Stanford University

Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

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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Zoom

(Open to all)


In Person

(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)

                                                                                           

 

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.

 

REGISTRATION

Zoom

(Open to all)

 

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.

 

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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

System Error, Live! With Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein

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 Register for System Error, Live!

This event will be held outside on Stanford's campus. In accordance with Santa Clara County Public Health, masks are encouraged to be worn by all at crowded outdoor events.

Join Profs. Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein — the authors of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot — for a discussion hosted by Professor Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The operating system of Big Tech is broken, and this panel discussion will explore the path to a reboot. Plus, it will also allow you experience Professor Sahami’s famous tradition of throwing candy into the audience!

A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors — experts who have worked at ground zero of the tech revolution for decades — System Error reveals how Big Tech’s obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and demands that we change course to renew our democracy and save ourselves.

Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, these three Stanford professors—a philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, the director of the undergraduate computer science program who was also an early Google engineer, and a political scientist who served under Barack Obama—reveal how we can hold that power to account. Troubled by the values that permeate the university and Silicon Valley, these professors worked together to chart a new path forward, creating a popular course to transform how tomorrow’s technologists might better approach their profession. Now, as the dominance of Big Tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum, join us as they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it control us.

Books will be available for purchase at the event, and the authors will be signing copies as well.

This event is hosted by Professor Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and it is co-sponsored by the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Stanford School of Engineering, and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

Rob Reich | FSI Affiliate
Mehran Sahami | Associate Chair for Education, Computer Science Department Associate Chair for Education, Computer Science Department
Jeremy Weinstein | FSI Senior Fellow at CDDRL
Lectures

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

Myanmar Back into Darkness: 2021 Shorenstein Journalism Award Discussion Featuring Award Recipient Swe Win

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This event is available through livestream only. Please register in advance to receive a personalized link to watch the webinar:  https://bit.ly/3tNN7wG

Myanmar Back into Darkness: 2021 Shorenstein Journalism Award Recipient Swe Win to Headline Award Panel Discussion

The military coup in February 2021 put an abrupt end to hopes of democracy and liberty in Myanmar.  With every form of free speech now brutally suppressed, one of the major victims of the coup has been the independent press. Newsrooms were raided and dozens of journalists have been arrested. Several publications, including Myanmar Now, had their operating licenses revoked and their websites blocked. Most of the staff of the news outlets targets by the junta were forced to flee to territories along the country's border areas controlled by ethnic armed organizations. From there, they continue their professional work despite the threats to their lives and logistical difficulties.  
 

Join APARC as we honor Burmese investigative journalist Swe Win, editor-in-chief of Myanmar Now and winner of the 2021 Shorenstein Journalism Award. In his award keynote address, Swe Win will speak about journalism under threat in Myanmar, what it is like to report on the crisis in the country from outside while in exile, and Myanmar’s future.

The keynote will be followed by a conversation with Swe Win and two experts: Scot Marciel, a career diplomat, former U.S. ambassador to Myanmar, and currently a visiting practitioner fellow on Southeast Asia at APARC, and Eileen Donahoe, executive director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford.

The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session moderated by Donald K. Emmerson, Director of the Southeast Asia Program at APARC.

Follow us on Twitter and use the hashtag #SJA21 to join the conversation.

Speakers:

Photo of Swe Win, winner of 2021 Shorenstein Journalism Award
Swe Win is a Burmese journalist, human rights defender, and the chief editor of Yangon-based news outlet Myanmar Now. He has survived an assassination attempt and detention by his own government. Now he leads Myanmar Now from exile and his newsroom is in hiding.

Swe Win has written extensively on human rights cases that involve physical injury or death, unlawful detention or miscarriage of justice in Myanmar. He is the recipient of the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, which is regarded as Asia's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the 2017 European Union’s Schuman Award for Human Rights, and the 2016 Presidential Certificate of Honor for Social Service through Journalism from the Myanmar Ministry of Information for his groundbreaking investigation into years-long abuse of domestic workers at a Yangon tailor shop.

Previously, he worked as a senior reporter for the Irrawaddy Magazine and freelanced for international publications such as the New York Times. From 1998 to 2005, he spent seven years in jail for distributing anti-junta material.

Photograph: Thet Htoo for the Mekong Review - https://mekongreview.com/cause-and-karma

 

Photo of Eileen Donahoe
Eileen Donahoe is the executive director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPI) at the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. GDPI is a global multi-stakeholder collaboration hub for development of policies that reinforce human rights and democratic values in digitized society. Areas of current research include AI and human rights, combating digital disinformation, and governance of digital platforms.

Donahoe served in the Obama administration as the first U.S. Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, at a time of significant institutional reform and innovation. After leaving government, she joined Human Rights Watch as director of global affairs, where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, cybersecurity, and internet governance. Earlier in her career, she was a technology litigator at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley.

She serves on the National Endowment for Democracy Board of Directors; the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity; the World Economic Forum Future Council on the Digital Economy; University of Essex Advisory Board on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology; NDI Designing for Democracy Advisory Board; Freedom Online Coalition Advisory Network; and Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.

 

Photo of Scot Marciel
Scot Marciel is a career diplomat with 35 years of experience in Asia and around the world. He is currently a visiting practitioner fellow on Southeast Asia at Shorenstein APARC.

Mr. Marciel served as U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar from March 2016 through May 2020, leading a mission of 500 employees during the difficult Rohingya crisis and a challenging time for both Myanmar’s democratic transition and the United States-Myanmar relationship. Prior to serving in Myanmar, Ambassador Marciel served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific at the State Department, where he oversaw U.S. relations with Southeast Asia.

In previous roles, he served as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, the first U.S. ambassador for ASEAN Affairs, deputy assistant secretary of state for Southeast Asia, at U.S. missions in Turkey, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Brazil and the Philippines, and at the State Department in Washington in multiple positions.

 

About the Shorenstein Journalism Award:

The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of US $10,000, recognizes outstanding journalists who have spent their careers helping audiences around the world understand the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region, defined broadly to include Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia and Australasia. Award recipients are veteran journalists with a distinguished body of work. News organizations are also eligible for the award.

The award is sponsored and presented by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) at Stanford University. It honors the legacy of the Center’s benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. It also symbolizes the Center’s commitment to journalism that persistently and courageously seeks accuracy, deep reporting, and nuanced coverage in an age when attacks are regularly launched on the independent news media, on fact-based truth, and on those who tell it.

An annual tradition, the Shorenstein Journalism Award alternates between recipients whose work has mostly been conveyed through American news media and recipients whose work has mostly been conveyed through news media in one or more parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Included among the latter candidates are journalists who are from the region and work there, and who, in addition to their recognized excellence, may have helped defend and encourage free media in one or more countries in the region.

Learn more at https://aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/events/shorenstein-journalism-award.

Virtual Webinar Via Zoom

Register at: https://bit.ly/3tNN7wG

Swe Win <br><i>Editor-in-Chief, Myanmar Now; 2021 Shorenstein Journalism Award Winner </i><br><br>
Eileen Donahoe <br><i> Executive Director, Global Digital Policy Incubator, Stanford University </i><br><br>
Scot Marciel <br><i> Career Diplomat, Former U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar; Visiting Practitioner Fellow on Southeast Asia, Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University </i><br><br>
Panel Discussions
Shorenstein Journalism Award

APARC Announces 2022-23 Fellowships for Asia Specialists

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Noa Ronkin
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The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is pleased to invite applications for four types of fellowship in contemporary Asia studies for the 2022-23 academic year.

The Center offers postdoctoral fellowships that promote multidisciplinary research on contemporary Japan, contemporary Asia broadly defined, health or healthcare policy in the Asia-Pacific region, and a fellowship for experts on Southeast Asia. Learn more about each fellowship and its eligibility and specific application requirements:

Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Japan

Hosted by the Japan Program at APARC, the fellowship supports research on contemporary Japan in a broad range of disciplines including political science, economics, sociology, law, policy studies, and international relations. Appointments are for one year beginning in fall quarter 2022. The application deadline is January 3, 2022.
 

Apply for the Japan Postdoctoral Fellowship
 

Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Asia

APARC offers two postdoctoral fellowship positions to junior scholars for research and writing on contemporary Asia. The primary research areas focus on political, economic, or social change in the Asia-Pacific region (including Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia), or international relations and international political economy in the region. Appointments are for one year beginning in fall quarter 2022. The application deadline is January 3, 2022.
 

Apply for the Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Asia
 

Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship

Hosted by the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) at APARC, the fellowship supports scholars undertaking original research on contemporary health or healthcare policy of high relevance to low- and middle-income countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The 2022-23 AHPP postdoctoral fellow will be eligible for a two-year fellowship if the applicant presents a compelling proposal for hosting AHPP events in the first year. The application deadline is January 3, 2022.
 

Apply for the Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship
 

Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Southeast Asia

The Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford (LKC NUS-Stanford) Fellowship on Southeast Asia provides an expert on Southeast Asia the opportunity to conduct research on or related to contemporary Southeast Asia. Fellows spend three to four months at Stanford and two to four months at NUS. At Stanford, APARC's Southeast Asia Program hosts the fellowship. Appointments will begin and end within the period from September 1, 2022 to August 31, 2023. The application deadline is January 31, 2022.
 

Discover more at APARC

Explore all fellowship and training opportunities

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[Left] Postdoc Spotlight, Jeffrey Weng, Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia, [Right] Jeffrey Weng
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The Center offers fellowships for postdoctoral scholars specializing in contemporary Asia, Japan, and Asia health policy and for experts on Southeast Asia.

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.

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