Stanford University

Hiding in Plain Sight: How China Builds and Exercises Military Power, 1995-2020

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 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

SEMINAR RECORDING

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About the Event: How do rising powers like China manage to build power in international systems dominated by one or more established great powers? International relations theory provides some answers, but most assume emulation of successful approaches. This paper leverages the established business literature on how new companies gain market share in markets dominated by established companies to develop a new theory of power accumulation. I argue that only under very narrow circumstances can rising powers build power and influence through emulation. Instead, China has built enough power over the past 25 years to be considered a great power competitor by doing things differently. Specifically, it exploits US blind spots, maneuvers in areas of strategic uncertainty and engages in entrepreneurial actions. I demonstrate that Chinese military strategy exhibits these components in its responses to key pillars of US foreign policy strategy like global power projection, foreign military intervention, and in conventional and nuclear posture decisions. The findings have significant implications for great power competition as well as for power transition theory.

 

About the Speaker: Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an inaugural Wilson Center China Fellow. She continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve for which she works as a strategic planner at INDOPACOM. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Survival, and Asian Security. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, (Cornell University Press, 2019) won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. Her publications and other commentary can be found on twitter @osmastro and www.orianaskylarmastro.com.

Virtual only.

Oriana Skylar Mastro

Stanford CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford,  CA  94305-6055

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Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science
OrianaSkylarMastro_2023_Headshot.jpg
PhD

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Mastro continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 and 2022 (FGO).

She has published widely, including in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Economist, and the New York Times. Her most recent book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (Oxford University Press, 2024), evaluates China’s approach to competition. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member.

She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Her publications and commentary can be found at orianaskylarmastro.com and on Twitter @osmastro.

Deterrence and Defense Across the Taiwan Strait

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Chinese Maritime Ambitions

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The China-Russia Military Relationship

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The U.S.-China Great Power Competition

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Research Seminar Series

Book Talk on Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order

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For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

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Seminar Recording

About the Event: There is never a good time for a pandemic but Covid-19 may have hit at the worst possible moment. In the decade before the virus, China had grown more dictatorial and assertive; populist nationalists held power in the United States, India, and Brazil; geopolitical tensions heightened—not just between China and the United States but also within the west; and the very notion of an objective truth was increasingly called into question. In Aftershocks, Colin Kahl and Tom Wright draw on interviews with officials from around the world to document how the world responded, or failed to respond, to a global crisis in an age of rivalry and nationalism. They shed new light on China’s lack of cooperation with the international community, how the Trump administration failed to rally an international coalition to deal with the pandemic, how Covid-19 brought the EU close to collapse, the role of central banks in averting a financial crisis, and the impact on the developing world. They also provide a pathway for how the world can prepare for the next pandemic. 

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About the Speaker: Thomas Wright is the Director for the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Strategy, Security, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a non-resident senior fellow at the Lowy Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Colin Kahl, is Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order (St Martin’s Press, 2021). He is also the author of All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century and the Future of American Power (Yale University Press 2017).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Thomas Wright The Brookings Institution
Seminars
Research Seminar Series

“Code Red for Humanity”: The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change – Process, Results, and Policy Implications

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For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

 

Seminar Recording                                                                                           

 

About the Event: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988 to provide scientific background for the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since then, it has released six major assessment reports. The Sixth Assessment, released in August 2021, prompted the UN Secretary-General to call it a “code red for humanity.”

As one of 234 Lead Authors of the IPCC Sixth Assessment’s physical science report, I will present some of its main conclusions. We’ll dive below the level of headline statements to examine some major scientific innovations since the last IPCC report in 2013. I’ll talk about my personal experience of the 3-year assessment process, including the most intensive peer review in the history of science; here I will also talk about the significance and the future of peer review in general. Finally, I’ll showcase some tools this new report provides for policy analysis at the regional scale, and discuss its implications for international and global security.

 

About the Speaker: Paul N. Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society at Stanford University. and Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan. Edwards is the author of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996) and co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001), as well as other books and numerous articles. He edits the MIT Press book series, Infrastructures, and co-directs the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative. Edwards served as one of 234 lead authors for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group I), released in August 2021.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Paul N. Edwards

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C226
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-2707
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PhD

Paul N. Edwards is the director of the Program in Science, Technology & Science (STS) and Senior Research Scholar at CISAC, as well as Professor of Information and History at the University of Michigan. At Stanford, his teaching includes courses in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and the Program in Science, Technology & Society. His research focuses on the history, politics, and culture of knowledge and information infrastructures. He focuses especially on environmental security (e.g. climate change, Anthropocene risks, and nuclear winter). 

Edwards’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), a history of the meteorological information infrastructure, received the Computer Museum History Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the Louis J. Battan Award from the American Meteorological Society, and other prizes. The Economist magazine named A Vast Machine a Book of the Year in 2010. Edwards’s book The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996) — a study of the mutual shaping of computers, military strategy, and the cognitive sciences from 1945-1990 — won honorable mention for the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science. It has been translated into French and Japanese. Edwards is also co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001) and Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), as well as numerous articles.

From 1992, Edwards taught in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and (for two years) the Dept. of Computer Science at Stanford. In 1999 he moved to the University of Michigan School of Information, where he founded and directed the UM Science, Technology & Society Program. He returned to Stanford in 2017 as a long-term William J. Perry Fellow and Senior Research Scholar, though he retains a full professorship in Information and History at Michigan. Edwards has advised PhD students at universities in France, Norway, Finland, Canada, and South Africa as well as the United States.

Edwards holds a PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1988) and a bachelor’s degree in Language and Mind from Wesleyan University (1980). His work has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation. He has been a Carnegie Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, and Distinguished Faculty in Sustainability at the Graham Sustainability Institute. Edwards has held visiting positions at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences (SciencesPo), France; the Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Sciences, Norway; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa; the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Cornell University.  

With Geoffrey C. Bowker, Edwards edits the MIT Press Infrastructures book series. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Big Data & Society, Information & Culture, and Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society, and was previously a deputy editor of Climatic Change.

Edwards' current research concerns the history and future of knowledge infrastructures, as well as further work on the history of climate science and other large-scale environmental data systems.

To access Dr. Edwards' CV, please click here. 

Director, Program in Science, Technology & Society (STS), Stanford University
Senior Research Scholar
Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan
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Research Seminar Series

Lawyering the Presidency: Legal Counsel and Constraints on the Use of Force

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*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. This event is part of the year-long initiative on “Ethics & Political Violence” jointly organized by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. This event is hosted by CISAC and is co-sponsored by McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.

 

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Seminar Recording

About the Event: Among its many profound effects on American life, the Trump presidency triggered a surge of interest in reforms that might better check the exercise of presidential power – from enhancing ethics and transparency requirements to reining in sweeping congressional delegations of substantive authority. Yet these reform efforts arise against a wholly unsettled debate about the function and effectiveness of existing checks, perhaps none more so than the role of executive branch legal counsel. With courts often deferential, and Congress often hamstrung by partisan polarization, scholars have focused on the experiences of executive branch lawyers to illuminate whether counsel functions as part of an “internal separation of powers,” an effective first-order constraint on the presidency.  Yet while these descriptive accounts are invaluable, they are also limited to the attorney side of an attorney-client relationship, leaving much unanswered about whether and why presidential advisors might heed their advice.  And while the search for signs of “constraint” is essential, this conceptual framing has tended to obscure other ways in which counsel may influence decision-making, dynamics that might prove essential for reformers to address if they are to achieve the change they seek. Aiming to help fill these gaps, this Article draws on an original survey of more than three dozen former senior U.S. national security policy officials, from the Cabinet Secretary level at the most senior, to National Security Council staff at the most junior, to examine when and why policy-making clients engage counsel’s advice surrounding the use of force, and how that advice may shape or reshape policymakers’ existing normative preferences.  Among its findings, the depth and bipartisan breadth of officials’ sense of obligation to engage counsel suggests that the existing literature may be underestimating counsel’s capacity to influence.  At the same time, as this Article describes, counsel is structurally capable of exerting that influence in multi-directional ways.  When policymakers’ own normative instincts lead them to want to avoid external limits on executive power, counsel’s insistence that such limits be observed can at times “constrain” executive action. But where, as may also arise, policymakers would prefer more external checks on presidential behavior, counsel’s permission not to may have an unintentionally encouraging effect. Indeed, when policymakers may be seeking a politically palatable justification for avoiding action, the unavailability of a narrow construction of presidential authority may deprive officials of an effectively action-limiting out. As this Article concludes, if the post-Trump goal is to improve counsel’s function as a “constraint” on power, reforms beyond simply increasing transparency or quality will be required. 

Draft Paper

 

About the Speaker: Deborah Pearlstein is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy.  Her work on the U.S. Constitution, international law, and national security has appeared widely in law journals and the popular press, including the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the University of Michigan Law Review, the University of Texas Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal, as well as in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Professor Pearlstein has repeatedly testified before Congress on topics from war powers to executive branch oversight.  In 2021, she was appointed to the U.S. State Department Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, a 9-member board of historians, political scientists, and U.S. foreign relations law experts who help ensure the timely declassification and publication of government records surrounding major events in U.S. foreign policy.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Professor Pearlstein clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, then for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. Following her clerkships, she practiced at the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco, earning the Voting Rights Award from the ACLU of Southern California for her litigation work on voting systems reform following the 2000 presidential election.

From 2003-2007, Professor Pearlstein served as the founding director of the Law and Security Program at Human Rights First, where she led the organization’s efforts in research, litigation and advocacy surrounding U.S. detention and interrogation operations, and served on the first team of independent military commission monitors to visit the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in 2004. In addition to developing impact litigation strategies and preparing multiple briefs amicus curiae to the U.S. Supreme Court, Pearlstein co-authored a series of reports on the human rights impact of U.S. national security policy, including Command’s Responsibility, which provided the first comprehensive accounting of detainee deaths in U.S. military custody and received extensive media attention worldwide. Throughout her tenure, Professor Pearlstein worked closely with members of the defense and intelligence communities, including in helping to bring together retired military leaders to address key policy challenges in U.S. counterterrorism operations.

After leaving law practice, Professor Pearlstein held an appointment as a research scholar in the Law and Public Affairs Program at the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, as well as visiting appointments at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Georgetown University Law Center.  She has since served as Chair of the AALS National Security Law Section, on the ABA's Advisory Committee on Law and National Security, and today serves on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Journal of National Security Law and Policy.

Before embarking on a career in law, Pearlstein served in the White House from 1993 to 1995 as a Senior Editor and Speechwriter for President Clinton.

Virtual Only. This event will not be held in person.

Deborah Pearlstein Yeshiva University
Seminars

Drone-Cinema, Data Practices, and the Developing New Scope of IHL Jurisdiction

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All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. This event is part of the year-long initiative on “Ethics & Political Violence” jointly organized by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. This event is hosted by CISAC and is co-sponsored by McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.

 

REGISTRATION

Zoom

(Open to all)

Seminar Recording

About the Event: This paper explores the role of cinematic representations of lawfare in shaping and disseminating the jurisdiction of humanitarian law (IHL) through advanced military technologies and data practices. Taking the 2015 British thriller ‘Eye in the Sky’ as an instance of a dominant representation of lawfare, I analyse how this representation strengthens and reaffirms misconceptions about IHL and the bureaucracy of killing. As a popular culture product – and one that is embraced by various IHL experts and organisations – ‘Eye in the Sky’ participates in the ethical, legal, and political debates about advanced military technologies, and establishes mundane data practices as a system of knowledge production through which IHL exercises its jurisdiction over facts, people, and spaces. In particular, the paper analyses how ‘Eye in the Sky’s representations of IHL’s data practices strengthen and reinforce a particular IHL narrative, which is consistent with Western countries’ narrative about their existing counterterrorism practices and their bureaucracy of killing. Based on studies from law, sociology, and communication, this paper answers the following three questions: (i) who is given the power to speak IHL (and who is not)? (ii) To whom is IHL speaking? And (iii) how do data practices shape IHL’s jurisdiction? The paper concludes that ‘Eye in the Sky’ speaks international law through the voices of drone-owning nations, and is directed to their mass publics, legitimising the existing bureaucracy of killing. At the same time, it disguises normative choices as inevitable, and erases African decision-makers, communities, and perspectives. 

Draft Paper

 

About the Speaker: Shiri Krebs is an Associate Professor at Deakin University’s Law School, and Co-lead, Law and Policy Theme, at the Australian Government Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC). She is also an affiliated scholar at SCISAC. Her research focuses on international law and politics, cyber warfare, and human-machine interaction in legal decision-making, exploring issues at the intersection of law, science and technology. Dr Krebs’ scholarship has been published at leading international law and general law journals, and granted her several research grants and awards. Krebs earned her Doctorate and Master Degrees from Stanford Law School, as well as LL.B. and M.A., both magna cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Virtual Only. This event will not be held in person.

Seminars

The American Passport in Turkey – Book talk with Ozlem Altan Olcay and Evren Balta

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The American Passport in Turkey
The American Passport in Turkey explores the diverse meanings and values that people outside of the United States attribute to U.S. citizenship, specifically those who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta interviewed more than one hundred individuals and families and, through their narratives, shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced outside of the United States. Offering a corrective to citizenship studies where discussions of inequality are largely limited to domestic frames, Altan-Olcay and Balta argue that the relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes can only be fully understood if considered transnationally. Additionally, The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates that U.S. global power not only reveals itself in terms of foreign policy but also manifests in the active desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not live in the United States. These citizens, according to the authors, create a new kind of empire with borders and citizen-state relations that do not map onto recognizable political territories.

The American Passport in Turkey has recently won the American Sociological Association, Global and Transnational Sociology Section, Best Book by an International Scholar Award.
 

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Özlem Altan-Olcay
Özlem Altan-Olcay is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations and the associate director of the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She is also an editor of Gender, Place, and Culture as well as an assistant editor of Citizenship Studies. She has a Ph.D. degree from New York University, Department of Politics. Her primary research interests include citizenship studies and gender and development. Her research has been supported by the New York University International Center for Advanced Studies, the UN Population Council, the Middle East Research Competition, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, the Turkish Science Academy, and the EU Marie Curie Individual Fellowship Program. Some of her recent articles have appeared in Development and Change, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminist Economics, Gender, Place and Culture, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Sociology, Social Politics, and Women’s Studies International Forum. She has recently co-authored (with E. Balta) The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).
 

Evren Balta
Evren Balta is a Professor of International Relations and the chair of the International Relations Department at  Özyeğin University. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Party Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology, Gender Place & Culture. She is the author of The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism (with O Altan-Olcay, University of Pennsylvania, 2020), Age of Uneasiness (İletisim, 2019), and Global Security Complex (İletisim, 2012). She is the editor of Neighbors with Suspicion: Dynamics of Turkish-Russian Relations (with G. Ozcan and B. Besgul, İletisim, 2017); Introduction to Global Politics (Iletisim, 2014) and Military, State and Politics in Turkey (with I. Akca, Bilgi University, 2010). Her research has been supported by the American Association for the University Women, Mellon Foundation, Bella Zeller Scholarship Trust Fund, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. In 2018, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award of the Political Science Program at the CUNY-The Graduate Center. Balta is a senior scholar at Istanbul Policy Center, a member of Global Relations Forum, and co-editor of International Relations Journal. She is appointed as the academic coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum in 2021.

Online via Zoom. Register here.

Özlem Altan-Olcay Koç University
Evren Balta Özyeğin University
Seminars

What The Multistakeholder Approach Can Bring to Content Policy Debates

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Julie Owono & Dr. Niousha Roshani Event September 28

PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us via Zoom on Tue, September 28th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for a conversation with PDI fellows, Julie Owono and Dr Niousha Roshani, moderated by Co-Director of the Cyber Policy Center, Nathaniel Persily, as they discuss the challenges to content policy and the solutions that a multistakeholder approach has to offer. This is part of the fall seminar series organized by Stanford Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. 

  

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The multistakeholder governance model is increasingly presented as a solution for addressing content governance issues online. While this inclusive and collaborative approach mirrors the foundational principle of an “open and free internet”, challenges with online content around scale and rapidity notably, call for further experimentation. 

The Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL), a new project of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center (CPC), aims to be one of these experiments - by creating a safe space for a diverse array of stakeholders from government, the private sector, civil society, and academia to share knowledge and collaborate on solutions.

Moderator: Nathaniel Persily, Co-Director, Cyber Policy Center

Speakers: Julie Owono, PDI Fellow and Niousha Roshani, PDI Fellow

 

 

 

Nathaniel Persily

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

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Julie Owono
Niousha Roshani
Seminars

Shooting for the Moon, embracing failure, learning fast: How to build a culture of innovation in any organization

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For Fall Quarter 2021, CDDRL will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will be open to the public online via Zoom, and limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford affiliates may be available in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines.

A Conversation with Obi Felten, founder and CEO of Flourish Labs

With Additional Remarks by 66th US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
Moderated by Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli

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Open to all

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Named in honor of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Condoleezza Rice “Women Who Inspire” Lecture Series seeks to highlight how women are reshaping the world, confronting global challenges, and blazing trails across all walks of life that improve the human condition.
 

SPEAKERS

Obi Felton
Obi Felten is the founder and CEO of Flourish Labs, a startup combining cutting edge mental health science and technology to foster flourishing and good mental health.

Previously, Obi was Head of Getting Moonshots Ready for Contact with the Real World at X (formerly Google X), Alphabet’s ‘moonshot factory’ and innovation lab. At X, Obi worked on cutting edge technology projects such as internet from balloons (Loon), air delivery by drone (Wing) and sustainable energy storage using molten salt (Malta). Most recently Obi founded and led Amber, a project using brain-based biomarkers and machine learning to measure anxiety and depression.

Obi was Director of Consumer Marketing for Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa, launching and growing Google Maps, Chrome and Android from zero to hundreds of millions of users. She founded Campus, Google’s space for tech entrepreneurs. Before Google, Obi set up the ecommerce business of a major UK retailer, worked as a strategy consultant, and led eToys.com’s (unsuccessful) expansion to Germany during the first dotcom boom.

Obi is an independent director of Springer Nature, a global academic and educational publisher. She is an advisor for mental health at the Wellcome Trust, one of the largest funders of scientific research, and Chelsea & Westminster NHS Trust’s Best For You youth mental health initiative.

Obi is an advocate for women, people of colour and other underrepresented groups in technology. At X, she founded the diversity & inclusion team, supported several employee resource groups and served on the leadership team for Women of Alphabet in the Bay Area. She mentors female startup founders and leaders getting ready for board service.

Obi grew up in Berlin and saw the wall come down. She has a BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University. She now lives in California with her husband and two children. She loves yoga, biking, paddleboarding, skiing (which she picked up at age 40), travelling, cooking, eating, and her family.

 

Condoleezza Rice
Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. In addition, she is a founding partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm.

From January 2005 to January 2009, Rice served as the 66th Secretary of State of the United States, the second woman and first black woman to hold the post. Rice also served as President George W. Bush’s Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Advisor) from January 2001 to January 2005, the first woman to hold the position.

Rice served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999, during which time she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and an academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. In 1997, she also served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.

From February 1989 through March 1991, Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff. She served as Director, then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs, as well as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice also served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

As Professor of Political Science, Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the university’s highest teaching honors – the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

She has authored and co-authored numerous books, most recently To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth (2019), co-authored with Philip Zelikow. Among her other volumes are three bestsellers, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017); No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011); and Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010). She also wrote Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995) with Philip Zelikow; edited The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin; and penned The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance (1984).

In 1991, Rice co-founded the Center for a New Generation (CNG), an innovative, after-school academic enrichment program for students in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California. In 1996, CNG merged with the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula, an affiliate club of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA). CNG has since expanded to local BGCA chapters in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Dallas. Rice remains an active proponent of an extended learning day through after-school programs.

Since 2009, Rice has served as a founding partner at RiceHadleyGates LLC, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. The firm works with senior executives of major companies to implement strategic plans and expand in emerging markets. Other partners include former National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley and former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

Rice currently serves on the boards of Dropbox, Inc., an online storage technology company; C3.ai, an AI software company; and Makena Capital Management, a private endowment firm. In addition, she is Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and a trustee of the Aspen Institute. Previously, Rice served on various additional boards, including those of: the George W. Bush Institute; the Commonwealth Club; KiOR, Inc.; the Chevron Corporation; the Charles Schwab Corporation; the Transamerica Corporation; the Hewlett-Packard Company; the University of Notre Dame; the Foundation for Excellence in Education; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and the San Francisco Symphony.

In 2013, Rice was appointed to the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, formerly the Bowl Championship Series. She served on the committee until 2017.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Rice earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver; her master’s in the same subject from the University of Notre Dame; and her Ph.D., likewise in political science, from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Rice is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has been awarded fifteen honorary doctorates.

 

Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli
Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli is a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute. From March 2003 to April 2005, she served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations at the National Security Council. From 2004 - 2006 she served as the key U.S. official in the formulation of U.S. policy toward United Nations Reform. She was appointed by Secretary Condoleezza Rice as Senior Advisor for Women’s Empowerment. She set up and oversaw the work of the Women Leaders' Working Group and spearheaded the State Department initiative for Women's Justice. Ambassador Tahir-Kheli also was Research Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS and served as the founding Director of the South Asia Program from 1999 to 2002. She is the author of Before the Age of Prejudice: A Muslim Woman’s National Security Work with Three American Presidents, among other books and monographs.

 

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Obi Felten Founder and CEO at Flourish Labs
Condoleezza Rice Director of the Hoover Institution
Shirin Tahir-Kheli Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute
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What the U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan Means for Taiwan

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Oriana Skylar Mastro
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Commentary
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There are many reasons to fear an impending Chinese attack on Taiwan: Intensified Chinese aerial activity. High-profile Pentagon warnings. Rapid Chinese military modernization. President Xi Jinping’s escalating rhetoric. But despite what recent feverish discussion in foreign policy and military circles is suggesting, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan isn’t one of them.

Some critics of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan argue the move will embolden Beijing because it telegraphs weakness — an unwillingness to stick it out and win wars that China will factor in when deciding whether to attack Taiwan, which it considers to be part of its territory.

The reality is, though, that the U.S. departure from Afghanistan will more likely give pause to Chinese war planners — not push them to use force against Taiwan.

The Chinese Communist Party’s stated goal is “national rejuvenation”: Regaining China’s standing as a great power. Chinese leaders and thinkers have studied the rise and fall of great powers past. They have long understood that containment by the United States could keep China from becoming a great power itself.

Luckily for Beijing, the Afghan war — along with Iraq and other American misadventures in the Middle East — distracted Washington for two decades. While China was building roads and ports from Beijing to Trieste, Italy, fueling its economy and expanding its geopolitical influence, the United States was pouring money into its war on terrorism. While Beijing was building thousands of acres of military bases in the South China Sea and enhancing its precision-strike capabilities, the U.S. military was fighting an insurgency and dismantling improvised explosive devices.

While Beijing was building thousands of acres of military bases in the South China Sea and enhancing its precision-strike capabilities, the U.S. military was fighting an insurgency and dismantling improvised explosive devices.
Oriana Skylar Mastro

In many ways, it was just dumb luck that Mr. Xi and his predecessors, thanks in part to the war in Afghanistan, could build national power, undermine international norms, co-opt international organizations and extend their territorial control all without the United States thwarting their plans in any meaningful way.

But the end of the war in Afghanistan could bring these good times — which the Communist Party calls the “period of important strategic opportunities” — to an abrupt end. Sure, over the past 10 years American presidents tried to get back into the Asia game even as the war continued. Barack Obama asserted we would pivot to Asia back in 2011. Donald Trump’s national security team made great power competition with China its top priority.

But neither went much beyond paying lip service. The withdrawal shows Mr. Biden is truly refocusing his national security priorities — he even listed the need to “focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China” as one of the reasons for the drawdown.

Such a refocusing comes not a moment too soon. Chinese expansion and militarization in the South China Sea, deadly skirmishes with India, its crackdown in Hong Kong and repression in Xinjiang all point to an increasingly confident and aggressive China. In particular, Chinese military activity around Taiwan has spiked — 2020 witnessed a record number of incursions into Taiwan’s airspace. The sophistication and scale of military exercises has increased as well. These escalations come alongside recent warnings from Mr. Xi that any foreign forces daring to bully China “will have their heads bashed bloody” and efforts toward “Taiwan independence” will be met with “resolute action.”

The U.S. policy toward Taiwan is “strategic ambiguity” — there is no explicit promise to defend it from Chinese attack. In this tense environment, U.S. policymakers and experts are feverishly considering ways to make U.S. commitment to Taiwan more credible and enhance overall military deterrence against China. A recent $750 million arms sale proposal to Taiwan is part of these efforts, as is talk of inviting Taiwan to a democracy summit, which undoubtedly would provoke Beijing’s ire.

Some have argued that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan undermines efforts to signal U.S. support for Taiwan. On the surface, it may seem as if the U.S. withdrawal would be a good thing for China’s prospects at what it calls “armed reunification.” Indeed, this is the message the nationalist Chinese newspaper The Global Times is peddling: The United States will cast Taiwan aside just as it has done with Vietnam, and now Afghanistan.

However, the American departure from Afghanistan creates security concerns in China’s own backyard that could distract it from its competition with the United States. Beijing’s strategy to protect its global interests is a combination of relying on host nation security forces and private security contractors and free-riding off other countries’ military presence. Analysts have concluded that China is less likely than the United States to rely on its military to protect its interests abroad. Beijing appears committed to avoiding making the same mistakes as Washington — namely, an overreliance on military intervention overseas to advance foreign policy objectives.

Now there will be no reliable security presence in Afghanistan and undoubtedly broader instability in a region with significant economic and commercial interests for China. Chinese leaders are also worried that conflict in Afghanistan could spill across the border into neighboring Xinjiang, where Beijing’s repressive tactics have already been the cause of much international opprobrium.

The reality is, the United States stayed much longer in Afghanistan than most expected. This upsets China’s calculus about what the United States would do in a Taiwan crisis, since conventional wisdom in Beijing had been that the painful legacy of Somalia would deter Washington from ever coming to Taipei’s aid.

But U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have called these assumptions into question. Taiwan, with its proportionately large economy and semiconductor industry, is strategically important to the United States. U.S. power and influence in East Asia are reliant on its allies and military bases in the region and America’s broader role as the security partner of choice. If Taiwan were to fall to Chinese aggression, many countries, U.S. allies included, would see it as a sign of the arrival of a Chinese world order. By comparison, Afghanistan is less strategically important, and yet the United States stayed there for 20 years.

If Taiwan were to fall to Chinese aggression, many countries, U.S. allies included, would see it as a sign of the arrival of a Chinese world order. By comparison, Afghanistan is less strategically important, and yet the United States stayed there for 20 years.
Oriana Skylar Mastro

This does not bode well for any designs Beijing might have for Taiwan.

It’s true that China would benefit from a home-field advantage given Taiwan’s proximity, and that Beijing’s arsenal is far greater than Taiwan’s. China, too, would likely enjoy more domestic public support for any conflict than the U.S. would for yet another intervention.

But if China has any hope of winning a war across the Strait, its military would have to move fast, before the United States has time to respond. Chinese planners know that the longer the war, the greater the U.S. advantage. Unlike Chinese production and manufacturing centers, which can all be targeted by the United States, the American homeland is relatively safe from Chinese conventional attack. China is far more reliant on outside sources for oil and natural gas, and thus vulnerable to U.S. attempts to cut off its supply.

And the Chinese economy would suffer more: Since the war would be happening in Asia, trade would be bound to be disrupted there. The United States would need to stick it out for only a short time — not 20 years — for these factors to come into play.

A call on Thursday between Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi hinted at the stakes — the two “discussed the responsibility of both countries to ensure competition does not veer into conflict,” according to the White House.

Chinese leaders already expected a tense relationship with the Biden administration. Now they are faced with the fact that the United States might have the will and resources to push back against Chinese aggression, even if it means war.

So, while there may be other reasons to oppose the end of the war in Afghanistan, the impact on China’s Taiwan calculus is not — and should not be — one of them.

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In a New York Times opinion piece, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro argues that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan does not represent a potential catalyst for an impending Chinese attack on Taiwan.

Director’s Series: Science, Technology, and Policy: Science and Technology for Nuclear Nonproliferation

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For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

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In Person

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. This event will not be livestreamed.

 

About the Event: Nuclear nonproliferation has been a pressing societal need since the development of nuclear weapons. Preventing the further spread of nuclear capabilities that could lead to a nuclear weapons program is a crucial mission that requires both technical and policy advances. Several international treaties have been put into place to curb the expansion of nuclear capabilities. Nevertheless, there are states that may be pursuing elements of an overt or covert nuclear weapons program. New science and technology developments are needed to verify the existing or proposed treaties in this area and to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again.

In this presentation, I will discuss these challenges and some of the recent advances in science and technology that contribute to solving them. I will present our Consortium for Monitoring, Technology, and Verification (MTV), a consortium of 14 universities and 13 national laboratories working together on these issues. I will highlight research projects including our studies on the fundamental emissions from nuclear fission and the development of new detection systems for nuclear materials detection, localization, and characterization. These systems were shown to aid the International Atomic Energy Agency in its nuclear safeguards and verification activities that have direct relevance to nuclear security. I will also talk about our efforts in furthering diversity, equity, and inclusion, which are crucial for building teams that can successfully address these societal issues.

 

About the Speaker: Professor Sara Pozzi earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan, Italy in 1997 and 2001, respectively. She is a Professor of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences and a Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan where she has graduated 25 Ph. D. students as advisor or co-advisor. Her research interests include the development of new methods for nuclear materials detection, identification, and characterization for nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and national security programs. She is the founding Director of the Consortium for Verification Technology (CVT) 2014-2019 and the Consortium for Monitoring, Technology, and Verification (MTV) 2019-2024, two large consortia of multiple universities and national laboratories working together to develop new technologies needed for nuclear treaty verification.

In 2018, Professor Pozzi was named the inaugural Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) for the UM College of Engineering. In this capacity, she heads the DEI implementation committee and works to ensure that the students, faculty, and staff are increasingly diverse, everyone is treated equally, and everyone is included.

She is the recipient of many awards, including the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM) Vince J DeVito Distinguished Service Award and the Department of Energy Outstanding Mentor Award, and is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, the INMM, and the IEEE.

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. This event will not be livestreamed.

Sara Pozzi Professor University of Michigan
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