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

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

About the Event: The Trump Presidency has changed transatlantic security relations permanently and fundamentally.  Former UK Ambassador to NATO Sir Adam Thomson, currently Director of the European Leadership Network, will look at the implications for relations between NATO and the European Union at the start of President Biden’s term.  Although some progress on NATO-EU cooperation has been made in the past few years, it was in the shadow of the challenges that Trump posed to both organizations.  Washington and America’s European allies and partners will need to repair the damage to the transatlantic relationship and take a new approach to working together. 

About the Speaker: Sir Adam Thomson has been the Director of the European Leadership Network since 2016. The ELN is an independent, non-partisan, network of leaders from all across the continent dedicated to a safer Europe.

Adam had a 38 year diplomatic career in the British Diplomatic Service. His final posting was as the UK Ambassador to NATO 2014 - 2016. From 2010 Adam served as British High Commissioner to Pakistan and between 2002 and 2006 he was British Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York.  Other postings included Moscow (1981-3), NATO (1983-6) and Washington DC (1991-5). He headed the Foreign Office’s Security Policy Department 1998 – 2002.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/Ot8lMxDSb34

About the Event: This paper addresses a single question: What explains the lack of civil war recurrence in El Salvador since the 1992 Chapultepec Accords? This lack of recurrence presents a unique puzzle given the fact that the civil war’s underlying causes remain unresolved. A well-established body of scholarship has identified a host of variables critical in explaining civil war recurrence, but much less ink has been spilled to explain non-recurrence. As such, I examine the factors identified in scholarship to be correlated with civil war recurrence to determine what they might tell us about civil war non-recurrence. I argue that the civil war non-recurrence in El Salvador rests not only on the durability of the agreement’s coercive/military and political provisions but also on the rebel group’s organizational design. To test this argument, I process trace along the recurrence variables and find support for my argument.   

About the Speaker: Meg K. Guliford is a Penn Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in residence at Perry World House. Her broad research agenda reflects an interest in political violence, conflict processes, and U.S. foreign policy. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Eisenhower Institute. Guliford’s career in the federal government began as a Presidential Management Fellow for the U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters and has included a civilian deployment to Iraq and work for the Institute for Defense Analyses and the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Guliford will receive her Ph.D. in International Relations from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She received her M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/JqN4Ga4DVss

About the Event: 

Much of the imagery and remote sensing analysis in the Open Source Community pertains to North Korea’s nuclear weapons pathway and military capability. However, many questions remain regarding economic and agricultural health in a nation known for denial of access to outside observation. But by applying emerging analytical and processing technology of satellite imagery and data, we can address the challenge of examining economic and environmental patterns in the North.

Machine Learning technology has been used to analyze rudimentary objects like roads or buildings on satellite imagery for years, but has yet to be successfully employed to better understand nuanced patterns of life. In our partnership with the analytics company Orbital Insight, we have undertaken a project of counting thousands of objects in satellite images taken over the past five years to uncover North Korea’s trade relationship with China.

This project includes counting number of trucks at each side of the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge as a measure of trade activity between North Korea and China. By applying artificial intelligence to more than 300 satellite images, we observed fluctuations of truck counts, which peak during the month of November. A significant drop in the truck counts during the year of 2020 is noticed as a result of restricted traffic from the global pandemic, although as much as 30 trucks were observed in the month of June on both sides of the border. The project demonstrates the utilities of machine learning in analyzing emerging datasets. Careful monitoring of trade between the two states can aid in better understanding the China-North Korea economic relationship and how it evolves over time.

CISAC is also partnering with international organizations and geospatial systems specialists to apply data derived from public space mapping systems to better understand macro-environmental, agricultural, and water security trends over the past twenty years in North Korea. For decades, scientists of every discipline have been analyzing remotely-sensed images and data sets to extract otherwise-imperceptible insight pertaining to broad aspects of environmental health including coastal erosion, deforestation, land subsidence, and global thermal changes. But because of a post-war technology vacuum and broadly-applied sanctions against space-derived information, North Korea has never had access to this data or the advanced software and data storage architecture necessary to support it. The potential for direct collaboration with the North on environmental analysis may enhance North Korea’s ability to mitigate its own agricultural risk and potentially facilitate informal international collaboration.

About the Speaker: Allison Puccioni has been an imagery analyst for over 25 years, working within the military, tech, media, and academic communities. After honorably serving in the US Army as an Imagery Analyst from 1991 - 1997, Allison continued the tradecraft as a civilian augmentee to US and NATO operations in the Kosovo airstrike campaign, and as a Senior Analyst and Mission Planner for Naval Special Warfare Group One. After earning her Master’s Degree in International Policy, Allison established the commercial satellite imagery analysis capability for the British publication company Jane's. In 2015, Allison joined Google to assist with the establishment of applications for its commercial small-satellites. Today, Allison is the Principal and Founder of Armillary Services, providing insight on commercial imaging satellites and associated analytics to the governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the commercial sector. Concurrently, Allison manages the multi-sensor imagery analysis team at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/TV8ye_OVdzY

About the Event: Proof that France had become the world’s fourth nuclear power exploded above the Algerian Sahara in February 1960, during the Algerian War for Independence (1954–62). Sixteen more blasts would take place before France abandoned its Saharan test sites in 1966, which had continued to host French explosions underground during the first years of Algerian Independence. Well before the first airborne detonation, and even after French testing went below ground, the likelihood that radioactive debris (known as fallout) would contaminate the desert environment and its human inhabitants animated an international controversy. Saharan fallout loomed at once as a new threat to Algerian and African sovereignty and to Cold War negotiations that promised to limit weapons testing, revealing historical intersections between African decolonization and the nuclear arms race.

About the Speaker: Austin Cooper is a Predoctoral Researcher at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a PhD Candidate in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/trpJJ0-nJzE

About the Event: In the middle of the twentieth century, geophysical science and new technologies pried open three of Earth's most remote and inhospitable regions: Antarctica, the ocean floor, and the exosphere—that is, outer space. As human activity in these frigid zones increased, so too did their status as “global commons,” domains belonging to all, and therefore none. This presentation examines how one issue in particular, nuclear weapons, galvanized the politics of the global commons from the 1950s to the 1970s and sheds light on how the United States navigated the new spaces as part of its Cold War foreign policy.

About the Speakers: 

Stephen Buono is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. He earned his PhD in History from Indiana University. At Stanford, he is at work on his first book, The Province of All Mankind, a history of how outer space became a realm of American foreign policy and international law in 1950s and 1960s. Before arriving at CISAC, Stephen was an editor for the journal Diplomatic History and an Aerospace History Fellow with the American Historical Association and the National Aeronautical and Space Administration.

Ryan A. Musto is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC. He holds a PhD in history from The George Washington University and master’s degrees in international and world history from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. Prior to joining CISAC, Ryan served as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MIT. His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Polar Record, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Americas Quarterly, amongst other outlets. Ryan is currently writing a book manuscript on the international history of regional denuclearization.

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

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/zrDq0xRWnhk

About the Event: Determination and verification of the nuclear activities of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are critical to ongoing disarmament and nonproliferation efforts. This study assesses the complete nuclear fuel cycle of the DPRK, from its capacity to produce fissile material precursors at mining and milling facilities in Pyongsan, to activity at the main Nuclear Scientific Research Center in Yongbyon. An interdisciplinary approach is used to analyze the different stages of the DRPK’s nuclear fuel cycle. In investigating the uranium ore grade and ore production capacity at the mining and milling facilities, we combine analysis of archival geological maps, geological field survey reports, and first-hand collection and geochemical analysis of comparable rock samples from the Korean Peninsula. In analyzing the ongoing activities at fissile material production facilities, we integrate satellite imagery analysis with machine learning algorithms, allowing for automated analysis of large image sets.

About the Speaker: Sulgiye Park is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC, Stanford University, where she focuses primarily on investigating the front-end of uranium pathway in North Korea. She looks at the uranium mining and milling processes for disarmament and nonproliferation efforts. Prior to joining CISAC, Sulgiye was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Geological Sciences and Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, where Sulgiye studied materials' behaviors at extreme environments.