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Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

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About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

About the event: The Women, Peace and Security sector advocates for the inclusion of designated gender experts in peace processes to improve outcomes for women. However, empirical support for the effectiveness of gender experts remains inconclusive. This talk explores whether gender experts serve as powerful advocates or powerless actors in efforts to advance gender-sensitive peace negotiation outcomes. Leveraging data capturing the gender and position of 2299 negotiation delegates across 116 comprehensive peace agreements finalized between 1990 and 2021, we find that gender experts increase the likelihood that peace agreements contain provisions for women. However, we find that gender experts primarily influence agreement outcomes by increasing women’s involvement in these processes. To examine this finding, we consider the impact of gender experts through the case of Northern Ireland, drawing from 42 interviews and archival work conducted between 2020 and 2023. We find that the systemic masculinized structure of peace negotiations hinders gender experts’ overall influence. Our mixed-methods findings explain how gender experts are simultaneously powerless and powerful. This study identifies the structural limitations of gender experts’ inclusion as the sole mechanism to advance women-specific provisions in peace processes, furthering our understanding of the gender dynamics of peace negotiations.

About the speaker: Elizabeth is a CISAC Postdoctoral Fellow and previously held fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, the US Institute of Peace, and Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Her research focuses on Women, Peace and Security, and explores women’s representation in peace negotiations. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of British Columbia. She previously worked as a Gender Specialist with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Kosovo and as a Gender Consultant for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Ghana.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The Baltic states keep surprising researchers — and that is why they are worth studying. They survived the Global Financial Crisis without devaluing their currencies and recovered quickly, even though many economists expected them to fail. Estonia did better than its neighbors during that crisis, and this could not be explained by economic factors alone — political trust turned out to matter. Now, Lithuania has overtaken Estonia in per capita income, which few predicted, and which remains to be explained. The Baltic puzzles are not just regional curiosities. They point to open questions in political economy and security studies.

My current research focuses on NATO burden-sharing. The standard story is that allies spend too little on defense because others will cover for them — but whether this actually happens, and how, is less clear than conventional wisdom suggests. I examine allied defense spending patterns using difference-in-differences methods, and separately run a survey experiment in Lithuania testing whether the visible presence of allied forces changes how citizens view allied commitment and how much they are willing to spend on defense. Lithuania is a crucial case for this question: Germany has committed to stationing a full permanent brigade there, creating a real-world experiment that most NATO countries never experience. Can European power substitute for — or does it complement — American security guarantees? The answer matters a great deal for how alliances actually hold together.

About the speaker: Vytautas Kuokštis is an associate professor at Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science (TSPMI), visiting Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) during the 2025–26 academic year. His research sits at the intersection of international political economy and security, with a focus on exchange rate regimes, labor market institutions, NATO burden-sharing, and the politics of financial technology (fintech).

At CISAC, Kuokštis is designing a survey experiment in Lithuania that examines how citizens respond to changes in NATO allies' defense commitments, and what this means for public preferences on national defense spending.

Kuokštis has published widely in journals including Political Science Research and Methods, European Journal of Political Economy, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Regulation & Governance, Policy & Politics, European Journal of Law and Economics, and European Security. Before coming to Stanford, Kuokštis held research positions at Harvard University (Fulbright Fellow), Yale University, and Hokkaido University. He received advanced quantitative methods training at Yale and the Essex Summer School, and organized the Baltic Studies Conference at Yale. At Vilnius University, he teaches courses on introductory economics, international political economy, and causal inference.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

This event is hosted by the Indo-Pacific Policy Lab.

About the event: In Retrench, Defend, Compete, Charles L. Glaser advances a thought-provoking strategy for securing vital US interests in the face of China's rise.

Many believe China's ascent will drive it to war with the United States. Yet this is far from inevitable; geography and nuclear weapons should ensure US security. The real danger, Glaser contends, lies in East Asia's territorial disputes, especially over Taiwan. To reduce the risk of war, Glaser makes a bold case for ending US security commitments to Taiwan and carefully calibrating its policies on protecting South China Sea maritime features. The United States should also strengthen its alliances with Japan and South Korea and eliminate unnecessarily provocative nuclear and conventional weapons policies. These measures, Glaser argues, would defuse China's biggest security concerns while preserving America's core strategic interests.

Fusing theoretical insights with policy analysis, Retrench, Defend, Compete lays out a distinctive and compelling approach for managing the world's most consequential geopolitical rivalry—before it's too late.

About the speaker: Charles L. Glaser is a Senior Fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. He was the Founding Director of the Elliott School's Institute for Security and Conflict Studies.

Glaser studies international relations theory and international security policy. His research focuses on defensive realism and deterrence theory, as well as U.S. security policy regarding China, nuclear weapons, and energy security.

His books include Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America’s Future Against a Rising China, Rational Theory of International Politics and Analyzing Strategic Nuclear Policy; and two co-edited volumes—Managing U.S. Nuclear Operations in the 21st Century and Crude Strategy.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: China's nuclear forces, policies, and, possibly, strategy seem to be changing dramatically, with official US estimates suggesting the country may reach peer status by the end of the decade. Policymakers and scholars alike want to understand why these changes are occurring, but determining what is changing must precede explaining why. China, like many other nuclear powers, veils its nuclear forces in secrecy. That veil, however, has been increasingly pierced by open-source intelligence. The discovery of more than three hundred ICBM silos under construction surprised many experts who long believed China was moving decisively toward mobile forces. This talk considers the relationship between models of China's decision-making and sources of information, both historical and contemporary. I compare the gaze of the intelligence community with that of scholars to create a framework for reconsidering our understanding of China's nuclear forces in the past and to suggest how open-source information could shape our understanding in the future. While focused on China's nuclear arsenal, the case illustrates a broader point: open-source analysis represents a distinct way of knowing about the world, but only when married to traditional research methods. Scholars working on other opaque policy challenges, especially in security, face similar empirical problems, and this talk offers a framework for thinking about how open-source research might contribute to their work.

About the speaker: Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is a Distinguished Scholar of Global Security at Middlebury College. He is also a member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control and the Frontier Red Team for Anthropic. From 2022 to 2025, Dr. Lewis was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board. He is the author of three books, The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China’s Search for Security in the Nuclear Age; Paper Tigers: China’s Nuclear Posture; and The 2020 Commission on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks on the United States.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

"Rebuilding Democracy in Venezuela" is a four-part webinar series hosted by CDDRL's Democracy Action Lab that examines Venezuela’s uncertain transition to democracy through the political, economic, security, and justice-related challenges that will ultimately determine its success. Moving beyond abstract calls for change, the series will offer a practical, sequenced analysis of what a democratic opening in Venezuela would realistically require, drawing on comparative experiences from other post-authoritarian transitions.

Margaret Brandeau is the Coleman F. Fung Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford and a Professor of Medicine (by courtesy) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the development of applied mathematical and economic models to support health policy decisions.

She has published cost-effectiveness analyses of a variety of HIV and drug-abuse interventions including methadone maintenance, buprenorphine maintenance, HIV testing and counseling programs targeted to women of childbearing age, and HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis for key populations. She has also published a number of studies on effective allocation of HIV prevention resources. She has been a Principal Investigator and co-Principal Investigator on four sequential five-year NIDA-funded projects entitled "AIDS and Drug Abuse: Policy Modeling for Better Decisions" that have led to numerous publications and presentations. Recently she has also worked in the area of bioterrorism preparedness planning, and on hepatitis B prevention and control.