Didi Kuo joins Thomas Carothers<, senior Vice President for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in outlining the ways in which ideas, experiences, and lessons from other countries can magnify reform in the United States.
Militaries around the world are racing to build robotic systems with increasing autonomy. What will happen when a Predator drone has as much autonomy as a Google car? Should machines be given the power to make life and death decisions in war? Paul Scharre, a former Army Ranger and Pentagon official, will talk on his new book, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. Army of None was named one of Bill Gates’ Top 5 Books of 2018. Scharre will explore the technology behind autonomous weapons and the legal, moral, ethical, and strategic dimensions of this evolving technology. Paul Scharre is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Paul's Biography: Paul Scharre is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He is author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. Mr. Scharre formerly worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) where he played a leading role in establishing policies on emerging weapons technologies. He led the working group that drafted DOD Directive 3000.09, establishing DOD’s policy on autonomy in weapon systems. He is a former infantryman in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and completed multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Radha's Biography: Radha Iyengar is the head of Product Policy Research at Facebook and an adjunct economist at the RAND Corporation. Previously, she served in senior staff positions at the White House National Security Council, Department of Defense, and Department of Energy. Over the course of her government service, she was instrumental in executive actions on sexual assault and suicide prevention, budget and policy related to nuclear and energy infrastructure security and resilience, and security assistance and counterterrorism efforts in the the Middle East and North Africa. Her research has covered empirical evaluations of policies aimed at reducing violence including criminal violence, sexual assault, terrorist behavior, and sexual and intimate partner violence.
Jeremy's Biography: Jeremy is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics and the political economy of development; and democracy, accountability, and political change. He is the author of Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge University Press), which received the William Riker Prize for the best book on political economy. He is also the co-author of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage Foundation), which received the Gregory Luebbert Award for the best book in comparative politics. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Journal of Democracy, World Policy Journal, and the SAIS Review.
Stanford University CEMEX Auditorium (655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305)
Paul Scharre
Senior Fellow and Director, Technology and National Security Program
Center for a New American Security
Abstract: Ambassador Koster will address the following political-military issues during his lecture. How has the security environment in Europe evolved since 2014, with growing instability and insecurity in the North Africa and the Middle East, and an assertive Russia in the East? How has Europe and NATO reacted to these challenges? Policies, structures and capabilities have been adapted, but will it be enough to restore peace and stability in Europe ? How will the demise of the arms control architecture affect all of this in the years to come?
Speaker's Biography: Ambassador Timo S. Koster is a career diplomat at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As of November 2018, Mr. Koster assumed his position as Ambassador-at-large for Security Policy & Cyber. Prior to this, since 2012, he was Director for Defence Policy and Capabilities at NATO HQ in Brussels.
After finishing his law degree at the University of Amsterdam, Ambassador Koster joined the diplomatic academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands in 1991. His first appointment was at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Back in The Hague from 1994, he served in several positions within the Ministry, including a stint as Private Secretary to the Minister for European Affairs, before moving to the Royal Netherlands Embassy in London, as Head of Economic Department, between 1998 and 2001.
In 2001, Ambassador Koster became Acting Director for European Integration at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, after which he served as a Project Director at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. In 2003 Mr. Koster was appointed Deputy Ambassador at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Athens, Greece. In 2008 he moved to Brussels where he served as Defence Advisor at the Netherlands Permanent Representation to NATO until 2012 when he moved to the position of Director Defence Policy & Capabilities in the NATO International Staff.
Ambassador Koster is affiliated to the Atlantic Council Washington DC as a non-resident Ambassadorial Fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Centre for International Strategy and Security.
Timo S. Koster is married with two sons and two daughters.
Timo Koster
Career Diplomat
Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Most studies that look at whether democracy improves global health rely on measurements of life expectancy at birth and infant mortality rates. Yet those measures disproportionately reflect progress on infectious diseases — such as malaria, diarrheal illnesses and pneumonia — which relies heavily on foreign aid.
A new study led by Stanford Health Policy's Tara Templin and the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that a better way to measure the role of democracy in public health is to examine the causes of adult mortality, such as noncommunicable diseases, HIV, cardiovascular disease and transportation injuries. Little international assistance targets these noncommunicable diseases.
When the researchers measured improvements in those particular areas of public health, the results proved dramatic.
“The results of this study suggest that elections and the health of the people are increasingly inseparable,” the authors wrote.
“Democratic institutions and processes, and particularly free and fair elections, can be an important catalyst for improving population health, with the largest health gains possible for cardiovascular and other noncommunicable diseases,” the authors wrote.
Templin said the study brings new data to the question of how governance and health inform global health policy debates, particularly as global health funding stagnates.
“As more cases of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancers occur in low- and middle-income countries, there will be a need for greater health-care infrastructure and resources to provide chronic care that weren’t as critical in providing childhood vaccines or acute care,” Templin said.
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Free and fair elections for better health
In 2016, the four mortality causes most ameliorated by democracy — cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries and other noncommunicable diseases — were responsible for 25 percent of total death and disability in people younger than 70 in low- and middle-income countries. That same year, cardiovascular diseases accounted for 14 million deaths in those countries, 42 percent of which occurred in individuals younger than 70.
Over the past 20 years, the increase in democratic experience reduced mortality in these countries from cardiovascular disease, other noncommunicable diseases and tuberculosis between 8-10 percent, the authors wrote.
“Free and fair elections appear important for improving adult health and noncommunicable disease outcomes, most likely by increasing government accountability and responsiveness,” the study said.
What Templin and her co-authors found was democracy was associated with better noncommunicable disease outcomes. They hypothesize that democracies may give higher priority to health-care investments.
HIV-free life expectancy at age 15, for example, improved significantly — on average by 3 percent every 10 years during the study period — after countries transitioned to democracy. Democratic experience also explains significant improvements in mortality from cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries, cancers, cirrhosis and other noncommunicable diseases, the study said.
Watch: Some of the authors of the study discuss the significant their findings:
What Templin and her co-authors found was democracy was associated with better noncommunicable disease outcomes. They hypothesize that democracies may give higher priority to health-care investments.
HIV-free life expectancy at age 15, for example, improved significantly — on average by 3 percent every 10 years during the study period — after countries transitioned to democracy. Democratic experience also explains significant improvements in mortality from cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, transportation injuries, cancers, cirrhosis and other noncommunicable diseases, the study said.
Foreign aid often misdirected
And yet, this connection between fair elections and global health is little understood.
“Democratic government has not been a driving force in global health,” the researchers wrote. “Many of the countries that have had the greatest improvements in life expectancy and child mortality over the past 15 years are electoral autocracies that achieved their health successes with the heavy contribution of foreign aid.”
They note that Ethiopia, Myanmar, Rwanda and Uganda all extended their life expectancy by 10 years or more between 1996 and 2016. The governments of these countries were elected, however, in multiparty elections designed so the opposition could only lose, making them among the least democratic nations in the world.
Yet these nations were among the top two-dozen recipients of foreign assistance for health.
Only 2 percent of the total development assistance for health in 2016 was devoted to noncommunicable diseases, which was the cause of 58 percent of the death and disability in low-income and middle-income countries that same year, the researchers found.
“Although many bilateral aid agencies emphasize the importance of democratic governance in their policy statements,” the authors wrote, “most studies of development assistance have found no correlation between foreign aid and democratic governance and, in some instance, a negative correlation.”
Autocracies such as Cuba and China, known for providing good health care at low cost, have not always been as successful when their populations’ health needs shifted to treating and preventing noncommunicable diseases. A 2017 assessment, for example, found that true life expectancy in China was lower than its expected life expectancy at birth from 1980 to 2000 and has only improved over the past decade with increased government health spending. In Cuba, the degree to which its observed life expectancy has exceeded expectations has decreased, from four-to-seven years higher than expected in 1970 to three-to-five years higher than expected in 2016.
“There is good reason to believe that the role that democracy plays in child health and infectious diseases may not be generalizable to the diseases that disproportionately affect adults,” Bollyky said. Cardiovascular diseases, cancers and other noncommunicable diseases, according to Bollyky, are largely chronic, costlier to treat than most infectious diseases, and require more health care infrastructure and skilled medical personnel.
The researchers hypothesize that democracy improves population health because:
When enforced through regular, free and fair elections, democracies should have a greater incentive than autocracies to provide health-promoting resources and services to a larger proportion of the population;
Democracies are more open to feedback from a broader range of interest groups, more protective of media freedom and might be more willing to use that feedback to improve their public health programs;
Autocracies reduce political competition and access to information, which might deter constituent feedback and responsive governance.
Various studies have concluded that democratic rule is better for population health, but almost all of them have focused on infant and child mortality or life expectancy at birth.
Over the past 20 years, the average country’s increase in democracy reduced mortality from cardiovascular disease by roughly 10 percent, the authors wrote. They estimate that more than 16 million cardiovascular deaths may have been averted due to an increase in democracy globally from 1995 to 2015. They also found improvements in other health burdens in the countries where democracy has taken hold: an 8.9 percent reduction in deaths from tuberculosis, a 9.5 percent drop in deaths from transportation injuries and a 9.1 percent mortality reduction in other noncommunicable disease, such as congenital heart disease and congenital birth defects.
“This study suggests that democratic governance and its promotion, along with other government accountability measures, might further enhance efforts to improve population health,” the study said. “Pretending otherwise is akin to believing that the solution to a nation’s crumbling roads and infrastructure is just a technical schematic and cheaper materials.”
The other researchers who contributed to the study are Matthew Cohen, Diana Schoder, Joseph Dieleman and Simon Wigley, from CFR, the University of Washington-Seattle and Bilkent University in Turkey, respectively.
Funding for the research came from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Stanford’s Department of Health Research and Policy also supported the work.
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Election officials count the votes at a polling station on February 24, 2019 in Dakar, Senegal.
Abstract: A Syria Divided: International rhetoric has evolved to accept Bashar al-Assad's continuance in power, at least for the time being. And yet, there is a growing recognition among many Syrians and some in the international community that the Assad regime’s center is decaying, and it is incapable of regaining control over all parts of Syria. Rather than accept Assad's control as a fait accompli, the international community should focus its political capital on those parts of Syria with room for democratic growth. For this discussion, Shaikh will draw on an extensive series of track II Syrian dialogues.
Speaker Bio: Salman Shaikh is the Founder and CEO of The Shaikh Group (TSG). Before establishing TSG, he was the director of the Brookings Institution's Doha Center, where his research focused on conflict resolution, domestic policy, and geopolitics of the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Levant (particularly Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. Shaikh has extensive experience working the United Nations in a number of offices, including as Special Assistant, Middle East and Asia in the Office of the Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs, Political Advisor to the Secretary-General's Personal Representative for Lebanon during the 2006 war, Special Assistant to the Special Coordinator to the Middle East Peace Process, and Programme Officer for the Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict. Shaikh also served as Director for policy and research in the private office of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bin Nasser al-Missned, the Consort of the former Emir of the State of Qatar. Shaikh is a respected commentator and policy adviser on the Middle East. He has been featured in key publications and broadcasters, including CNN, BBC, Sky New, Al Jazeera, and NBC, and he has published commentaries with Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere.
Abstract: Multilateral conferences are the bread-and-butter of international politics. In such settings, countries may pursue their interests individually, but most of the time they prefer to act through coalitions. Such coalitions are overlapping, creating a network structure. States build and utilize networks to get agenda items pushed through or to block unfavorable ones. While sometimes they are formed on the basis of formal institutions (such as the NAM or the EU), frequently their membership is based on either ad hoc cooperation, or existing informal bodies (such as the NSG, New Agenda Coalition, or Zangger Committee). The attention to such networks is, however, still in its infancy. This paper looks at how state networks within one of the most important recurring diplomatic conferences – the quinquennial NPT Review Conference – develop and transform over time. By doing so, the paper maps the existing networks, and explains their transformation as an instrument of global governance.
Speaker Bio: Michal Onderco is a Junior Faculty Fellow at CISAC (2018-2019), and his research focuses on politics of multilateral nuclear diplomacy. His current project tries to understand how states build coalitions in multilateral diplomacy, and why are some coalitions more successful than others.
Michal is currently on leave from Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he is Assistant Professor of International Relations. Previously, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Columbia University in New York, and a short-term Stanton Fellow at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo. He received his LLM in Law and Politics of International Security and PhD in Political Science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His earlier work was published in International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of Political Research, Cooperation & Conflict, The Nonproliferation Review, and European Political Science Review.
Michal Onderco
MacArthur Junior Faculty Fellow
CISAC, Stanford University
*This event is co-sponsored with the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies.
Jason Rezaian discusses his new book, Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison, with Brett McGurk, the former Special Envoy to Defeat ISIS. Rezaian was the Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief when he was imprisoned and McGurk led 14 months of secret negotiations with Iran that helped free him in 2016.
Jason Rezaian is one of the few Western journalists to have been based in Tehran in recent years. From 2009 until his arrest in 2014 he covered stories that tried to explain Iran to a general American audience, first as a freelancer for a variety of outlets and later as The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief.
He reported on two presidential elections, Iran’s nuclear negotiations with global powers, the effects of one of the most punitive sanctions regimes in modern times and environmental issues. In between those momentous topics he told the stories of everyday Iranians which sought to make them more accessible to readers, reporting on Iran’s small community of baseball players, the quest for the best high end hamburger in Tehran, and a clinic for female drug addicts.
In July of 2014 Rezaian and his wife were detained in their home and he went on to spend 545 in Tehran’s Evin prison, released on the same day that the historic nuclear deal between Iran and world powers was implemented.
Brett McGurk is joining Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies as the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer.
McGurk recently served as special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the U.S. Department of State. He helped build and then led the coalition of seventy-five countries and four international organizations and was responsible for coordinating all aspects of U.S. policy in the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, and globally.
McGurk previously served in senior positions in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, including as Special Assistant to President Bush and Senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran and Special Presidential Envoy for the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State under Obama.
McGurk has led some of the most sensitive diplomatic missions in the Middle East over the last decade, including negotiations with partners and adversaries to advance U.S. interests. In 2015 and 2016, McGurk led 14 months of secret negotiations with Iran to secure the release of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezain, U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, and Pastor Saad Abadini, as well as three other American citizens.
Hauck Auditorium, David & Joan Traitel Building, Hoover Institution
Over the course of more than three decades as a diplomat, William J. Burns served five Presidents and ten Secretaries of State. He played a central role in the most consequential diplomatic episodes of his time—from the bloodless end of the Cold War to the collapse of post–Cold War relations with Putin’s Russia, from post–9/11 tumult in the Middle East to the secret nuclear talks with Iran. Burns is widely regarded as one of the most distinguished and admired American statesmen of the last half century. Upon his retirement in 2014, Secretary John Kerry said Burns belonged on “a very short list of American diplomatic legends,” alongside George Kennan. Now, Burns draws on his decades of experience to make an impassioned argument for the enduring value of diplomacy in an increasingly volatile world in THE BACK CHANNEL (A Random House Hardcover; On Sale 3/12/2019).
In this memoir, Burns recounts with novelistic detail and incisive analysis some of the seminal moments of his career. Employing a trove of newly declassified cables and memos, he gives readers a rare inside look at American diplomacy in action. His dispatches on war-torn Chechnya and Putin’s opulent dacha outside of Moscow and his prescient warnings of the “Perfect Storm” that would be unleashed by the Iraq War will reshape our understanding of history and inform the policy debates of the future. Burns sketches the contours of effective American leadership in a world that resembles neither the zero-sum Cold War contest of his early years as a young diplomat nor the “unipolar moment” of American primacy that followed. Ultimately, THE BACK CHANNEL is an eloquent, deeply informed, and timely story of a life spent in service of American interests abroad. It is also an urgent reminder, in a time of great turmoil, of the enduring importance of diplomacy.
“The Back Channel is a masterfully written memoir from one of America’s most accomplished and respected diplomats. Ambassador Burns not only offers a vivid account of how American diplomacy works, he also puts forward a compelling vision for its future that will surely inspire new generations to follow his incredible example.”
–Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State
“Bill Burns is a treasure of American diplomacy who I had the honor of watching in action and working closely with during my years at the State Department. He is a model of the American idea and spirit when we need it most. In The Back Channel, Burns provides another great act of public service by giving us a smart, plain-spoken account of America’s changing role in the world and the power and purpose of American diplomacy at its best.”
–Hillary Clinton, former U.S. Secretary of State
“From one of America’s consummate diplomats, an incisive and sorely needed case for the revitalization of our diplomacy—what Burns wisely describes as our ‘tool of first resort.’”
–Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State
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Retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014, after a thirty-three-year diplomatic career, Ambassador Burns holds the highest rank in the Foreign Service, career ambassador, and is only the second serving career diplomat in history to become deputy secretary of state. Prior to his tenure as deputy secretary, Ambassador Burns served from 2008 to 2011 as under secretary for political affairs. He was ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2001 to 2005, and ambassador to Jordan from 1998 to 2001. Ambassador Burns earned a bachelor’s in history from La Salle University and master’s and doctoral degrees in international relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.
Encina Hall
Bechtel Conference Center, 1st floor
William J. Burns
<i>President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace</i>
To listen to the audio recording of this talk, please visit our multimedia page.
While Ephesos was inscribed in the UNESCO world heritage list in 2015, Vienna is in danger of losing the title because of building projects in the city center. From these two rather different examples, the whole UNESCO process including application, inscription, and monitoring will be critically reviewed and the question of accuracy, independency, and scrutiny of UNESCO and related organizations raised. National exertions of influence will be reflected upon, as they often contradict expert evaluations. In conclusion, the issue ought to be addressed whether something like “World Cultural Heritage,” in the sense of global responsibility, actually exists, and whether the national administration of the world heritage sites in fact excludes this aspiration. Ultimately the overriding question is raised as to how a consciousness for cultural heritage, apart from touristic-economic incentives and beyond national (in many cases regional) borders, can be created.
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Sabine Ladstätter studied Classical Archaeology, Prehistory, Protohistory and Ancient History at the Universities of Graz and Vienna, culminating in a Master's degree (University of Graz) in 1992 and a Doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in 1997. Between 1997-2007 she held the position of Research Assistant at the Institute for the Cultural History of Antiquity at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After her Habilitation at the University of Vienna in 2007 she moved to the Austrian Institute of Archaeology, the directorship of which she assumed in 2009. At the same time, the directorship of the excavations at Ephesos was assigned to her. Awards for Scientist of the Year in 2011 in Austria, and for the best popular scientific book in Austria in 2014, are proof of her engagement in the areas of scientific communication and public outreach. She is a member of the German Archaeological Institute and of the Archaeological Institute of America, as well as numerous national and international scientific and editorial boards, and is a referee for leading research promotion institutions. Visiting professorships at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Paris (2016) and Stanford University (2019) underscore her engagement in the fields of education and teaching, also attested by her supervision of academic degrees at a variety of European universities.
Abstract: Materials used in key components of nuclear power reactors, such as the fuel cladding and the pressure vessel, provide shields for the release of highly radioactive isotopes generated in the nuclear fuel to the environment, thus their reliability is an important issue in the safety evaluation. The accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 demonstrated that materials that are considered reliable during normal operating conditions will fail in an extreme accident condition. Subsequently, there has been an international effort on developing materials for Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF). In addition, the development of new generation of nuclear reactors also calls for new materials that may withstand higher temperatures, higher radiation doses and with better performance under severe corrosive conditions. This talk will outline the challenges and status for such developments using recent data from the authors’ own research group as examples. Also, since China is building the most nuclear reactors now and “a nuclear accident anywhere of the world will be an accident of everywhere of the world”, the importance and challenges of collaborating with the Chinese in this area will be discussed.
Bio: Dr. Lumin Wang is a professor of nuclear engineering, and materials science & engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (UM). He came to the US from China in 1982, and received his MS and PhD degrees in Material Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and a research scientist at the University of New Mexico before joining the faculty of UM in 1997. His research has focused on the study of radiation effects of materials using ion beams and transmission electron microscopy. He served as the director of Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory, a campus-wide material characterization center at UM between 2005 and 2010. Dr. Wang has published more than 400 papers in research journals and delivered more than 100 invited talks internationally. He has been a member of the International Committee of the American Nuclear Society and an adjunct chair professor of Xiamen University of China since 2011. He has taken more than 100 UM students to China to observe the construction of nuclear reactors during the last 8 summers.
Professor
Lumin Wang
Professor, College of Engineering
University of Michigan
