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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.

Dr. Matthew Levitt is the Fromer-Wexler Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy where he directs the Institute's Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. Previously, Levitt served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and before that as an FBI counterterrorism analyst, including work on the Millennial and September 11th plots. He also served as a State Department counterterrorism advisor to Gen James L. Jones, the special envoy for Middle East regional security.

Levitt teaches at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the Center for Jewish Civilization, as well as at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.  He previously taught at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.  He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and sits on the advisory boards of several think tanks around the world.  Widely published, Levitt is the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God (Georgetown, 2013 & 2024) and Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (Yale, 2006). Levitt hosts the podcast Breaking Hezbollah’s Golden Rule and created open access, interactive maps of Lebanese Hezbollah worldwide activities and Iranian external operations.

About the event: This talk will describe two projects, one in the middle and one just getting under way, both related to the benefits and harms of COVID-19 control measures.

The first project aims overall to provide a rigorous estimate of the benefits of COVID-19 control measures prior to vaccination in terms of COVID-19 deaths averted. Prominent existing analyses (T. Bollyky et al., 2023, Lancet, and empirical estimates in Macedo and Lee In COVID’s Wake 2025, suggest that this benefit was nonexistent — that adoption of anti-COVID restrictions had no measurable impact on COVID-19 deaths — but suffer from major methodological limitations and defects. This part of the talk will lay out the conditions for an appropriate analysis of this question and will describe planned work to conduct such an analysis.

The second project, with CISAC fellow Johannes Ponge, aims to assess the degree to which existing pandemic response plans incorporate consideration of unintended consequences of these measures in sectors such as the economy, education, and mental health, and to create tools to aid decision makers in tracking such impacts in future pandemics.

About the speaker: Marc Lipsitch is an infectious disease epidemiologist, mathematical modeler, and microbiologist who has been actively working on biosecurity for more than a decade. His science focuses on pandemic preparedness and response, evaluation of disease control measures, and the impact of pathogen evolution on human disease. His biosecurity work to date has focused on surveillance design, pandemic response, and prevention through the regulation of risky research. He joined Stanford this year after 26 years at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, where he led the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, and 4 years at the US CDC, where he was founding Director for Science and then Senior Advisor at the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics.
 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Why do states draw security forces from the same social bases as insurgent groups in some conflicts, but rely on rival social outgroups in others? In identity-driven conflicts, recruiting insurgent-coethnics – personnel who share an ethnic or religious identity with insurgents – can improve access to local information, enhance state legitimacy, and enable selective violence. Yet it can also undermine discipline and cohesion within the coercive apparatus by raising the risks of defection, indiscipline, and divided loyalty. Existing scholarship has shown that such recruiting decisions can shape battlefield effectiveness and regime survival, but we know relatively little about how states decide whether to leverage or sideline personnel drawn from insurgents’ own social bases. Kaur argues that states strategically shape the ethnic composition and deployment of their security forces in response to the organizational risks that insurgent-coethnics may pose to the state’s coercive apparatus. Coethnics can be co-opted as counterinsurgents only when insurgencies are sufficiently weakened to make coethnics willing to collaborate with the state, and when the state’s coercive institutions are structured to reduce the risk of insubordinate collective action. She tests this argument through a mixed-methods design that combines within- and cross-conflict evidence from counterinsurgency campaigns in India and the British Empire. Taken together, the study shows how states manage organizational risk from internal conflict through the recruitment, reassignment, deployment, and withholding of coethnic personnel. In doing so, it demonstrates that the ethnicity of security forces is itself an ethno-political outcome shaped by wartime dynamics.

About the speaker: Dipin Kaur is an India-U.S. Security Studies Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ashoka University. Her research focuses on state strategy in the shadow of political violence, the politics of post-conflict transitions, and public opinion in polarized settings. Her book project draws on case studies from India and the British Empire to explain why states vary in their reliance on particular ethnic groups as counterinsurgents in response to conflict. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University (2022) and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.