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.

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

Bio:

Marc Lipsitch is Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics and the Interdisciplinary Program on Infectious Disease Epidemiology. He is an honorary faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. He is currently on part-time secondment to the US CDC as Senior Advisor for the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, for which he was the founding co-director (though this talk is in his personal and academic capacity). His scientific research concerns the effect of naturally acquired host immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, and other public health interventions on the population biology of pathogens and the consequences for human health. In the area of  biosafety and biosecurity, he co-founded the Cambridge Working Group, whose efforts led to the US government funding pause on gain-of-function research to enhance potential pandemic pathogens, and he has been writing and speaking on policy issues in this area in both popular and peer-reviewed forums for over a decade. He has authored 400 peer-reviewed publications on antimicrobial resistance, epidemiologic methods, mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission, pathogen population genomics, research ethics, biosafety/security, and immunoepidemiology of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Dr. Lipsitch is a leader in research and scientific communication on COVID-19. Dr. Lipsitch received his BA in philosophy from Yale and his DPhil in zoology from Oxford. He did postdoctoral work at Emory University and CDC. He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology and the National Academy of Medicine.

Abstract:

The growing ability of researchers to enhance potential pandemic pathogens' transmissibility or virulence has raised concerns about the risk that such research could lead to a pandemic through accidental or inadvertent release, or that the products of the research, including the knowledge it creates, could facilitate deliberate acts of bioterrorism. An incipient policy process to address these concerns in the mid-late 2010s was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and attention has recently returned to the topic especially in the US but also internationally. While the White House has been constructing guidance (not released as of this writing in January 2024), the scientific and wider community have reached a state of polarization, with many calling for an outright ban, and others claiming that scientific self-regulation is sufficient. This talk will describe the components of a middle way that acknowledges a legitimate public interest in restricting experiments that could heighten pandemic risks, in the absence of compelling and offsetting public health benefits. It will begin with a historical overview of the issue, consider informative and misleading parallels to the notion of restricting research with pandemic risks, and suggest ways forward to break this deadlock. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: While rebels' electoral participation has become a focal point of scholarship on post-conflict development, the drivers and process of rebels' organizational transformation into political parties have remained elusive. Organizational theory provides a novel, yet critical, point of entry to understanding rebel-to-party transformation and the actors at the heart of it. I look inside rebels' wartime organizations and identify a set of subdivisions (in some groups) that mirror the key structures of political parties: governance wings, political-messaging wings, and social service wings. I argue that variation in rebels' wartime organizational structures gives rise to different party-building mechanisms with distinct prospects for success.  To test this theory, I use intra-organizational comparative process tracing of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, I create sub-organizational biographies and trace their evolution from inception to transformation.  This approach allows me to exploit systematic differences in the organizational structures of the FMLN's subgroups—while holding equal other key variables like ideology, prewar networks, and state context—to demonstrate how the construction of proto-party structures during wartime facilitates party-building at the war's end. 

About the Speaker: Sherry Zaks is a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as an assistant professor of Comparative Politics and Methodology at the University of Southern California. Her substantive work examines the conditions under which rebel groups are able to transform into political parties in the aftermath of civil wars. She draws on organizational sociology to develop a comprehensive model of militant groups and trace how wartime structures either facilitate or inhibit rebel-to-party transformations. On the methods side, Sherry’s work focuses on conceptualization, measurement, and process tracing. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Debates on cohesion in the world’s most powerful alliance have largely overlooked NATO’s complex constellation of internal politics - instead overly focusing on US influence. While the US undoubtedly retains it outsized role in NATO, security scholarship offers few clues as to how or why Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine has affected NATO cohesion. Policymakers and pundits were quick to predict a long-lasting “NATO revival”, however, the aftermath has been a mixed bag: achievements (e.g. Swedish accession, augmented force posture) and setbacks (e.g. EU-NATO coordination on Ukraine, Russia-PRC responses, etc.). In this study, I argue that observed variation in NATO cohesion can best be explained by policymakers’ repeated use of internal, sticky narratives about other Allies’, which limit the number of issue areas on which formal agreements can occur. Even when Allies’ interests align, such pre-determined labeling of some Allies as spoilers and others as champions on specific issues constrains Allies’ outreach to one another. To test this narrative-focused argument, I conduct a discourse analysis of high-level, formally-agreed NATO documents (e.g. Strategic Concept, Communiqués and other NATO Summit “deliverables”), which are the products of months of intense negotiations, and leaders’ public statements immediately preceding and following the invasion. I also draw on interview evidence from several officials who were part of negotiations during this period. The study advances security scholarship by offering a new argument for why NATO cohesion has changed in the ways that it has, offers an explanation for observed disunity and updates negotiations literatures to stress the power of outgoing knowledge on coalition politics. The study’s empirical evidence also reveals that policymakers’ national narratives can both increase or decrease cohesion, depending on these narratives – even when the narratives themselves mischaracterize Allies’ actual bargaining space. The research advances existing security studies that find that individuals – and not just states – can play critical roles in alliance decision-making.

About the Speaker: Prof. Heidi Hardt is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. As a 2021-2022 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs TIRS fellow, she served the State Department (NATO Desk), a senator and congresswoman. She has authored articles, chapters and two books: NATO’s Lessons in Crisis: Institutional Memory in International Organization (Oxford, 2018) and Time to React: The Efficiency of International Organizations in Crisis Response (Oxford, 2014). Hardt examines transatlantic and European security, NATO, multilateral military operations, climate security, organizational change, learning, gender and elite decision-making. The NSF, Fulbright, NATO and Carnegie have funded her research.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: When and why do terrorist groups attack outside their local conflict ecosystems? In the last decade, the number of terrorist groups carrying out violence across international borders has increased. Many explanations of transnational terrorism focus on state-level factors that make some countries more attractive bases or targets for transnational attacks than others. However, state-centric explanations fail to consider the organizational characteristics of the groups carrying out this violence. Transnational terrorism demands significant resources, strength, and coordination as well as intent. At what point in a group’s campaign is it motivated and capable of carrying out attacks abroad? Why are some groups more likely to transition to transnational violence? In this paper, we study the conditions under which terrorist groups move from conducting attacks in their home country to carrying out violence across state borders. We employ data from the Mapping Militants Project to analyze which organizational traits are associated with this choice. Our findings emphasize the importance of group-level attributes in understanding broader patterns of terrorism and consider the implications for counterterrorism policies.

About the Speakers: 

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow emerita at the FSI Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and a professor of political science by courtesy, emerita, at Stanford University. She taught in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University from 1974 to 2007. She has published extensively on the subject of terrorism. In 2011, Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work. A book co-authored with Gary LaFree titled Countering Terrorism was published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2017. She is the founder and a Principal Investigator on the Mapping Militants Project, which traces the evolution of violent militant or extremist organizations across several different conflict theatres.

Kaitlyn Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2022, and she was an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University from 2022-2023. Her research seeks to explain how violent non-state actors organize, build relationships with foreign states, and carry out violence in armed conflict. In this work, she draws on original datasets, fieldwork interviews, and archival materials. She is a Principal Investigator on the Mapping Militants Project, which traces the evolution of violent militant or extremist organizations across several different conflict theatres.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The Missiles on Our Land investigates the human and environmental risks associated with the U.S. Air Force plans to replace its current fleet of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and maintain it well into the 2080s. It is the result of a two-year collaboration led by the Princeton University’s Program on Science & Global Security together with Nuclear Princeton, a group of Japanese and Native American researchers, and Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and published in partnership with Scientific American. This project combines state-of-the-art simulations of the consequences of nuclear war with ethnography and journalism, including narrative storytelling, podcasting, photography and cinematography to shed light on the consequences of the most significant nuclear weapon build-up since the end of the Cold War. This project aims to provide information that everyone in the United States and especially the communities living closest to the missile fields need to know so that they can understand and be part of the discussion as to the full extent of the risks associated with deploying new missiles for the next 60 years or more.

About the Speaker: Sébastien Philippe is a Research Scholar with Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, part of the School of Public and International Affairs where he holds a continuous appointment. His research includes nuclear non-proliferation, arms control, disarmament, and justice issues. He is the co-author of Toxique (French University Press, 2021), an investigation into the radiological and environmental impact of French nuclear tests in the Pacific, which was a Finalist for the 2021 Albert Londres Prize (the French equivalent of the Pulitzer) and won a 2022 Sigma Award for best data journalism in the world, among other accolades. Philippe received his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, was a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and has served as a nuclear weapon system safety engineer in France's Ministry of Armed Forces.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The future of technology is unknown. In some cases, however, the military accepts exceptional expectations about future technology. What technology hype is accepted? And why does the military accept some exceptional expectations but dismiss similar hype about other kinds of emerging technology? Paradoxically, despite discourse about “revolution” and “disruption,” I argue that the hype audiences accept depends on their established identities and interests. They choose to embrace technology hype so long as the imagined change is familiar. Unfamiliar change is rejected. To test my argument, I posit that the U.S. military’s established identities and interests favor offense over defense, and kinetic over non-kinetic capabilities. I then compare the military’s response to discourse about the Cyber Revolution versus the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The latter was familiar; the former was not. I find that the armed services were more willing to act on hype about the RMA. The military’s conservative bias is well documented in scholarship about bureaucratic politics and technological innovation. What makes the contrast between the RMA and Cyber Revolution so remarkable is how persistent that bias can be—even when the military thinks about revolutionary change and the future of war.

About the Speaker: Frank L. Smith III is a Professor and Director of the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. His interdisciplinary research and teaching examine how ideas about technology—especially bad ideas—influence national security and international relations. His current research examines international cooperation on military science, cyber wargames, and the impact of technology hype. Previous scholarship includes his book, American Biodefense, as well as articles published in Security Studies, Social Studies of Science, Security Dialogue, Health Security, Asian Security, and The Lancet. His policy work includes helping draft the 2023 National Defense Science and Technology Strategy. He has a PhD in political science and a BS in biological chemistry, both from the University of Chicago. 

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Join the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies Program for a discussion about the roots and causes of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news in times of war. Learn more about the informational contents of foreign and domestic actors when addressing the informational threats. How it must be faced for the future of democracy, and is at stake when protecting media freedoms and civil liberties in Israel.

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Omer Benjakob is an investigative journalist for Haaretz, Israel's sole newspaper of record, focused on the intersection of politics and technology. He covers disinformation, cyber, and surveillance and has participated in several international investigations, including the Project Pegasus — the misuse of spyware made by the NSO Group — and “Team Jorge,” a groundbreaking undercover investigation into the private disinformation market and digital mercenaries offering election interference as a service. His investigation into the sale of spyware to a militia in Sudan was shortlisted for the EU's European Press Prize for investigative journalism (2023).

He is also a researcher and his writing on Wikipedia has been published in Wired UK, the Columbia Journalism Review and MIT Press, as well as academic journals. Born in New York and raised in Tel Aviv, he lives in Jaffa with his wife and teaches in a local college in Israel. He is also an associate research fellow at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (LPI) in Paris, a research institute affiliated with the Université Paris Cité focused on open science.
 

Tomer Naor is a father, educator, lawyer, and a well-known social activist in Israel. Tomer holds an LLB in Law from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an LLM graduate degree in Public Law from Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University. For the past ten years Tomer has been working for The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, one of Israel’s leading grass roots organizations, fighting corruption and promoting the values of democracy, transparency, good governance and civic participation and volunteerism in Israeli society.

Tomer has led multiple legal cases discussed in the Supreme Court that are pertinent to the core issues of preserving democracy in Israel, and has frequently appeared before the Supreme Court to argue constitutional and administrative petitions as well as before Knesset committees on various issues. In 2020, Marker magazine named Tomer as one of their "40 Under 40" influencers, and he continues to feature as a regular guest in the Israeli and international media. In addition to his legal work, Tomer is involved in a variety of social initiatives in Israel and won the Civil Society Award in 2015.