* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/UOHyKJR5d1w

 

About the Event: 

In 2017, former diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford wrote a pointed resignation letter to her then boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. She had watched as the State Department was gutted, and now she urged him to stem the bleeding by showing leadership and commitment to his diplomats and the country. If he couldn’t do that, she said, “I humbly recommend that you follow me out the door.” In The Dissent Channel, Shackelford chronicles how the challenges facing the State Department under the current administration, while extreme, are not new. In this live-streamed conversation, Shackelford will discuss the costs of a government unwilling to face mistakes or correct its course. She will also discuss how to build a more accountable foreign policy, through greater public engagement, more effective congressional oversight, and a State Department culture more open to dissent. In her book, The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age, she shares her personal experience as a diplomat trying to push back against the status quo and offers insight into the State Department’s long history of overlooking others who have tried to do the same. 

Moderating the discussion will be Rose Gottemoeller, Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and CISAC. Gottemoeller served as Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019 and prior to that as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State for nearly five years. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation.

Book Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Dissent-Channel-American-Diplomacy-Dishonest/dp/1541724488

 

About the Speakers: 

Elizabeth Shackelford was a career diplomat in the U.S. State Department until December 2017, when she resigned in protest of the Trump administration. During her tenure with the Foreign Service, Shackelford served in the U.S. embassies in Warsaw, Poland, and Juba, South Sudan; the U.S. Mission to Somalia; and Washington, D.C. For her work in South Sudan during the outbreak of civil war, Shackelford received the Barbara Watson Award for Consular Excellence, the State Department's highest honor for consular work. Shackelford is a non-resident fellow with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

 

Moderated by: Rose Gottemoeller is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Gottemoeller was Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019. Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. Gottemoeller was also the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation in 2009 and 2010.

 

 

ABSTRACT

This talk is based on the co-authors' recent paper "How Much Will the Pandemic Change Egyptian Governance and for How Long?" The Egyptian regime has reacted in an unexpected way to the global pandemic—with civilian, technocratic, and expert bodies leading the way and even some (admittedly officially patrolled) political debate being allowed to emerge. This talk examines these recent developments and evaluates whether they mark a real change in Egyptian governance, and if so, why, what kind, and will it last.

Co-Authors Bios

Amr Hamzawy is currently a senior research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. He was previously an associate professor of political science at Cairo University and a professor of public policy at the American University in Cairo. Between 2016 and 2017, he served as a senior fellow in the Middle East program and the Democracy and Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC. His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. His new book On The Habits of Neoauthoritarianism – Politics in Egypt Between 2013 and 2019appeared in Arabic in September 2019. Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the January 25, 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a weekly op-ed to the All Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi.

Nathan Brown is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at The George Washington University. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and serves on the board of trustees at the American University in Cairo. His contributions span a wide range of topics, including Islamist movements, Egyptian politics, Palestinian politics, and Arab law and constitutionalism. Dr. Brown served as the president of the Middle East Studies Association between 2013 and 2015. He was previously named a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and is a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His previous research was funded by the United States Institute of Peace and two Fulbright fellowships. He received the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Award for Scholarship from George Washington University in 2015 and the Harry Harding teaching award from the Elliott School of International Affairs in 2014. His dissertation received the Malcolm Kerr award from the Middle East Studies Association in 1987. Dr. Brown is the author of six books, including Arguing Islam after the Revival of Arab Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), and When Victory is Not an Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). He received his B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago and his M.A. and Ph.D. in politics and Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. 

Recent public outcries over facial recognition technology, police and state usage of automated surveillance tools, and racially motivated disinformation on social media have underscored the ways in which new digital technologies threaten to exacerbate existing racial and social cleavages.  What is known about how digital technologies are contributing to racial tensions, what key questions remain unanswered, and what policy changes, by government or tech platforms, might help?

On Wednesday, September 23rd, from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. Pacific Time, please join us for Race and Technology, with Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, in conversation with Julie Owono, the Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières, a digital rights advocacy organization based in France, an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab, and a member of Facebook’s Oversight Board; Mutale Nkonde, CEO of AI for the People, a member of the recently formed TikTok Content Advisory Council, and a fellow at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab; and Safiya Noble, Associate Professor at UCLA in the Departments of Information Studies and African American Studies, and author of Algorithms of Oppression. 

The event is open to the public, but registration is required.

This event is part of the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2020-21 Colloquium series "Health, medicine, and longevity: Exploring public and private roles"

Hong Kong time: Friday, October 16, 2020, 8:00am - 9:15am

Gabriel Leung, one of Asia’s leading epidemiologists and Dean of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, provides an update on the global pandemic and policy responses in Asia. Leung’s presentation draws on his deep experience in research and policy, including research that defined the epidemiology of three novel viral epidemics, namely SARS in 2003, influenza A(H7N9) in 2013 and most recently COVID-19. Leung also served as Hong Kong's first Under Secretary for Food and Health (2008-11) and fifth Director of the Chief Executive's Office (2011-2).

Gabriel Leung is the fortieth Dean of Medicine (2013-), inaugural Helen and Francis Zimmern Professor in Population Health and holds the Chair of Public Health Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He was the last Head of Community Medicine (2012-3) at the University as well as Hong Kong's first Under Secretary for Food and Health (2008-11) and fifth Director of the Chief Executive's Office (2011-2) in government.

Leung is one of Asia's leading epidemiologists and global health exponents, having authored more than 500 scholarly papers with an h-index of 66 (Scopus). His research defined the epidemiology of three novel viral epidemics, namely SARS in 2003, influenza A(H7N9) in 2013 and most recently COVID-19. He led Hong Kong government's efforts against pandemic A(H1N1) in 2009. He was founding co-director of HKU's World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control (2014-8) and currently directs the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park (2020-).

Leung regularly advises national and international agencies including the World Health Organisation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Boao Forum for Asia, Institut Pasteur, Japan Center for International Exchange and China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is an Adjunct Professor of Peking Union Medical College Hospital and Adjunct Professorial Researcher of the China National Health Development Research Center.

He edited the Journal of Public Health (2007-14), was inaugural co-editor of Epidemics, associate editor of Health Policy and is founding deputy editor-in-chief of China CDC Weekly. He currently serves on the editorial boards of seven journals, including the British Medical Journal.    

He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/bUXHbUj5uxE

 

About the Event: While most civil wars today are fought within Muslim-majority states and, frequently, by armed groups that self-identify as Islamic, we know little about the relationships between and amongst Islamic humanitarian law, Western (treaty-based) humanitarian law, and the rhetoric and behavior of Islamic armed groups. Our legal analysis suggests that, while there is a great deal of overlap between Western and Islamic humanitarian law, this overlap is not perfect. Our empirical analysis, which focuses on both the words and behaviors of Islamic armed groups, suggests similarly mixed results. Specifically, we find that, on average, Islamic armed groups do not appear to be more or less compliant with Western or Islamic humanitarian law than non-Islamic armed groups when it comes to civilian targeting and child soldiering. While they often appeal to Islamic humanitarian law, Islamic armed groups appear to be bound by similar political and military – rather than religious or legal – constraints to non-Islamic armed groups.

 

About the Speaker: Tanisha Fazal is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict.  Fazal’s current book project analyzes the effect of improvements in medical care in conflict zones on the long-term costs of war.  She is the author of State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton University Press, 2007), and Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2018.

Please join the Cyber Policy Center on Wednesday, September 9th, from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. pacific time for Navigating U.S.-China Technology Futures, an online seminar, open to the public with Andrew Grotto, Director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, Graham Webster, editor in chief of the Stanford–New America DigiChina Project, Jeffrey Ding from the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and Jennifer Pan, Assistant Professor of Communication in the Stanford Department of Communication. Speakers will be exploring how the U.S. can address security and values challenges in U.S.-China technological cooperation, while avoiding excesses that impede innovation and harm innocent people.

This event is open to the public but registration is required.