This Conference will be held in person on our Stanford University Campus.
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About the Conference

The inaugural conference of the South Asia Initiative at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) focuses on the role that critical and emerging technologies can play in India’s national security. These technologies promise to deliver enormous advantages as powers like India and China compete for security and influence. India’s ability to deploy critical and emerging technologies will shape not only its military power but also its resilience and self-sufficiency, which the Indian government sees as key national goals in a post-pandemic world. To develop these technologies, India’s national security establishment will need new policy settings – including new relationships with private industry – and new ways of cooperating with key partners, especially the United States.

Our conference will be a unique forum bringing together academic experts, senior policymakers, and leading industry representatives to develop this critical policy agenda. Keynote speeches and panel discussions will contemplate the changing character of national security, the imperatives for public-private cooperation on technology policy, and the implications for national and foreign policy. In keeping with our policy-focused mission, we look forward not only to fostering important dialogues but also to convening problem-solvers with different perspectives, to understand and act on new technologies’ role in strategic competition.

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Conference Agenda

8:30-8:45 a.m.
Opening and Welcome Remarks

Prof. Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Asia-Pacific Research Center and Korea Program, Stanford
Dr. Arzan Tarapore, Research Scholar, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford

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8:45-9:30 a.m.
Keynote address: “Technology’s Role in Managing India’s Security Challenges.”

Dr. Ajay Kumar, Defence Secretary, India
Introduction by Prof. Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford

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9:30-10:45 a.m.
Panel 1: Redefining the Military’s Relationship with Technology

Moderated by Dr. Arzan Tarapore, Research Scholar, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford

LtGen Stephen D. Sklenka, Deputy Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command
LtGen (ret.) Raj Shukla, ARTRAC
Ms. Kari Bingen, Hawkeye 360
Ms. Heather Richman, BMNT

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10:45-11:00 a.m.
Coffee Break

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11:00 a.m. -12:15 p.m.
Panel 2: The Way Forward in Defense Innovation

Moderated by Mr. Steve Blank, Adjunct Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Stanford

Mr. Sanjay Jaju, Director iDEX (Virtual)
Mr. Mike Brown, Director DIU
Ms. Colleen Laughlin, Defense Innovation Board
Ms. Lauren Bedula, Silicon Valley Defense Group

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12:15-2:00 p.m.
Lunch

Fireside chat: "Looking Forward: Critical and Emerging Technology in the U.S.-India Relationship"

Mr. Jose W. Fernandez, Under-Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and Environment (virtual)
Introduction by Amb. Scot Marciel, Visiting Practitioner Fellow on Southeast Asia, Stanford

Fireside chat: "A New Agenda for US-India Relations"

Amb. Atul Keshap, USIBC (Virtual)
Mr. Vikram Singh, USIP and USISPF

With Dr. Joe Felter, Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, Stanford

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2:00-2:15 p.m.
Coffee Break

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2:15-3:45 p.m.
Panel 3: Start-Up Success Stories

Moderated by: Sridhar Narayanan, Professor of Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business
 

Mr. Vinayak Dalmia, 3rditech
Ms. Vrinda Kapoor, 114AI (Virtual)
Mr. John Martellaro, Skanda Defense
Ms. Jacqueline Tame, GameBreaker AI

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3:45-4:00pm
Concluding Remarks

​Breakfast, lunch, and afternoon refreshments will be served at the conference.

Parking information can be found on our Shorenstein APARC Contact Us page.

Time:  7:30am-8:45am  California, USA 2 March 2022 
9:00pm-10:15pm New Delhi, India 2 March 2022
 

India’s international position has evolved sharply in the first two decades of the 21st century, and it is poised to become only more consequential in coming decades. Its strategic interests and influence have now stretched into the distant reaches of the Indo-Pacific, it has emerged as a central actor in managing global governance challenges like climate change, and it may have the capacity to take a commanding position in some key leading-edge technologies. In this webinar, veteran journalist Indrani Bagchi, who spent nearly two decades covering India’s foreign relations for the Times of India, will reflect on India’s recent trajectory and its prospects. Through the prism of some key episodes and issues of India in the 21st century, the webinar will examine India’s capacity and approach to manage international issues, as well as the constraints and challenges Indian policymakers must face. 

Speaker: 

Indrani Bagchi is CEO-designate at Ananta Aspen Centre, India. She was Associate Editor with the Times of India, where she reported and analyzed foreign policy issues for the newspaper from 2004 until 2022. As Diplomatic Editor, Indrani covered the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on her news beat, and interpreted and analyzed global trends with an Indian perspective. Earlier, Indrani worked with India Today, the Economic Times and The Statesman, and has held fellowships at Oxford University and the Brookings Institution. She is a Fellow of the Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellowship Class 3 of the Ananta Aspen Centre and a member of Aspen Global Leadership Network. She graduated from Loreto College, Calcutta University with English honors. 

Moderator:

Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defense Department. Arzan holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London. 

 

This event is co-sponsored by Center for South Asia

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
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What is the relationship between internal development and integration into the global economy in developing countries? How and why do state–market relations differ? And do these differences matter in the post-Cold War era of global conflict and cooperation? Drawing on research in China, India, and Russia and examining sectors from textiles to telecommunications, Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism introduces a new theory of sectoral pathways to globalization and development. Adopting a historical and comparative approach, Hsueh's Strategic Value Framework shows how state elites perceive the strategic value of sectors in response to internal and external pressures. Sectoral structures and organization of institutions further determine the role of the state in market coordination and property rights arrangements. The resultant dominant patterns of market governance vary by country and sector within country. These national configurations of sectoral models are the micro-institutional foundations of capitalism, which mediate globalization and development.

Roselyn Hsueh is an associate professor of political science at Temple University, where she co-directs the Certificate in Political Economy. She is the author of Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2022), China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2011), and scholarly articles on states and markets, comparative regulation and governance, and political economy of development. She is a frequent commentator on politics, finance and trade, and economic development in China and beyond. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, National Public Radio, and The Washington Post, among other media outlets, have featured her research. Prestigious fellowships, such as the Fulbright Global Scholar Award, have funded international fieldwork and she has served as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She holds a B.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

About the Session: Join Dinsha Mistree, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and in the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, to discuss "The Troubling State of India's Democracy," a volume he is co-editing with Sumit Ganguly and Larry Diamond.

 

 

About the Speaker: Dinsha Mistree is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and in the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School. Dr. Mistree studies the relationship between governance and economic growth in developing countries. His scholarship concentrates on the political economy of legal systems, public administration, and education policy, with a special focus on India. Recent and forthcoming scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at Stanford Law Review, Social Science and Medicine, Public Administration Review, and Comparative Politics. Dr. Mistree holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, along with an S.M. and an S.B. from MIT. He was previously a CDDRL postdoc (2015-16).