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Governments Aren’t Yet Serious About AI’s Risk to Human Rights

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From the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) blog:

More than 25 governments around the world, including those of the United States and across the European Union, have adopted elaborate national strategies on artificial intelligence — how to spur research; how to target strategic sectors; how to make AI systems reliable and accountable.

Yet a new analysis finds that almost none of these declarations provide more than a polite nod to human rights, even though artificial intelligence has potentially big impacts on privacy, civil liberties, racial discrimination, and equal protection under the law.

That’s a mistake, says Eileen Donahoe, executive director of Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator, which produced the report in conjunction with a leading international digital rights organization called Global Partners Digital.

Read More (at the HAI blog)

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In the rush to develop national strategies on artificial intelligence, a new report finds, most governments pay lip service to civil liberties.

Authoritarian Regimes React to Recent Challenges to Democracy in the U.S.

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As street protests in the U.S. grew in strength in support of racial justice, authoritarian regimes around the world offered their own interpretations of events to their people back home. The Iranian regime in particular points to the demonstrations as proof that U.S. democracy has failed. Join us as Stanford scholars discuss recent and persistent challenges to democracy in the U.S., in particular violence against the Black community and in response to recent protests.

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Director Michael McFaul will moderate a panel discussion on this trend with Larry Diamond, senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution, Didi Kuo, associate director for research at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Abbas Milani director of the Iranian Studies Program, and Nancy Okail, visiting scholar at CDDRL.

This event is online only. Register to receive a personalized link to join the Zoom webinar.

REGISTER HERE.

This event is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at FSI and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford.

Abbas Milani

615 Crothers Way,
Encina Commons, Room 128A
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 721-4052
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Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies
Co-director of the Iran Democracy Project
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
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Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
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Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Michael A. McFaul

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

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Statement of Solidarity from CISAC

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From the CISAC Co-Directors

 

June 9, 2020

Today, CISAC scholars have released a statement of solidarity with all those who suffer from, and peacefully protest against, police brutality and systemic racism. We are all profoundly affected by the painful last minutes of George Floyd’s life. His death was racism in its most blatant form, but it is not an isolated event. Rather, it is part of a wider pattern and deeper stain on our national experience. As jarring as George Floyd’s death was to watch, countless other people of color suffer structural violence and a slower death over the course of their lives as a consequence of deeply ingrained inequality and discrimination. For too long, too many have been deprived of the simple expectation of the opportunity to live, work, and raise their families in safety. Black and brown communities, as well as other minority communities, continue to be systematically denied equal access to their most basic rights, as well as to financial opportunity, education, and medical care—circumstances that have been all brought into even sharper relief by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their lived experiences are unfathomable, and too often ignored, by many who are sheltered by their own privilege. As hundreds of thousands peacefully march to end this injustice, following in the best traditions of our democracy, we stand with them.

The statement below was initiated by CISAC Fellows. We thank the Fellows for their initiative at a time when everyone should rise to the occasion and act. At the same time, we realize that statements of solidarity are insufficient. As co-directors, we accept that our responsibility is to lead CISAC in a manner that helps combat racism and other forms of injustice so that true equality is actually attained. Our power and position of privilege as a policy center at a renowned university extends well beyond the relevance of our scholarship. Every decision, no matter how small, should reduce privilege and increase access to resources at Stanford. The road forward will not be easy. Since each of us is a product of unique circumstance with a different perspective, there will not always be agreement. But, by taking action beyond our scholarship, by expanding the voices at our table, by carefully and thoughtfully listening to those voices, and by committing to concrete steps—small and large—we can together make the world safer and more just. This is a burden we all must bear, and we will.

As the co-directors of CISAC, we commit to publicly releasing an action plan outlining specific additional steps we will take as an institution—in coordination with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies—no later than the beginning of the fall quarter of 2020.

If you are part of the Stanford community and would like to add your signature to the statement below, please do so at this link.

 

Rod Ewing and Colin Kahl

Co-Directors

Center for International Security and Cooperation

Stanford University

 

 

Statement of Solidarity from CISAC

 

We the undersigned scholars at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) express our anguish and outrage at the brutal killing of George Floyd—and the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, David McAtee, and countless other black Americans who have lost, and continue to lose their lives, as a consequence of police brutality and racism. These recent injustices are only the tip of an iceberg of systemic racism and the violence stemming from it.

To all those in the Stanford community and beyond experiencing hardship and pain in these difficult times, we stand with you. We express our solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and all minority groups that face the indignity and violence of structural inequality every day.  

We condemn the use of violence against peaceful protesters. As experts in national and international security, we are deeply concerned with threats to deploy military forces to suppress constitutional rights—actions that endanger the very core of our democracy. 

We reaffirm our commitment to diversity, social justice, and basic human dignity. We also recognize our position of privilege in this deeply unequal society, and find it important to reflect, learn, act, and recommit to these basic values as a community. 

As an academic and policy community, CISAC’s mission is to generate knowledge to build a safer world. But we recognize that mission is impossible to achieve without addressing the structural inequalities that put true safety and security for so many people around the world out of reach. CISAC is committed to diversity, drawing on scholars from a range of disciplines, experience, and racial and cultural backgrounds. CISAC is also committed to civil discourse and constructive dialogue. As a community, we reject hate, intolerance, and discrimination in all its forms. But at this moment of national reflection, we know there is much more we must do to build a more inclusive institution and disrupt the structures of racism and inequality that we knowingly and unknowingly perpetuate. Moving forward, we will redouble our commitment to diversity and inclusion in our events, curriculum, fellowship program, and recruiting and hiring practices. We will do more to include Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and LGBTQI scholars and voices, as well as those from other underrepresented minorities, in our conversations. As scholars, we also commit to widening the aperture of national and international security conversations to include a fuller appreciation for the role of discrimination and inequality in all its forms.  

 

List of Signatories (institutional affiliations provided for identification purposes only)

Shazeda Ahmed, Pre-doctoral Fellow, CISAC/Human-Centered AI Institute

Nandita Balakrishnan, Pre-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Jody Berger, Communications Manager, CISAC

Lauren J. Borja, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC 

Daniel Bush, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC/Stanford Internet Observatory

Melissa Carlson, Pre-doctoral Fellow, CISAC 

Alicia R. Chen, MIP Student and TA, CISAC

Kevin Chen, Research Assistant, CISAC

Martha Crenshaw, Senior Fellow, CISAC

Elena Crespo, Honors Student '20, CISAC

Christophe Crombez, Senior Research Scholar, The Europe Center, FSI

Debak Das, Pre-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, CDDRL

François Diaz-Maurin, Affiliate, CISAC

Paul N. Edwards, Senior Research Scholar, CISAC and Director, Program in Science, Technology & Society

Lisa Einstein, MIP Master's Student and TA, CISAC 

Rodney C. Ewing, CISAC Co-Director, Senior Fellow at FSI and Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security, Professor of Geological Sciences

James D. Fearon, Senior Fellow at FSI and Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences

Thomas Fingar, Shorenstein APARC Fellow at FSI

Colin Garvey, Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC & Institute for Human-Centered AI

Jonah Glick-Unterman, CISAC Honors '20, Political Science

Megan Gorman, Associate Director for Administration and Finance at FSI

Rose Gottemoeller, Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer, CISAC

Andrea Gray, Associate Director, CISAC

Daniel Greene, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Melissa Griffith, Pre-doctoral Fellow, CISAC 

Anna Grzymala-Busse, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow, FSI

Rosanna Guadagno, Director, Information Warfare Working Group, CISAC

Amr Hamzawy, Senior Research Scholar, CDDRL, FSI

David Havasy, Associate Director of Operations, Cyber Policy Center

Gabrielle Hecht, Senior Fellow at FSI, and Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security, CISAC, Professor, History

Siegfried S. Hecker, Senior Fellow at FSI, Emeritus, CISAC

Martin Hellman, Professor, Electrical Engineering, Emeritus

Connor Hoffmann, Research and Programs Assistant, CISAC

David Holloway, Senior Fellow at FSI, and Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, CISAC

Edward Ifft, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution

Colin Kahl, CISAC Co-Director, Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow 

Bronte Kass, Program Manager, FSI

Alla Kassianova, Research Scholar, CISAC

David Kennedy, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus

Lindsay Krall, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC 

David Laitin, James. T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science

John Lee, Finance and Research Administration Manager, CISAC

Gabriela Levikow, Research Assistant, CISAC

Herb Lin, Senior Research Scholar, CISAC

Steve Luby, Senior Fellow FSI and Professor of Medicine, Infectious Diseases

Xinru Ma, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Robert J. MacCoun, James & Patricia Kowal Professor of Law, Stanford University

Beatriz Magaloni, Senior Fellow at FSI and Professor, Political Science

Iris Malone, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Michael May, Professor Emeritus, Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research, CISAC

Michael McFaul, Director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Brett McGurk, Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer, CISAC

Katie McKinney, Research Assistant, CISAC 

Taylor McLamb, Research Assistant, CISAC

 Bryan Metzger, CISAC Honors '20, CISAC

John C Mitchell, Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor, Computer Science

Asfandyar Mir, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Gary Mukai, Director, Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education

Norman M. Naimark, Senior Fellow at FSI and Professor, History

Scott K. Nelson, Development Associate, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Anna Nguyen Thuy An,  Master's in International Policy, Asia Pacific Fellow, FSI

Megan Palmer, Executive Director, Bio Policy & Leadership Initiatives, Bioengineering

Reid Pauly, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Steven Pifer, William Perry Research Fellow, CISAC 

Eric H. Phillips, MD, MPH, Alumni-Class of 1975

William M. Phillips III, Affiliate, CISAC

Maxime Polleri, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Michelle Pualuan, Program Administrator, Cyber Policy Center

David Relman, Senior Fellow at FSI, and Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor Stanford School of Medicine

Scott Sagan, Senior Fellow at FSI, and Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, CISAC

Kenneth A. Schultz, Professor, Political Science

Rylan Sekiguchi, Manager of Curriculum and Instructional Design, Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education

Elliot Serbin, Research Analyst, CISAC

Gi-Wook Shin, Director, Shorenstein APARC

Tim Stearns, Professor, Biology, Professor, Genetics 

Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director at FSI

Michael R. Tomz, Professor of Political Science

Julien de Troullioud de Lanversin, Post-doctoral Fellow, CISAC

Harold Trinkunas, Deputy Director, CISAC 

Gil-li Vardi, Lecturer in History, CISAC

Amelie-Sophie Vavrovsky, Student and Researcher, International Policy

Debbie Warren, Events & Bechtel Conference Center Manager, FSI

Allen S. Weiner, Director, Program in International and Comparative Law, Stanford Law School

Jeremy Weinstein, Professor of Political Science, CISAC

Leonard Weiss, Visiting Scholar and Network Affiliate, CISAC

Katherine Welsh, Administrative Associate, FSI/CDDRL

Alice Wenner, Communications Associate, FSI

Tara Wright, Communications, Cyber Policy Center

Amy Zegart, Senior Fellow at FSI and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, CISAC

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Cybersecurity Lessons From the Pandemic, or Pandemic Lessons From Cybersecurity

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Herbert Lin
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Fred Cohen was the first person to introduce the term “computer virus.” In a 1984 paper, he defined it as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself. With the infection property, a virus can spread throughout a computer system or network using the authorizations of every user using it to infect their programs. Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows.” (The original 1984 paper was eventually published in 1987.) Since then, the security company Kaspersky claims, rightly so, that “when it comes to cybersecurity, there are few terms with more name recognition than ‘computer viruses.’”

This bit of history has taken on new meaning now that the world is in the midst of a global pandemic caused by a biological virus, the novel coronavirus, that induces an unusual and novel disease, COVID-19.

Read the rest at Lawfare Blog

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Important pandemic lessons from cybersecurity would have saved the U.S. economic and medical heartbreak had those lessons been heeded earlier.

Preventing and Managing Hospital-Based Infections During Coronavirus

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During the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, Taiwan reported 346 confirmed cases and 73 deaths. Of all known infections, 94% were transmitted inside hospitals. Nine major hospitals were fully or partially shut down, and many doctors and nurses quit for fear of becoming infected. The Taipei Municipal Ho-Ping Hospital was most severely affected. Its index patient, a 42-year-old undocumented hospital laundry worker who interacted with staff and patients for 6 days before being hospitalized, became a superspreader, infecting at least 20 other patients and 10 staff members. The entire 450-bed hospital was ordered to shut down, and all 930 staff and 240 patients were quarantined within the hospital. The central government appointed the previous Minister of Health as head of the Anti-SARS Taskforce. Ultimately the hospital was evacuated; the outbreak resulted in 26 deaths. Events surrounding the hospital’s evacuation offer important lessons for hospitals struggling to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been caused by spread of a similar coronavirus.

Read the Full Study in the Journal of Hospital Medicine

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SHP's Jason Wang and colleagues provide five key steps to managing infections in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic in this Journal of Hospital Medicine study, drawing on lessons from previous hospital-based coronavirus infections.

Patterns and Potential Solutions to Disinformation Sharing, Under COVID-19 and Beyond

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REGISTER

 

Join Cyber Policy Center, June 17rd at 10am Pacific Time for Patterns and Potential Solutions to Disinformation Sharing, Under COVID-19 and Beyond, with Josh Tucker, David Lazer and Evelyn Douek.

The session will explore which types of readers are most susceptible to fake news, whether crowdsourced fact-checking by ordinary citizens works and whether it can reduce the prevalence of false news in the information ecosystem. Speakers will also look at patterns of (mis)information sharing regarding COVID-19: Who is sharing what type of information? How has this varied over time? How much misinformation is circulating, and among whom? Finally, we'll explore how social media platforms are responding to COVID disinformation, how that differs from responses to political disinformation, and what we think they could be doing better.

Evelyn Douek is a doctoral candidate and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society. Her research focuses on online speech governance, and the various private, national and global proposals for regulating content moderation.

David Lazer is a professor of political science and computer and information science and the co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Before joining the Northeastern faculty in fall 2009, he was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Program on Networked Governance. 

Joshua Tucker is Professor of Politics, Director Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, Co-Director NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab, Affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Affiliated Professor of Data Science.

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

REGISTER

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The Executive Order on Platforms and Online Speech

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On May 28th, President Trump signed an executive order threatening to revoke CDA 230 protections, which would expose social media companies to increased liability for content that is posted on their sites. The Cyber Policy Center team responded on June 1 in a public webinar. The event was recorded.

The Executive Order on Platforms and Online Speech: Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center Responds

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On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order threatening to revoke CDA 230 protections, which would expose social media companies to increased liability for content that is posted on their sites. This comes on the heels of Twitter, last week, fact-checking two misleading tweets from the president about mail-in voting. Critics of the executive order say the White House is overstepping its authority, and cannot limit the legal protections that social media companies currently hold under federal law.
 
Join the Stanford Cyber Policy Center's team Monday June 1 at 8AM PST for President Trump’s Executive Order on Platforms and Online Speech: Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center Responds, with Nate Persily, Faculty Co-Director of the Cyber Policy Center and Director of the Program on Democracy and the Internet; Daphne Keller, Director for the Program on Platform Regulation and former associate general counsel for Google; Alex Stamos, Director of the Cyber Center’s Internet Observatory and former Chief Security Officer at Facebook; Marietje Schaake, Policy Director for the Cyber Policy Center and former Member of EU Parliament; and Eileen Donahoe, Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator and former US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Counsel, in conversation with Cyber Center Director Kelly Born.

Monday, June 1st
8am PDT
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Panel Discussions

Weapons of the Weak State: Contracts and Consent in Post-Conflict Statebuilding

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

 

Livestream: Please click here to join the livestream webinar via Zoom or log-in with webinar ID 924 4971 4330.

 

About the Event: International statebuilding aims to transform weak, conflict-affected states into stable modern states, grounded in rule of law, market economies, and liberal democracies (Barnett 2006, Mann 2012). International organizations (IOs) play a central role in this effort. By deploying country-level statebuilding missions in conflict-affected states, IOs aim to co-govern with the conflict-affected state for a defined period of time, helping to strengthen the capacity of the state to govern itself. International relations scholarship assumes that once IOs exercise, possess, and assert their authority to intervene on a country’s domestic territory they do not have to renegotiate this authority. We argue, in contrast, that most agreements between IOs and the host government are incomplete contracts that give weak states substantial authority over the intervening IO. We demonstrate that in a context of changing sovereignty norms, weak states have consistently used their authority to resist the influence of IOs and reduce the effectiveness of international statebuilding efforts. To test the observable implications of these claims, we employ a mixed method research design that integrates text-as-data analysis with in-depth case studies.

 

About the Speakers:

 

Susanna P. Campbell is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Service and Director of the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab (RIPIL) at American University. Her research examines the sub-national behavior of international actors in fragile and conflict-affected states, addressing debates in the statebuilding, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, international aid, and global governance literatures. She uses mixed-method research designs and has conducted extensive fieldwork in conflict-affected countries, including Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Sudan, South Sudan, and East Timor. She has received grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Network for International Studies, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Swedish and Dutch governments, among others. In 2018, she won the School of International Service Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award and the Excellence in PhD Mentoring Award.

Prof. Campbell’s first book, Global Governance and Local Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2018), argues that because global governance actors are accountable to external stakeholders, seemingly “bad behavior” by country-based staff is necessary for local peacebuilding performance. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize and featured as one of the 2018 top picks for engaged scholarship by Political Violence @ a Glance. She is finishing a co-authored second book, Aid in Conflict, that explains the aid allocation behavior of international donors in war-torn countries. Her work has also been published by Columbia University Press, International Studies Review, International Peacekeeping, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Political Research Quarterly, among others. Prior to graduate school, she worked for the United Nations, International Crisis Group, and the Council on Foreign Relations and recently served as a senior advisor for the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, mandated by the US Congress. She received her PhD from Tufts University and was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and The Graduate Institute in Geneva.

 

Aila M. Matanock is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research addresses the ways in which international and other outside actors engage in fragile states. She uses case studies, survey experiments, and cross-national data in this work. She has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Central America, Europe, Melanesia, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. She has received funding for these projects from many sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Minerva Research Initiative, the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START), and the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her 2017 book, Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation, was published by Cambridge University Press. It won the 2018 Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize and was a runner up for the 2018 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize. It is based on her dissertation research at Stanford University, which won the 2013 Helen Dwight Reid award from the American Political Science Association. Her work has also been published by the Annual Review of Political Science, Governance, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and elsewhere. She worked at the RAND Corporation before graduate school, and, since then, she has held fellowships at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UCSD. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University.

 

Virtual Seminar

Susanna P. Campbell and Aila M. Matanock
Seminars
Research Seminar Series
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