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. 

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

                                                                                           

 

Seminar Recording

About the Event: We consider how the U.S. news media reports on international affairs. Analyzing ≈40 million news articles published between 2010 and 2020, we explore whether the American news media report differently on various international affairs topics based on partisan leanings. We then analyze ≈25 million articles published by top online news sites to determine whether collective reporting shows disparities between the level of attention afforded major global issues and objective measures of their human costs (e.g. numbers of individuals killed). We find that left- and right-leaning news outlets tend to report on international affairs at similar rates but differ significantly in their likelihood of referencing particular issues. We find further strong evidence that the frequency of reporting on the international issues we study tracks only modestly with their associated human costs. Given evidence U.S. public and policymakers dependence on news reports for foreign affairs information, our findings raise fundamental questions about the influence of these reporting biases.

Draft Paper

 

About the Speakers: Andrew Shaver is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. He is a CISAC affiliate and a former postdoctoral research fellow within Stanford’s political science department. He is the founding director of the Political Violence Lab and focuses broadly on contemporary sub-state conflict. His research appears in outlets including the American Political Science Review, American Economic Review, Annual Review of Sociology, and Journal of Politics. Dr. Shaver has served in different foreign affairs/national security positions within the U.S. Government. He completed his PhD in Public Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs.

Amarpreet Kaur is a recent graduate of University of California, Merced with a bachelor in Public Health and a minor in Political science. Kaur has been working the lab for a year under the guidance of Professor Shaver. Kaur has aspirations to go on and get a PhD in Health Policy.

Robert Kraemer is a graduate student of data science at the University of Denver. Prior to this, Kraemer earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has been working in the Political Violence Lab with Professor Shaver for over a year, developing his research and analytic skills.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

                      

About the Event: How do rising powers like China manage to build power in international systems dominated by one or more established great powers? International relations theory provides some answers, but most assume emulation of successful approaches. This paper leverages the established business literature on how new companies gain market share in markets dominated by established companies to develop a new theory of power accumulation. I argue that only under very narrow circumstances can rising powers build power and influence through emulation. Instead, China has built enough power over the past 25 years to be considered a great power competitor by doing things differently. Specifically, it exploits US blind spots, maneuvers in areas of strategic uncertainty and engages in entrepreneurial actions. I demonstrate that Chinese military strategy exhibits these components in its responses to key pillars of US foreign policy strategy like global power projection, foreign military intervention, and in conventional and nuclear posture decisions. The findings have significant implications for great power competition as well as for power transition theory.

 

About the Speaker: Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an inaugural Wilson Center China Fellow. She continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve for which she works as a strategic planner at INDOPACOM. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Survival, and Asian Security. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, (Cornell University Press, 2019) won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. Her publications and other commentary can be found on twitter @osmastro and www.orianaskylarmastro.com.

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. 

(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 21^st Century and the Future of American Power (Yale University Press 2017).

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.

*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.

 

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.

 

The American Passport in Turkey explores the diverse meanings and values that people outside of the United States attribute to U.S. citizenship, specifically those who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta interviewed more than one hundred individuals and families and, through their narratives, shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced outside of the United States. Offering a corrective to citizenship studies where discussions of inequality are largely limited to domestic frames, Altan-Olcay and Balta argue that the relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes can only be fully understood if considered transnationally. Additionally, The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates that U.S. global power not only reveals itself in terms of foreign policy but also manifests in the active desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not live in the United States. These citizens, according to the authors, create a new kind of empire with borders and citizen-state relations that do not map onto recognizable political territories.

The American Passport in Turkey has recently won the American Sociological Association, Global and Transnational Sociology Section, Best Book by an International Scholar Award.
 

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Özlem Altan-Olcay is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations and the associate director of the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She is also an editor of Gender, Place, and Culture as well as an assistant editor of Citizenship Studies. She has a Ph.D. degree from New York University, Department of Politics. Her primary research interests include citizenship studies and gender and development. Her research has been supported by the New York University International Center for Advanced Studies, the UN Population Council, the Middle East Research Competition, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, the Turkish Science Academy, and the EU Marie Curie Individual Fellowship Program. Some of her recent articles have appeared in Development and Change, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminist Economics, Gender, Place and Culture, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Sociology, Social Politics, and Women’s Studies International Forum. She has recently co-authored (with E. Balta) The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).
 

Evren Balta is a Professor of International Relations and the chair of the International Relations Department at  Özyeğin University. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Party Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology, Gender Place & Culture. She is the author of The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism (with O Altan-Olcay, University of Pennsylvania, 2020), Age of Uneasiness (İletisim, 2019), and Global Security Complex (İletisim, 2012). She is the editor of Neighbors with Suspicion: Dynamics of Turkish-Russian Relations (with G. Ozcan and B. Besgul, İletisim, 2017); Introduction to Global Politics (Iletisim, 2014) and Military, State and Politics in Turkey (with I. Akca, Bilgi University, 2010). Her research has been supported by the American Association for the University Women, Mellon Foundation, Bella Zeller Scholarship Trust Fund, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. In 2018, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award of the Political Science Program at the CUNY-The Graduate Center. Balta is a senior scholar at Istanbul Policy Center, a member of Global Relations Forum, and co-editor of International Relations Journal. She is appointed as the academic coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum in 2021.

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. 

 

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

 

 

 

For Fall Quarter 2021, CDDRL will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will be open to the public online via Zoom, and limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford affiliates may be available in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines.

A Conversation with Obi Felten, founder and CEO of Flourish Labs

With Additional Remarks by 66th US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
Moderated by Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli

Named in honor of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Condoleezza Rice “Women Who Inspire” Lecture Series seeks to highlight how women are reshaping the world, confronting global challenges, and blazing trails across all walks of life that improve the human condition.
 

SPEAKERS

Obi Felten is the founder and CEO of Flourish Labs, a startup combining cutting edge mental health science and technology to foster flourishing and good mental health.

Previously, Obi was Head of Getting Moonshots Ready for Contact with the Real World at X (formerly Google X), Alphabet’s ‘moonshot factory’ and innovation lab. At X, Obi worked on cutting edge technology projects such as internet from balloons (Loon), air delivery by drone (Wing) and sustainable energy storage using molten salt (Malta). Most recently Obi founded and led Amber, a project using brain-based biomarkers and machine learning to measure anxiety and depression.

Obi was Director of Consumer Marketing for Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa, launching and growing Google Maps, Chrome and Android from zero to hundreds of millions of users. She founded Campus, Google’s space for tech entrepreneurs. Before Google, Obi set up the ecommerce business of a major UK retailer, worked as a strategy consultant, and led eToys.com’s (unsuccessful) expansion to Germany during the first dotcom boom.

Obi is an independent director of Springer Nature, a global academic and educational publisher. She is an advisor for mental health at the Wellcome Trust, one of the largest funders of scientific research, and Chelsea & Westminster NHS Trust’s Best For You youth mental health initiative.

Obi is an advocate for women, people of colour and other underrepresented groups in technology. At X, she founded the diversity & inclusion team, supported several employee resource groups and served on the leadership team for Women of Alphabet in the Bay Area. She mentors female startup founders and leaders getting ready for board service.

Obi grew up in Berlin and saw the wall come down. She has a BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University. She now lives in California with her husband and two children. She loves yoga, biking, paddleboarding, skiing (which she picked up at age 40), travelling, cooking, eating, and her family.

 

Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. In addition, she is a founding partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm.

From January 2005 to January 2009, Rice served as the 66th Secretary of State of the United States, the second woman and first black woman to hold the post. Rice also served as President George W. Bush’s Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Advisor) from January 2001 to January 2005, the first woman to hold the position.

Rice served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999, during which time she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and an academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. In 1997, she also served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.

From February 1989 through March 1991, Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff. She served as Director, then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs, as well as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice also served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

As Professor of Political Science, Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the university’s highest teaching honors – the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

She has authored and co-authored numerous books, most recently To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth (2019), co-authored with Philip Zelikow. Among her other volumes are three bestsellers, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017); No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011); and Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010). She also wrote Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995) with Philip Zelikow; edited The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin; and penned The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance (1984).

In 1991, Rice co-founded the Center for a New Generation (CNG), an innovative, after-school academic enrichment program for students in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California. In 1996, CNG merged with the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula, an affiliate club of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA). CNG has since expanded to local BGCA chapters in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Dallas. Rice remains an active proponent of an extended learning day through after-school programs.

Since 2009, Rice has served as a founding partner at RiceHadleyGates LLC, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. The firm works with senior executives of major companies to implement strategic plans and expand in emerging markets. Other partners include former National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley and former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

Rice currently serves on the boards of Dropbox, Inc., an online storage technology company; C3.ai, an AI software company; and Makena Capital Management, a private endowment firm. In addition, she is Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and a trustee of the Aspen Institute. Previously, Rice served on various additional boards, including those of: the George W. Bush Institute; the Commonwealth Club; KiOR, Inc.; the Chevron Corporation; the Charles Schwab Corporation; the Transamerica Corporation; the Hewlett-Packard Company; the University of Notre Dame; the Foundation for Excellence in Education; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and the San Francisco Symphony.

In 2013, Rice was appointed to the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, formerly the Bowl Championship Series. She served on the committee until 2017.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Rice earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver; her master’s in the same subject from the University of Notre Dame; and her Ph.D., likewise in political science, from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Rice is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has been awarded fifteen honorary doctorates.

 

Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli is a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute. From March 2003 to April 2005, she served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations at the National Security Council. From 2004 - 2006 she served as the key U.S. official in the formulation of U.S. policy toward United Nations Reform. She was appointed by Secretary Condoleezza Rice as Senior Advisor for Women’s Empowerment. She set up and oversaw the work of the Women Leaders' Working Group and spearheaded the State Department initiative for Women's Justice. Ambassador Tahir-Kheli also was Research Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS and served as the founding Director of the South Asia Program from 1999 to 2002. She is the author of Before the Age of Prejudice: A Muslim Woman’s National Security Work with Three American Presidents, among other books and monographs.