against within-country migration across the developing world, published by Cambridge University Press. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and other outlets. 

Prior to starting at UW–Madison, Professor Bhavnani was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He has worked at the Center for Global Development and the International Monetary Fund, and received a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University, and a BA in political science and economics from Yale University.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/P1-Q0OSo4yM

About this Event: The governance of big data and the prevention of their misuse is among the most topical issues in current debates among security experts. But what does it mean when security is not an issue for the stakeholders governing big biomedical data? This paper answers this question by looking at what it describes as a peculiar omission of the issue of security in the biggest harmonization cluster of biomedical research in Europe - BBMRI-ERIC. While it does treat personal data, the risks and threats are constructed through a language of anticipation and self-governance rather than security. The analysis explains why: based on document analysis, interviews, and field research, it studies (1) how are risks and threats constructed in the research with big biomedical data, (2) what regime of their governance is established in this area, and (3) what are the implications for the practices of science and the politics of security. The paper argues that this silence is a by-product of bureaucratization and responsibilization of security, which is in biobanking characteristic by discourse and practices of responsible research, ethics, and law. The paper suggests that this regime of governance precludes the prospects of addressing bigger questions that biobanks may need to deal with in the future, such as regarding the access to the biomedical data by state or private actors and their use for policing, surveillance, or other types of population governance.

Speaker's Biography: Dagmar Rychnovská is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Techno-science and societal transformation group at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. She holds a PhD in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an MA in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich), and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam). Her research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, security studies, and science and technology studies. Her current research explores security controversies in research and innovation governance, with a focus on bioweapons, biotechnologies, and biobanks.

On January 11, 2020 Taiwan held its presidential and legislative elections. Many observers expected the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to run an online disinformation campaign during the lead-up to the election in support of their preferred candidate, Han Kuo-yu, who was challenging incumbent Tsai Ing-wen. Such concerns were increased by demonstrated PRC online disinformation targeting the Hong Kong protests, and claims by an alleged PRC spy saying he led disinformation efforts targeting Taiwan during the 2018 elections. 

In this talk, we delve into case studies that highlight the role social media plays in disinformation at large in the Taiwanese information environment. We examine that while the fears of disinformation were generally not realized, we did find evidence of coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook, in particular on fan Pages and Groups for the two candidates. Our findings hold implications for researchers trying to distinguish authentic hyper-partisan domestic activism from coordinated disinformation. 

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Carly Miller is a social science researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. In addition to covering the Taiwanese election, she assists the team in other digital forensic research and thinking about how researchers external to social media platforms think about disinformation campaign and concepts such as attribution. Before coming to Stanford, Carly was a Team Lead at the Human Rights Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law School where she worked to unearth patterns of various bad actors’ media campaigns. Carly received her BA with honors in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2019.

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Vanessa Molter is a Research Assistant at SIO and a Master in International Policy candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on International Security in East Asia. At SIO, she monitors and writes on the Taiwanese social media environment. Previously, she has studied Taiwanese security affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, Taiwan, a government-affiliated defense think-tank. Vanessa is fluent in Mandarin and holds a B.S. in International Business and East Asian studies from Tubingen University, Germany.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/c1RKnxPEk54

About this Event: U.S.-Russian relations are at perhaps their lowest point since the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union.  What are the principal points of contention between Washington and Moscow, and what are the prospects for managing these differences as well as for making progress where U.S. and Russian interests align?

Speaker's Biography: Christopher Robinson is a career Foreign Service Officer with over 23 years of experience as a diplomat. He currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.

Chris most recently was Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at U.S. Embassy Moscow, Russia. He also has served as Deputy Director for Russian Affairs at the State Department, as Political Counselor at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, Austria, and as Political Counselor in Managua, Nicaragua. His previous assignments have included Iraq, Belarus, Canada, Russia, and assignments in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs and the Bureau of European Affairs. He holds multiple State Department Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards. He speaks Russian and Spanish.

Chris received an M.S. in strategic studies from the National War College and a B.A. in international affairs from the George Washington University.

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: In this new Brookings Marshall Paper, Michael O’Hanlon argues that now is the time for Western nations to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in eastern Europe to stabilize the region and reduce the risks of war with Russia. He believes NATO expansion has gone far enough. The core concept of this new security architecture would be one of permanent neutrality. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc, from Europe’s far north to its south: Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; and finally Cyprus plus Serbia, as well as possibly several other Balkan states. Discussion on the new framework should begin within NATO, followed by deliberation with the neutral countries themselves, and then formal negotiations with Russia.

The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to help uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner; after that, corresponding sanctions on Russia would be lifted. The neutral countries would retain their rights to participate in multilateral security operations on a scale comparable to what has been the case in the past, including even those operations that might be led by NATO. They could think of and describe themselves as Western states (or anything else, for that matter). If the European Union and they so wished in the future, they could join the EU. They would have complete sovereignty and self-determination in every sense of the word. But NATO would decide not to invite them into the alliance as members. Ideally, these nations would endorse and promote this concept themselves as a more practical way to ensure their security than the current situation or any other plausible alternative.

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Speaker's Biography: Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow, and director of research, in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He co-directs the Security and Strategy Team, the Defense Industrial Base working group, and the Africa Security Initiative within the Foreign Policy program, as well. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia, Georgetown, and Syracuse universities, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. O’Hanlon was also a member of the External Advisory Board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011-2012.