BOOK TALK

Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University Press, 2025) by Jennifer Jihye Chun and Ju Hui Judy Han offers insight into the utility and futility of protesting precarity under neoliberal capitalism. Based on long-term ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with key labor and social movement activists, the book follows the protests of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs, as they contend with what it means to be treated as disposable and what it takes to resist. Long-term protest camps, life-threatening hunger strikes, grueling prostrations, perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as affective catalysts of change. Through dramatic performances and rituals that are repeated across time and space, Against Abandonment finds that protesters cultivate repertoires of solidarity as a relational force that binds people and worlds together in a collective praxis of refusal. In doing so, Against Abandonment builds upon intersectional, transnational, and abolitionist feminist theorizing that has long emphasized the centrality of building relations of care and community in place-based struggles against capitalist abandonment.

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on labor and community organizing; gender, care, and migration; ethnography and intersectional feminist methods; and culture, power, and global capitalism. She is the author of the award-winning book Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press) and Against Abandonment: Repertoires Solidarity in South Korean Protest (co-authored with Ju Hui Judy Han; forthcoming, Stanford University Press). Chun is currently Chair of International Development Studies (IDS) and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. 

Directions and Parking > 

The Fallacy of the China Model and its Long-term Consequences: A Roundtable Discussion 

Yasheng Huang, Skyline Scholar and MIT Professor of Global Economics and Management

This talk draws on Professor Yasheng Huang’s recently completed book manuscript, Statism with Chinese Characteristics: From Directional Liberalism to the China Model—A History of China’s Reforms and Reversals (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Based on detailed archival research and rare databases in the 1980s, he shows that China's healthiest and most inclusive growth took place during the most politically liberal period. The China Model, which asserts that autocracy and statist finance created the Chinese growth miracle, gets many facts wrong and gets causal order backward. But the China Model is the prevailing economic thinking in China, and it is the root cause of many problems in the Chinese economy today.  

Please register for the event and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Yasheng Huang is a Professor and holds the Epoch Foundation Professorship of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2013 to 2017, he served as an Associate Dean in charge of MIT Sloan’s Global Partnership programs and its Action Learning initiatives. His previous appointments include faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School.

Professor Huang is the author of 11 books and counting in both English and Chinese He is currently involved in research projects in three broad areas: 1) political economy of contemporary China, 2) historical technological and political developments in China, and 3) as a co-PI in “Food Safety in China: A Systematic Risk Management Approach” (supported by Walmart Foundation, 2016). He has published numerous articles in academic journals and in media outlets.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

Limited number of lunches available for registered guests until 12:30pm on day of event.

About the event: A rigorous understanding of the past provides powerful insights and tools that enable better choices in the present. This is especially true for the extraordinarily consequential worlds of statecraft and strategy. This book proposes ways to apply historical knowledge to understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us.

It may seem obvious that we should employ history to improve decision-making, but it is rarely done. History is more often misused, deployed ineffectively, or exploited for problematic and even nefarious purposes. Our times favor other ways of knowing the world over historical thinking. Sadly, historians rarely engage decision-makers, and decision-makers seldom consult historians. This is unfortunate, as good historical work captures, perhaps better than any other discipline, the challenges and complexities the decision-maker faces. The academic discipline of history has not helped: in recent years it has de-emphasized the history of statecraft, strategy, and policy in favor of other subjects.

How can history be better understood and used more effectively? The book explains and deploys two key interconnected concepts: first, a historical sensibility, which is the foundation for the second, the act of thinking historically. Thinking Historically demonstrates how a historical sensibility, married to thinking historically, can generate better insights about the world while improving how we make critical choices facing a complex, uncertain future.

About the speaker: Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Previously, he was the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. From 2005 until 2010, he directed The American Assembly’s multiyear, national initiative, The Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions. He is the founding Chair of the Board of Editors for the Texas National Security Journal. Gavin’s writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971; Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age ; and Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (Brookings Institution Press), which was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His IISS-Adelphi book, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era in 2024. Thinking Historically – A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, will be published by Yale University Press, 2025.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In an international security environment marked by the heightened risk of nuclear weapons use and the weakening of the global nuclear order, reviving arms control between the two largest nuclear weapon States—the United States and Russia—is imperative. But under what circumstances might they return to the negotiating table? One school of thought holds that it may take another event like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to (re)awaken American and Russian leaders to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the need for greater restraint. Yet this claim, and the interpretation of Cold War history on which it rests, have not been subject to rigorous analysis in existing work. Using insights from cognitive psychology on the phenomenon of “wakeup calls,” I fill this gap by testing prevailing assumptions about the role of nuclear crises in driving arms control and assessing what the results mean for theory and practice. I show that these assumptions are not supported empirically and argue that future nuclear crises could have adverse effects on arms control depending on the priors of the leaders in office. These results challenge normative claims promoted in the scholarship on nuclear learning about the kinds of lessons nuclear crises teach and the influence of these events on elite inferential learning. In so doing, they demonstrate why electing leaders into office who have already learned the value of arms control is more likely to precipitate a return to the negotiating table than relying on external events to teach them.

About the Speaker: Sarah Bidgood is a postdoctoral fellow in technology and international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), based in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on nuclear diplomacy and military innovation in the United States, Russian Federation, and beyond. From 2023-2024, Sarah was a Stanton nuclear security fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program. Prior to this, she served as director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, where she remains a non-resident scholar. Sarah’s work has been published as single and co-authored articles in journals such as International Security, Cold War History, and The Nonproliferation Review, as well as outlets including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Arms Control Today, and War on the Rocks. She is a coauthor of Death Dust: The Rise, Decline, and Future of Radiological Weapons Programs, which was published by Stanford University Press in December 2023. Sarah received her PhD in Defence Studies from King's College London and holds an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in Russian.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: It has long been a presumption that the president enjoys vast powers with respect to decisions to intervene with military force abroad: the United States has an “imperial presidency”. This book challenges this conventional wisdom by arguing that this is more illusion than reality. Presidents have to operate in the shadow of Congress: they realize that if they act absent sufficient political cover from lawmakers, they leave themselves highly exposed should the use of force end poorly. Introducing a new measure of congressional sentiment toward the use of force, this book shows that while presidents frequently use force without formal approval from Congress, they are virtually always doing so pursuant to Congress’s informal support and urging. Moreover, it demonstrates that presidents are actually unwilling to undertake the largest interventions (full-scale war) absent the formal imprimatur of the legislator. Lastly, it shows that allies and adversaries pay close attention to domestic constraints on the president, yielding implications for deterrence and alliance reassurance. While in reality substantially constrained politically by Congress, presidents intentionally project a facade of imperialism in order to caution adversaries and hearten allies.

About the Speaker: Before coming to CISAC, Patrick was a Research Fellow with the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California San Diego in May 2023, and his J.D. at the UCLA School of Law in 2017. For the summer of 2022, Patrick was a Summer Associate with the RAND Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy, and for the 2020-2021 academic year he was a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center.

Patrick’s research and teaching interests include congressional-executive relations in U.S. foreign policy, constitutional law, deterrence theory, and the U.S.-China relationship. He is especially interested in the influence of Congress in use of military force decisions, as well as the role of legal constraints in international security.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Charles Mok is a Research Scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, and a board member of the International Centre for Trade Transparency and Monitoring. Charles served as an elected member of the Legislative Council in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, representing the Information Technology functional constituency, for two terms from 2012 to 2020. In 2021, he founded Tech for Good Asia, an initiative to advocate positive use of technology for businesses and civil communities.

Kai-Shen Huang graduated from the University of Oxford and National Taiwan University, possessing interdisciplinary training in both anthropology and law. His research expertise includes China’s critical technology policies, the application of artificial intelligence in dispute resolution and public administration, and legal anthropology.

Florence G’sell is a visiting professor of private law at the Cyber Policy Center, where she leads the Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies. She also holds the Digital, Governance, and Sovereignty Chair at Sciences Po (France) and is a professor of private law at the University of Lorraine (currently on leave). G’sell began her academic career focusing on tort law, judicial systems, and comparative law. In recent years, her work has concentrated on digital law, particularly in the regulation of online platforms, the legal challenges posed by emerging technologies such as blockchain and the metaverse, and the concept of digital sovereignty.

Sergey Sanovich is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before joining the Hoover Institution, Sergey Sanovich was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Sanovich received his PhD in political science from New York University and continues his affiliation with its Center for Social Media and Politics. His research is focused on disinformation and social media platform governance; online censorship and propaganda by authoritarian regimes; and elections and partisanship in information autocracies. 

Margaret Tu also known as Nikal Kabala'an, hailing from Taiwan's Indigenous communities, is a dynamic young leader with a passion for interdisciplinary pursuits. She actively engages in Indigenous self-determination and decolonization, contributing to social justice movements and curating exhibitions at prestigious institutions like the Burke Museum and the Tateuchi East Asia Library. Margaret is an accomplished legal researcher with expertise in Intellectual Property laws and a keen interest in technology-related policies, including Artificial Intelligence and Data Governance.

PANELISTS
 

Janel Thamkul (Deputy General Counsel, Anthropic)

Janel Thamkul drives legal strategy on AI as Deputy General Counsel at Anthropic. She has built and currently oversees the legal teams counseling AI development, commercial deals, product deployment, regulatory/litigation, privacy, and more. She handles a wide range of issues across the company, from handling the company's employment matters, advising on government engagements, overseeing the defense of high stakes litigation to launching consumer and B2B products across the world. Prior to Anthropic, Ms. Thamkul was at Google where she led Google’s Research product counsel team and advised Google’s AI governance and ethics team. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts from UCLA, an Associate's Degree in Fashion Design from FIDM, and a J.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley - School of Law.

Senator Scott Wiener (California State Senator)

Senator Scott Wiener is a California State Senator representing the eleventh district which includes all of San Francisco, Broadmoor, Colma, Daly City and parts of South San Francisco. First elected in 2016 and reelected in 2020, Wiener has focused on issues such as housing, transportation, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and AI governance. Most recently, Senator Wiener spearheaded SB1047 (“Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Intelligence Models Act”), a controversial AI regulation bill that passed both houses of the California State Assembly but was vetoed by Governor Newsom on September 29, 2024. Prior to his Senate role, Wiener served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and as a Deputy City Attorney. He received a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School.

Mr. Gerard de Graaf (Senior Envoy for Digital to the U.S. and Head of the EU Office in San Francisco)

Currently the Senior Digital Envoy to the U.S. and head of the EU Office in downtown San Francisco, Gerard de Graaf has worked for the European Commission for more than 30 years. Prior to leading the San Francisco EU Office, Mr. de Graaf was Director of the European Commission’s Directorate-General “Communications Networks, Content & Technology” (DG CONNECT). There, he was responsible for the Digital Services and Digital Markets Act among other important digital policy issues. Mr. de Graaf has held many other high-ranking positions within the European Commissions including co-chairing two of the Trade and Technology (TTC) Council Working Groups and serving as Trade Counsellor on behalf of the European Commission’s Delegation to the United States. Mr. de Graaf is from the Netherlands. He studied Economic Geography and Regional Planning at the Free University in Amsterdam and European Economics and Law at the Catholic University Leuven (Belgium).

Professor Nathaniel Persily (James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Co-Director of the Cyber Policy Center)

Professor Nathaniel Persily is the Founding Co-Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and its Program on Democracy and the Internet, as well as the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.  Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice address 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 many states. 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 social media and artificial intelligence on political communication, campaigns, and elections.  His most recent book is a coedited volume with Joshua Tucker, Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, 2020). He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale; a J.D. from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley.

Florence G’sell (Visiting Professor, Stanford Cyber Policy Center and Director of the Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies)

Florence G’sell is a visiting professor of private law at the Cyber Policy Center, where she leads the Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies. She also holds the Digital, Governance, and Sovereignty Chair at Sciences Po (France) and is a professor of private law at the University of Lorraine (currently on leave). Professor G’sell began her academic career focusing on tort law, judicial systems, and comparative law. In recent years, her work has concentrated on digital law, particularly in the regulation of online platforms, the legal challenges posed by emerging technologies such as blockchain and the metaverse, and the concept of digital sovereignty. Her research spans digital policies in both the EU and the U.S. She has edited and authored several notable works, including, most recently, “Regulating Under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI.” Her other recent publications include “AI Judges,” “The Digital Services Act: a General Assessment,” and a Council of Europe report entitled “The Impact of Blockchains for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law.” Professor G’sell graduated from Sciences Po, is admitted to the Paris Bar, and holds a PhD in private law from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Jacob Ward (Technology Journalist, Writer and Television Correspondent)

Mr. Ward is an established technology correspondent and writer. He was most recently NBC News Technology Correspondent from 2018 – 2023, where he reported for the TODAY Show, Nightly News, MSNBC, and NBCNews.com. From 2018 to 2019, Mr. Ward was a fellow with Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and its partner institution, the Berggruen Institution. During that time Mr. Ward wrote, The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back (Hachette; 2022), which looks at the effects of artificial intelligence on human psychology. Ward is also known for hosting a four-part PBS television series on the science and implications of bias called “Hacking Your Mind,” which looked at the concealed effects of technology on the human brain. Previously, Mr. Ward was a television correspondent for Al Jazeera and editor-in-chief of Popular Science.

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Reception to follow from 5:00pm - 6:30pm in the lobby in front of the William J. Perry Conference Room

About the event: New Cold Wars—the latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon David E. Sanger—is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations with two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace—so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. Now the three powers are engaged in a high-stakes struggle for military, economic, political, and technological supremacy, with nations around the world pressured to take sides. Yet all three are discovering that they are maneuvering for influence in a far more turbulent world than they imagined. Based on a remarkable array of interviews with top officials from five presidential administrations, U.S. intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and tech companies, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era’s critical questions. New Cold Wars is a remarkable first-draft history chronicling America’s return to superpower conflict, the choices that lie ahead, and what is at stake for the United States and the world.

About the speaker: David E. Sanger is national security correspondent for the New York Times and bestselling author of The Inheritance and Confront and Conceal. He has been a member of three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, including in 2017 for international reporting. A regular contributor to CNN, he also teaches national security policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

We examine the intergenerational persistence of health in a low- and middle-income country, using longitudinal datasets from Indonesia. Our study evaluates both objective and self-reported health outcomes including self-reported health (SRH), hemoglobin levels, anemia, pulse, hypertension, and adiposity measures (BMI, overweight and waist-hip ratio) to assess the persistence of these conditions across generations.

Linking the health of adult children to their parents, we find significant differences in persistence between objective and subjective health measures. SRH and adiposity show stronger persistence, especially through maternal health, with daughters more susceptible. In contrast, objective measures like waist-hip ratio show minimal intergenerational persistence, suggesting individual lifestyle factors play a larger role. Daughters are more affected by maternal health in hemoglobin, anemia, pulse rate and BMI, while paternal health has a weaker but notable influence.

Our results remain robust across regions and ethnic groups. We conclude that the persistence of intergenerational health significantly hinders socioeconomic mobility, underscoring the need for maternal health-oriented health policies, including prenatal care, nutrition, and family-based interventions to reduce the transmission of chronic diseases such as anemia and obesity.

Currently, Dr. Huixia Wang is an associate professor at Hunan University. Her research interests encompass health economics, environmental economics, and development economics, with a particular focus on assessing the health impacts of pollution, climate change, and economic fluctuations in developing countries. She earned both her PhD and MA in economics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) largely remains an enigma to foreign policy specialists and diplomats alike. As a regional organization, ASEAN is often lambasted for prioritising consensus over clampdowns and regional resilience over allegiance to democratic values. Yet conversely, ASEAN remains a flagship institution in the pivot toward an emerging Indo-Pacific legal order - one which stands to play a vital role in shaping the dynamics of the world’s largest region, particularly as they relate to economic partnerships and trade. As it continues to strengthen its ties with India, China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan, in addition to the United States, ASEAN’s brand of centrality, plurality, and the ASEAN way, may yet emerge as the ‘primary force in shaping the Indo-Pacific architecture’ (as ASEAN itself intends). 

In this thought-provoking paper drawing from her extensive experience living, working and researching in Southeast Asia and with Southeast Asian scholars, Dr Staggs Kelsall considers these three aspects of ASEAN’s internal structure (centrality, plurality, and the ASEAN way) that she argues remain significant for Southeast Asia’s future in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Building upon the findings of multi-country studies undertaken with Southeast Asian researchers and her forthcoming work in the field of Business and Human Rights, Dr Kelsall provides an analysis of the norms, conventions and practices that have emerged and may yet emerge in support of ASEAN centrality, and its implications for several ASEAN members states, referring particularly to Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, amongst others. She then considers further how plurality evidenced in trans-local solidarities across Southeast Asia are shaping notions of centrality and challenging the ASEAN way. The paper argues that that a lot can yet be learned from ASEAN’s approach to regional ordering and Southeast Asian responses to it, at a time when ongoing threats of disorder require us to rethink any commitment to a multipolar world order anew.

Before joining SOAS, Dr. Michelle Staggs Kelsall worked at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Cambodia Country Office) and in leadership positions on applied research projects in the region. She was Deputy Director of the Human Rights Resource Centre for ASEAN (Jakarta), leading multi-country regional studies with researchers from across all ten ASEAN member states.

Michelle’s research has a strong socio-legal focus. She is deeply interested in how international law is understood and reconstituted in the Asia-Pacific, and particularly in Southeast Asia. She has published widely for several academic journals and presses, including the European Journal of International Law and Oxford University Press. Her forthcoming book, Capitalizing Human Rights, provides a genealogy of Business and Human Rights and analyses how it shapes contemporary responses to human rights harms.

Lunch will be served.