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What to make of North Korea’s latest nuclear test?

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Siegfried S. Hecker
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Stanford nuclear scientist and CISAC senior fellow Siegfried S. Hecker explains in this article in 38 North why North Korea's recent nuclear test is "deeply alarming" and what Washington's possible policy options are going forward. An excerpted passage is below:

 

On September 9, 2016, seismic stations around the world picked up the unmistakable signals of another North Korean underground nuclear test in the vicinity of Punggye-ri. The technical details about the test will be sorted out over the next few weeks, but the political message is already loud and clear: North Korea will continue to expand its dangerous nuclear arsenal so long as Washington stays on its current path.

 

Preliminary indications are that the test registered at 5.2 to 5.3 on the Richter scale, which translates to an explosion yield of approximately 15 to 20 kilotons, possibly twice the magnitude of the largest previous test. It appears to have been conducted in the same network of tunnels as the last three tests, just buried deeper into the mountain. This was the fifth known North Korean nuclear explosion; the second this year, and the third since Kim Jong Un took over the country’s leadership in December 2011. Continue reading

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Attribution of Malicious Cyber Incidents: From Soup to Nuts

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Attribution of malicious cyber activities is a deep issue about which confusion and disquiet can be found in abundance. Attribution has many aspects—technical, political, legal, policy, and so on. A number of well-researched and executed papers cover one or more of these aspects, but integration of these aspects is usually left as an exercise for the analyst. This paper distinguishes between attribution of malicious cyber activity to a machine, to a specific human being pressing the keys that initiate that activity, and to a party that is deemed ultimately responsible for that activity. Which type of attribution is relevant depends on the goals of the relevant decision maker. Further, attribution is a multi-dimensional issue that draws on all sources of information available, including technical forensics, human intelligence, signals intelligence, history, and geopolitics, among others. From the perspective of the victim, some degree of factual uncertainty attaches to any of these types of attribution, although the last type—attribution to an ultimately responsible party—also implicates to a very large degree legal, policy, and political questions. But from the perspective of the adversary, the ability to conceal its identity from the victim with high confidence is also uncertain. It is the very existence of such risk that underpins the possibility of deterring hostile actions in cyberspace.

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Social Science Research Network
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Herbert Lin
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Negotiation in War

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Abstract: What role do negotiations play in the midst of interstate wars? Extant scholarship has largely treated negotiations as being irrelevant to understanding a conflict's trajectory, or as being a direct reflection of hostilities on the battlefield. Neither view is supported by historical readings or empirical patterns of intra-war diplomacy. I present an alternative view of negotiations as being instrumental. Diplomatic bargaining not only occurs in response to battlefield outcomes, but is also used deceptively by disadvantaged belligerents to stall for time, manage political pressures, and regroup militarily. Using two new daily-level datasets of battles and diplomatic activity, I show that negotiations in post-1945 wars extend conflict when the war initiator has an advantage in fighting, occur in response to lop-sided battle outcomes, dampen the intensity of combat, and are associated with subsequent improvements in the war target's success on the battlefield. This framework of instrumental negotiations shows that the effect of intra-war diplomacy is conditional on the state of hostilities, and has substantial implications on our understanding of war termination and conflict resolution.

About the Speaker: Eric Min is a CISAC Predoctoral Fellow for 2016-2017 and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University. His research is focused on interstate diplomacy, information gathering and sharing during crises, and applications of machine learning and text analysis techniques to declassified documents related to conflict and foreign policy. 

His dissertation develops a theory regarding the strategic use of negotiations as a tool of war. Utilizing two new daily-level datasets of battles and diplomatic activity across all interstate wars since 1816, digitized versions of military operations reports and negotiation transcripts from the Korean War, and a series of case studies, he shows that states dynamically weigh costs and benefits with respect to “instrumental” negotiations. His findings demonstrate when, why, and how diplomacy is not only used to settle wars, but also to help win them. These conclusions have substantial implications on academic and policy-making approaches to conflict resolution.  
Eric is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He has also received support from Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) and the Center for International Cooperation and Negotiation (SCICN). Eric received his undergraduate degree in International Relations and Spanish/Linguistics at New York University, where he was valedictorian of the College of Arts and Science.

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Eric Min

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Eric Min is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He is received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, where he was the Zukerman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation for the 2017-2018 academic year. From 2011-2013 he held the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Graduate Fellowship at Stanford, and from 2013-2017 he held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. His dissertation, entitled “Negotiation in War,” was the recipient of the 2018 Kenneth Waltz Dissertation Prize from American Political Science Association’s International Security Section. His work has won the Midwest Political Science Association’s 2017 Robert H. Durr Award (for best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem), Stanford University’s 2016 Goldsmith Writing Prize, and he won the New York University Roland P. Beattie Award as the 2010 university valedictorian. He is an expert on the application of machine learning, text, and statistical methods to the analysis of interstate war, diplomacy, and conflict management.

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Eric Min Predoctoral Fellow CISAC
Seminars

The rivaling narratives of World War II in Asia

Authors
Daniel C. Sneider
Gi-Wook Shin
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Seventy-one years ago today, Japan formally surrendered in World War II. Though the end of war may seem part of the distant past, the cultural and political legacy of that conflict still looms large over the international stage, particularly in Asia. U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit this past May to Hiroshima did more than pay homage to the victims of the atomic bombing carried out by the United States more than seven decades ago. The President also stepped into the complex and often treacherous realm of wartime historical memory, Daniel Sneider and Stanford professor Gi-Wook Shin write in a piece for the Stanford University Press blog.

Shin and Sneider, director and associate director for research of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, respectively, are co-authors of the book Divergent Memories and lead a multiyear research project that examines historical reconciliation in Asia.

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Meet Your Army: Now, What Do You Want Us to Do?

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Abstract: The Army is in a period of Transition and Transformation, where the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan are supposed to be over or winding down, in theory enabling the force to rebalance and refocus our efforts.  Though we have been here before with many post-war and conflict periods, the Army and DoD are in actuality presented with possibly the most complex set of challenges and threats to the Army’s mission and to national security as a whole this nation has experienced.  While the Budget Control Act is currently preventing any strategic planning for operations, training, personnel forecasting and management, and R&D/Acquisition investment, all key factors for input into any strategy, the myriad threats to national security and in global competition are on the rise.  Resources and focus are down; threats and competition are going up.  China’s rapid development and matching need for resources, such as those in Africa and the South China Seas; a reemerging Russia, bent on disrupting NATO efforts to expand while simultaneously persisting in efforts to expand their reach in the Arctic and the Middle East and disrupt U.S. interests where it can in the “Grey Zone” of conflict; an unstable and possibly nuclear weapons-capable North Korea; an Iran that will be nuclear-armed and looking to maintain Shia hegemony in the Middle East and defeat U.S. interests in the region; and existing and emerging transnational terrorist organizations and states, such as Daesh/ISIL; innovative and widely-available technologies in cyberwarfare, unmanned aerial systems, dynamic shifts in regional and global demographics, information and liberation technology, and even the U.S. national debt round out a list of our current and future national security challenges.

SECDEF Ash Carter has articulated that the DoD is looking for a Third Offset Strategy to keep our unique hedge of capabilities against many, if not all of these threats and conditions.  Unfortunately, neither the First nor Second Offset were devised as such and only came into their being once key technologies and applications were developed against a much smaller list of threats and capabilities than we face now.

The key question is then, how does the Army, with these challenges, limitations, and threats, create opportunities now that assist a Third Offset Strategy?  Or at least, how are we going to fight and win our nations’ wars in the near and far-term?

About the Speaker: COL J.B. Vowell has served as an Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army for over 25 years.  He has had a variety of postings, including Europe, the Pacific, Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan.  He was a combat leader in both the Surge in Iraq, 2006-2007 and the Surge in Afghanistan, 2010-2011.  He currently serves as Army Chief of Staff GEN Mark Milley’s Senior Fellow to Brookings Institution, where he works to assist in the development of policy and strategy with research towards Land Warfare, 2030-2050 and the Human Domain of Battle.

COL Vowell commanded 2d battalion, 327th Infantry (“No Slack”) in the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, Fort Campbell, KY.  During this 2.5-year command, COL Vowell trained and deployed his Infantry Task Force to Kunar and Nangarhar provinces in support of Operation Enduring Freedom XI in Afghanistan.  During this year-long deployment, COL Vowell and his task force of more than 1,000 men and women were deployed along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, dealing with local, national and international issues at the tactical, operational and strategic levels of policy and diplomacy.  The documentary film, The Hornet’s Nest, features the numerous missions and heroic fights during this challenging combat deployment.

COL Vowell then commanded 3rd Brigade Combat Team (“Rakkasans”), 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), from 2013-2015.  COL Vowell led the Brigade's deployment to Afghanistan for ISAF and Operation Resolute Support (RS) from January 2015-October 2015, where his task force led the efforts to train, advise, and assist Afghan Army and Police efforts across Eastern Afghanistan to defeat Taliban, al-Qaeda, and newly-formed ISIL efforts to destabilize the country.

COL Vowell’s military and civilian education includes the United States Army Command and General Staff College, the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), and he was a War College Fellow to Stanford and CISAC from 2012-2013. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree (Biology) from the University of Alabama and a Master of Science degree in Human Resources Management from Troy State University and a Masters of Arts in Theater Operations from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

 

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Infantry Officer U.S. Army
Seminars

America, the Middle East, and Grand Strategy in the Post-9/11 Era

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Abstract: Grand strategy represents a state's overarching theory of what constitutes national security and how best to produce national security. Do U.S. presidential administrations have grand strategies? If so, do these theoretical frameworks shape the actual practice of American foreign policy? This seminar addresses these questions, focusing on the grand strategies of the Bush and Obama administrations and American foreign policy in the Middle East since 9/11. 
 
About the Speaker: Dr. Colin Kahl is the National Security Advisor to the Vice President and Deputy Assistant to the President. He is on public service leave from Georgetown University, where he is an associate professor in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He previously served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon (2009-2011), where he received the Outstanding Public Service Medal in 2011.  He has published articles on U.S. foreign and defense policy in the Middle East in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, the Los Angeles Times, Middle East Policy, the National Interest, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Washington Quarterly. Kahl's previous research, including his book States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World (Princeton, 2006), focused on the causes of civil and ethnic conflict. Kahl received his B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan (1993) and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University (2000).

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Colin Kahl National Security Advisor to the Vice President, Deputy Assistant to the President Office of the Vice President
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"Nagorno-Karabakh: Is a Solution Visible?" A Lecture by Minister Edward Nalbandian

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The people of Nagorno-Karabakh have long strived for the recognition of their right to self-determination. Azerbaijan reacted by unleashing a large scale military offensive that led to war, which ended in May 1994 with the signing of the cease-fire agreement by Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Armenia. The negotiation process is mediated by the Co-Chairs of the Minsk Group – the USA, France and Russia. Though the parties were close to a solution on several occasions, the negotiations have not yielded a durable settlement. In April 2016 the conflict once again erupted with violence leaving hundreds killed and maimed. Since then, two summits have been convened to create conducive conditions for the advancement of the peace process.

 
Minister Edward Nalbandian has been the Foreign Affairs Minister of Armenia since 2008. He studied at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and received his PhD (in political science) from the Institute of Oriental Studies at the National Academy of Sciences. Minister Nalbandian began working at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the late 1970s. After Armenia's independence he was invited to work for the Armenian diplomatic service. He has been Armenia's Ambassador to Egypt, Morocco, Oman, France, as well as Israel, the Vatican and Andorra. He has also been Special Representative of the President of Armenia in different international organizations. Minister Nalbandian has published several works on international relations. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Armenian Medal of Mkhitar Gosh and the second-grade and first-grade Medals of Services to the Motherland, Commandeur and Grand Officier de la Légion D'honneur of France, Saint Gregory's Grand Cross Order of the Holy See (Vatican), the USSR order of Friendship of Nations, and others. He is married and has a daughter. 
 
Edward Nalbandian, Foreign Affairs Minister of Armenia Foreign Affairs Minister of Armenia Speaker
Seminars
European Security Initiative Lecture Series
European Security Initiative

Introducing CDDRL's incoming pre- and postdoctoral fellows

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Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce our four incoming fellows who will be joining us in the 2016-2017 academic year to develop their research, engage with faculty and tap into our diverse scholarly community. 

The pre- and postdoctoral program will provide fellows the time to focus on research and data analysis as they work to finalize and publish their dissertation research, while connecting with resident faculty and research staff at CDDRL. 

Fellows will present their research during our weekly research seminar series and an array of scholarly events and conferences.

Topics of the incoming cohort include electoral fraud in Russia, how the elite class impacts state power in China, the role of emotions in support for democracy in Zimbabwe, and market institutions in Nigeria. 

Learn more in the Q&A below.

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Natalia Forrat

CDDRL Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Hometown: Tomsk, Russia

Academic Institution: Northwestern University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Sociology, April 2017

Research Interests: authoritarianism, state capacity, social policy, civil society, trust, Russia and post-communist countries

Dissertation Title: The State that Betrays the Trust: Infrastructural State Power, Public Sector Organizations, and Authoritarian Resilience in Putin's Russia

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I study the connection between state capacity and political regimes - the topic that is at the core of many research initiatives at CDDRL. Learning more about this work and receiving feedback for my dissertation will enrich and sharpen my analysis, while helping me to place it into a comparative context. I am looking forward to discussing my work with the faculty who study the post-Soviet region. I also will explore policy implications of my work with the help of policy experts at CDDRL.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? Besides finishing writing my dissertation, I will workshop three working papers to prepare them for publication. The first one argues that Putin's regime used the school system to administer a large-scale electoral fraud in 2012 presidential elections; the second one shows how the networks of social organizations were used by subnational autocrats to strengthen the regime; and the third one will look at the factors that make the abuse of such organizations more difficult in some regions. In addition to these papers I will continue developing my post-graduation research project exploring the relationship between social trust and distrust, institutions, political competition, and democratization.

Fun fact: I have spent 25 years of my life in Siberia, and I can tell you: Chicago winters are worse!

 
 

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Shelby Grossman

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Reading, MA

Academic Institution: Harvard University

Discipline & Graduation Date:  Government, Summer 2016

Research interests: political economy of development, private governance, market institutions, Sub-Saharan Africa, survey methods

Dissertation Title: The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? I was attracted to CDDRL largely for its community of scholars. Affiliated faculty work on the political economy of development and medieval and modern market institutions, topics that are tied to my own interests.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? I plan to prepare a book manuscript based on my dissertation, a project that explains variation in the provision of pro-trade institutions in private market organizations through the study of physical marketplaces in Nigeria. In addition, I will continue to remotely manage an on-going project in Nigeria (with Meredith Startz) investigating whether reputation alleviates contracting frictions. I also plan to work on submitting to journals a few working papers, including one on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in Nigeria (with Jonathan Phillips and Leah Rosenzweig). 

Fun fact: Contrary to popular belief, not all cheese is vegetarian. I have a website to help people determine if a cheese is vegetarian or not: IsThisCheeseVegetarian.com. 

 
 

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Daniel Mattingly

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Oakland, California

Academic Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science, Summer 2016

Research Interests: Governance, rule of law, state building, authoritarian politics, Chinese politics

Dissertation Title: The Social Origins of State Power: Democratic Institutions and Local Elites in China

What attracted you to CDDRL?  The Center has a fantastic community of scholars and practitioners who work on the areas that I'm interested in, including governance and the rule of law. I'm excited to learn from the CDDRL community and participate in the Center's events. The fellowship also provides me with valuable time to finish my book manuscript before I start teaching.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? While at CDDRL, I plan to prepare my book manuscript and to work on some related projects on local elites and state power in China and elsewhere. 

Fun fact: I grew up on an organic farm in Vermont.

 
 

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Lauren E. Young

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Saratoga, CA

Academic Institution: Columbia University 

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science (Comparative Politics, Methods), May 2016 (defense), Oct 2016 (degree conferral)

Research Interests: political violence, political economy of development, autocratic persistence, democratization, protest, electoral violence

Dissertation Title: The Psychology of Repression and Dissent in Autocracy

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? As a graduate of the CISAC honors program when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I have seen first-hand how intellectually stimulating, collaborative, and plugged into policy CDDRL is. While at the center I will be revising my dissertation work on the political psychology of participation in pro-democracy movements in Zimbabwe for submission as a book manuscript, and moving forward new projects that similarly seek to understand how different forms of violence by non-state actors affects citizens' preferences and decision-making. Because of its deep bench of experts on autocracy, narco-trafficking, and insurgency, CDDRL will add enormous value to these projects.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL?  During my fellowship year, my primary goal is to revise my research on Zimbabwe into a book manuscript. I defended my dissertation as three stand-alone articles, including two experiments showing that emotions influence whether opposition supporters in Zimbabwe express their pro-democracy preferences and a descriptive paper showing that repression has a larger effect on the behavior of the poor. To prepare the book manuscript during my fellowship, I will bring in additional quantitative and qualitative descriptive evidence and tie the three papers together into a cohesive argument about how opposition supporters make decisions about participation in protest, why emotions have such a large effect on these decisions, and how this affects variation across individuals and the strategic choices of autocrats and activists.

Fun fact: During my fieldwork I took an overnight train from Victoria Falls to a southern city in Zimbabwe and hitch-hiked into a national park. It got a little nerve-wracking when night started to fall, but ended with  an invitation to a barbecue! 

 

 
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Implications of the Chinese military's uses of cyber for inter-state crisis management

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Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to allow for an accurate headcount.

Abstract: Dr. Johnston will present a preliminary analysis of some of the tensions between inter-state crisis management principles (as accepted by many Chinese crisis management experts) and concepts for the use of cyber weapons in military conOlicts being developed by the Chinese military.

About the Speaker: Alastair Iain Johnston is The Governor James Albert Noe and Linda Noe Laine Professor of China in World Affairs at Harvard University and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution in summer 2016. He has written on socialization theory, identity and foreign policy, and strategic culture, mostly with application to the study of China’s foreign policy and East Asian international relations.

Alastair Iain Johnston Harvard University
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Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War

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No nation is free from the charge that it has a less-than-complete view of the past. History is not simply about recording past events—it is often contested, negotiated, and reshaped over time. The debate over the history of World War II in Asia remains surprisingly intense, and Divergent Memories examines the opinions of powerful individuals to pinpoint the sources of conflict: from Japanese colonialism in Korea and atrocities in China to the American decision to use atomic weapons against Japan.

Rather than labeling others' views as "distorted" or ignoring dissenting voices to create a monolithic historical account, Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider pursue a more fruitful approach: analyzing how historical memory has developed, been formulated, and even been challenged in each country. By identifying key factors responsible for these differences, Divergent Memories provides the tools for readers to both approach their own national histories with reflection and to be more understanding of others.

"A well-written investigation on the legacy of World War II in Asia, greatly contributes to the field of cultural and military history.” —Mel Vasquez, H-War

"This book is an important counterweight to prevailing tendencies that promote uncritical nationalism and is thus an invaluable resource for this generation’s Asian and American youth to gain a critical understanding of their national histories...[T]he authors’ non-judgmental approach, coupled with persistence in pursuing the multiple interpretations and experiences of these traumatic events, provoke a reconsideration of our notions of justice, equality, and humanity within our nationalist thinking."—Grace Huang, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 26.2

This book is part of the Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center series at Stanford University Press.

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Gi-Wook Shin
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