About the Speaker

Jennifer Pan is a political scientist whose research focuses on political communication, digital media, and authoritarian politics. She is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of Communication and (by courtesy) Political Science, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Pan's research uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity to answer questions about the role of digital media in authoritarian and democratic politics, including how political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result. Her papers have appeared in peer reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Communication, and Science. She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government.

Parking & Directions

Parking meters are enforced Monday - Friday 8 AM to 4 PM, unless otherwise posted.

The event will take place in the Koret-Taube Conference Center located within the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building. The closest visitor parking to the Gunn-SIEPR building is:

• Galvez Lot, located across from the Stadium lot
• Track House Visitor Lot at the corner of Galvez Street and Campus Drive
• Knight Management Parking structure on Campus Drive East (this is an underground option)

Please visit this website for more detailed parking options and directions to the venue.

Questions? Contact Ragina Johnson at raginaj@stanford.edu

Sir. Lawrence Freedman is also delivering the Annual Alexander Dallin Lecture "Escalations, Red Lines, Risks, and the Russo-Ukrainian War" on Thursday, April 18, 2024 at 5:30pm PT at the Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall.

This event is at full capacity. Registration is no longer available.

The Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture honors the life of Daniel Pearl (Class of '85), who was a journalist, musician, and family man dedicated to the ideals of peace and humanity. In 2002, Daniel was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan while working as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

The 2024 Pearl Memorial Lecture is presented by the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in partnership with the Daniel Pearl Foundation and Hillel at Stanford.

About the Speaker 
 

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In 2018, Craig Allen began his tenure as the president of the US-China Business Council (USCBC), a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization representing over 270 American companies doing business with China. Prior to joining USCBC, Allen had a career in US public service. Allen began his government career in 1985 at the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) where he served as an international economist in ITA’s China Office. He served as the Senior Commercial Officer at the US Embassy in Beijing in 2002 where he was later promoted to the rank of Minister Counselor of the Senior Foreign Service. Allen then became Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asia at the US Department of Commerce’s ITA and later became Deputy Assistant Secretary for China. Allen was sworn in as the United States Ambassador to Brunei Darussalam in 2014. He served there until 2018, when he transitioned to President of the US-China Business Council. Allen received a B.A. from the University of Michigan in Political Science and Asian Studies in 1979. He received a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 1985.

In an era marked by rapid shifts in global power dynamics, the ascent of China as a formidable force on the world stage poses one of the most critical challenges to the international order of the 21st century. The prevailing notion that China is a revisionist power, intent on establishing a parallel international order to rival that of the United States and the West, raises pivotal questions. Is there truth to this belief? How did China and the United States lose their consensus over the desirable international order? Which elements are we satisfied or dissatisfied with? Towards what kind of order or orders are we moving?

Our upcoming webinar, "China, the US, and the International Order: Are We Moving Towards Parallel Systems?" aims to dissect the narrative of China's emergence as a power intent on sculpting a new world order—a vision that starkly contrasts with the U.S.-led system that has dominated global affairs for nearly a century. Join us on April 3 for an in-depth discussion of this critical issue with Wei Da, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua University.

Wei Da is the director of the Center for International Security and Strategy  (CISS) at Tsinghua University and a professor in the Department of International Relations, School of Social Science, Tsinghua University. Dr. Da’s research expertise covers China-US relations and US security & foreign policy. He has worked in China’s academic and policy community for more than two decades. Before his current positions, Dr. Da was the assistant president of University International Relations (2017-2020) and director of the Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (2013-2017). He has written hundreds of policy papers for the Chinese government and published dozens of academic papers in journals in China, the US, and other countries. He earned his BA and MA from UIR and his Ph.D. from CICIR. He was a visiting senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States from 2006 to 2007, and a visiting senior associate at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University from 2008 to 2009.

About the Speaker 
 

Mr. Bo Li assumed the role of Deputy Managing Director at the IMF on August 23, 2021. He is responsible for the IMF’s work on about 90 countries as well as on a wide range of policy issues.

Before joining the IMF, Mr. Li worked for many years at the People’s Bank of China, most recently as Deputy Governor. He earlier headed the Monetary Policy, Monetary Policy II, and Legal and Regulation Departments, where he played an important role in the reform of state-owned banks, the drafting of China’s anti-money-laundering law, the internationalization of the renminbi, and the establishment of China’s macroprudential policy framework.

Outside of the PBoC, Mr. Li served as Vice Mayor of Chongqing—China’s largest municipality, with a population of over 30 million—where he oversaw the city’s financial-sector development, international trade, and foreign direct investment. Mr. Li was also Vice Chairman of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese. He started his career at the New York law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he was a practicing attorney for five years.

Mr. Li holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and an M.A. from Boston University, both in economics, as well as a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. He received his undergraduate education from Renmin University of China in Beijing.

The family of Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh donated his personal archive to the Stanford Libraries' Special Collections and endowed the Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture series to honor his legacy and to inspire future generations. Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh (1919-2004) was former Governor of the Central Bank in Taiwan. During his tenure, he was responsible for the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, and was widely recognized for achieving stability and economic growth. In his long and distinguished career as economist and development specialist, he held key positions in multilateral institutions including the Asian Development Bank, where as founding Director, he was instrumental in advancing the green revolution and in the transformation of rural Asia. Read more about Dr. Hsieh.

Request Disability Accommodations and Access Info

This event is open only to Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, and students.

Bio:

Allison Macfarlane is Professor and Director, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Faculty of Arts, the University of British Columbia.  Dr. Macfarlane has held both academic and government positions in the field of energy and environmental policy, especially nuclear policy.  The first geologist (and the third woman) to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012-2014, Dr. Macfarlane holds a doctorate in earth science from MIT and a bachelor's of science from the University of Rochester.  She has held fellowships at Radcliffe College, MIT, Stanford, and Harvard Universities, and she has been on the faculty at Georgia Tech in Earth Science and International Affairs, at George Mason University in Environmental Science and Policy, and in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.  From 2010 to 2012 Dr. Macfarlane served on the White House Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. Dr. Macfarlane’s research has focused on technical, social, and policy aspects of nuclear energy production and nuclear waste management and disposal as well as regulation, nuclear nonproliferation, and energy policy.  

Abstract:

New nuclear reactors, including small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced reactors, have been touted in the media recently as the best way to transition off fossil fuels. Reactor proponents claim that they will be cheaper, safer, and produce less waste than existing large light water reactors.   But are these claims realistic? This talk will examine the challenges facing these new nuclear technologies and will attempt to address whether new nuclear power will help us move quickly to a low-carbon future.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

This event is open only to Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, and students.

Bio:

Tom Dannenbaum is Associate Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, where he is Co-Director of the Center for International Law & Governance. Prior to joining the Fletcher School, he taught at University College London and Yale Law School. Dannenbaum writes on the law of armed conflict, the law governing the use of force, international criminal law, human rights, shared responsibility, and international judging. His articles have appeared in a range of leading journals and have received multiple awards, including the American Society of International Law’s (ASIL) International Legal Theory Scholarship Prize in 2022 for his work on siege starvation and ASIL’s Lieber Prize in 2017 for his work on the crime of aggression. His writing on peacekeeping has been cited by the Hague Court of Appeal and the International Law Commission. His book, The Crime of Aggression, Humanity, and the Soldier, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Dannenbaum has testified or presented before U.S. congressional and U.N. bodies and has appeared or been quoted in leading media outlets, including the New York Times, the Economist, National Public Radio, PBS Frontline, the BBC World Service, MSNBC, Deutsche Welle, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others. He has received teaching awards at both the Fletcher School and UCL, as well as the faculty research award at Fletcher. He holds a PhD from Princeton, a JD from Yale, and a BA from Stanford.

Abstract:

A recent amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has drawn unprecedented attention to the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. It comes at a time when mass starvation in war is resurgent, devastating populations in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Palestine, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere. The practice has also drawn the scrutiny of the United Nations Security Council. And yet, what precisely is criminally wrongful about starvation methods remains underspecified.

A common way of thinking about the criminal wrong is as a form of killing or harming civilians. Although its differentiating particularities matter, the basic wrongfulness of the crime inheres, on this view, in it being an attack on those who ought not be attacked. For some, this supports a broad interpretation of the starvation ban. However, for others, the graduality of starvation preserves the continuous possibility of the avoidance or minimization of civilian death or harm in a way that direct kinetic attacks do not. In combination with the method’s purported military utility, this distinctive incrementalism has underpinned arguments for the permissibility of certain forms of siege and other deprivation and a narrow interpretation of the starvation crime.

Drawing on the moral philosophy of torture, this Article offers a different normative theory of the crime. Starvation, like torture, is peculiarly wrongful in its distortion of victims’ biological imperatives against their capacities to formulate and act on higher-order desires, political commitments, and even love. This process does not merely raise the cost of fulfilling those commitments. Instead, starvation tears gradually at the very capacity of those affected to prioritize their most fundamental commitments, regardless of whether they would choose to do so under the conditions necessary to evaluate matters with a “contemplative attitude.” Rather than palliating, the slowness of starvation methods is at the crux of this torturous wrong. Recognizing this redefines the meaning and place of the crime in the framework of international criminal law.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.