Join Recruitment and Admissions Manager Meghan Moura to learn more about the Master's in International Policy program and how to apply. Please register in advance: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RX5OsP56RvmhnFsQOhPHCg

Social media sites have now surpassed cable, network, and local TV as primary sources of political news for one-in-five Americans. Yet the speed and volume of online information, challenges discerning the credibility of online sources, and concerns about viral online disinformation place a significant burden on users. What do we know about what new user-facing digital literacy initiatives are underway, what the research has to say about the impact and effectiveness of media literacy interventions, and what the implications are for both corporate and government policy.

On Wednesday, October 14th, from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. Pacific Time, please join Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, in conversation with Jennifer Kavanaugh, of RAND’s Countering Truth Decay initiative, Kristin Lord, President and CEO of IREX, and Claire Wardle, co-founder and director of First Draft, for a discussion on the state of Media Literacy.

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

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/UOHyKJR5d1w

 

About the Event: 

In 2017, former diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford wrote a pointed resignation letter to her then boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. She had watched as the State Department was gutted, and now she urged him to stem the bleeding by showing leadership and commitment to his diplomats and the country. If he couldn’t do that, she said, “I humbly recommend that you follow me out the door.” In The Dissent Channel, Shackelford chronicles how the challenges facing the State Department under the current administration, while extreme, are not new. In this live-streamed conversation, Shackelford will discuss the costs of a government unwilling to face mistakes or correct its course. She will also discuss how to build a more accountable foreign policy, through greater public engagement, more effective congressional oversight, and a State Department culture more open to dissent. In her book, The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age, she shares her personal experience as a diplomat trying to push back against the status quo and offers insight into the State Department’s long history of overlooking others who have tried to do the same. 

Moderating the discussion will be Rose Gottemoeller, Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and CISAC. Gottemoeller served as Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019 and prior to that as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State for nearly five years. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation.

Book Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Dissent-Channel-American-Diplomacy-Dishonest/dp/1541724488

 

About the Speakers: 

Elizabeth Shackelford was a career diplomat in the U.S. State Department until December 2017, when she resigned in protest of the Trump administration. During her tenure with the Foreign Service, Shackelford served in the U.S. embassies in Warsaw, Poland, and Juba, South Sudan; the U.S. Mission to Somalia; and Washington, D.C. For her work in South Sudan during the outbreak of civil war, Shackelford received the Barbara Watson Award for Consular Excellence, the State Department's highest honor for consular work. Shackelford is a non-resident fellow with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

 

Moderated by: Rose Gottemoeller is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Gottemoeller was Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019. Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. Gottemoeller was also the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation in 2009 and 2010.

 

 

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

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/ryBtzvLI0QQ

 

About the Event: Despite the importance of understanding how refugee crises end, we know little about when and why refugees, who were forced to emigrate, return home. We study the drivers of refugees’ decision-making using original observational and experimental survey data from a representative sample of approximately 3,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that conditions in a refugee’s home country are much more important than the situation in the host country in shaping return intentions. Specifically, our findings suggest that refugees’ decisions are influenced primarily by safety and security in their place of origin, their economic prospects, the availability of public services, and their personal networks. Confidence in information is also important: we find that several drivers of return---safety, services, and networks---only impact intentions among people who have high confidence in their information. By contrast, the conditions in hosting countries–so-called “push'” factors–play a negligible role in the process of refugee return. Even in the face of outright hostility and poor living conditions, refugees are unlikely to return unless the situation at home improves significantly.

 

About the Speakers: 

Ala’ Alrababa’h is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University, a graduate fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab, and a junior scholar at the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network. His research combines fieldwork, machine learning, and experimental methods to study issues related to authoritarian media, political violence, and migration and refugees. His research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Research and Methods, and International Studies Quarterly. Prior to arriving at Stanford University, Ala’ was a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

 

Jeremy Weinstein is Professor of Political Science, Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He also is faculty co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab and the Data for Development Initiative. In addition, he is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.

His research focuses on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics; the political economy of development; democracy and accountability; and migration. He is the author of Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge University Press), which received the William Riker Prize for the best book on political economy. He is also the co-author of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage Foundation), which received the Gregory Luebbert Award for the best book in comparative politics.

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
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Most people attribute the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to Beijing’s imperialist ambitions. In her talk, Professor Min Ye will go beyond top-level rhetoric, however, and investigate BRI’s origins, its implementation, and its on-the-ground effects inside China. She will unpack different local governments' approaches to the BRI by discussing how subnational entities have leveraged Beijing’s grand strategy and how the implementation of projects and programs related to the BRI facilitate local economic agendas. China’s local developmentalism, which has undergirded not only the BRI but also other national-level strategies (like the Western Development Program and China Goes Global policy), has propelled the Chinese economy from a middle power in 1998 to a superpower in 2018. The talk will conclude with a discussion of COVID-19’s impact on China’s BRI as well as preliminary findings from Professor Ye’s current research into other state-mobilized development initiatives in China.
 

Min Ye is an Associate Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Her research lies in the nexus between domestic and global politics and economics and security, focusing on China, India, and regional relations. Her publications include The Belt, Road, and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China 1998 -- 2018 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and The Making of Northeast Asia (with Kent Calder, Stanford University Press, 2010). She has received a Smith Richardson Foundation grant (2016-2018), the East Asia Peace, Prosperity, and Governance Fellowship (2013), Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program post-doctoral fellowship (2009-2010), and Millennium Education Scholarship in Japan (2006). In 2014-2016, Min Ye was an NCUSCR Public Intellectual Program fellow. Ye is currently the 2020 Rosenberg Scholar of East Asian Studies at Suffolk University.

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC’s fall webinar series "Shifting Geopolitics and U.S.-Asia Relations"

Co-sponsored with the Center for South Asia (CSA)

Since May 2020, Chinese troops have crossed the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC) and occupied positions in the Indian union territory of Ladakh. The Chinese troops crossed in multiple places and in large numbers, and have skirmished with Indian forces. Diplomatic channels are still open, but despite numerous pledges to disengage, this Chinese action appears to be an attempt to revise the LAC. This webinar will examine the crisis’ longer-term implications for China-India-U.S. relations. Can India and China reconcile their relationship or are they destined for a more antagonistic strategic rivalry? What tools and leverage does each side have in strategic competition? How does this affect U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific region, and what action can Washington take to advance its interests?

Joseph Felter is a William J. Perry Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and research fellow at the Hoover Institution.  From 2017 to 2019, Felter served as US deputy assistant secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, where he was responsible for defense strategies and plans in the region. He previously taught at West Point and Columbia University. A former US Army Special Forces and Foreign Area officer, Joe served in a variety of special operations and diplomatic assignments, and holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University. 

Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program, and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Madan’s work explores India’s role in the world and its foreign policy, focusing in particular on India's relations with China and the United States. Madan is the author of the book "Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations during the Cold War," and researching her next book on the China-India-US triangle. She holds a PhD in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin.

Yun Sun is a Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the East Asia Program and Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center. Her expertise is in Chinese foreign policy, U.S.-China relations and China’s relations with neighboring countries and authoritarian regimes. She has previously held positions at the Brookings Institution, where she focused on Chinese national security decision-making processes and China-Africa relations, and at the International Crisis Group, specializing in China’s foreign policy towards conflict countries and the developing world. She earned her master’s degree in international policy and practice from George Washington University.

Moderator:

Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. Tarapore’s research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, the Observer Research Foundation, and the East-West Center in Washington, and served in the Australian Defence Department. Tarapore holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

This event has been rescheduled to October 14, 2020

It is a good time to be interested in Southeast Asia-China relations. In addition to the three new books referenced in this webinar, additional books on the subject are forthcoming from other authors.  The timing is all the more propitious in view of the current animosity between Beijing and Washington as it may implicate Southeast Asia and American policy toward the region, depending in part on who wins the 3 November US election.  These books are both sweeping and granular.  Hiebert’s and Strangio’s country-focused chapters cover all ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), while Emmerson and his co-authors mix country studies with thematic arguments about China’s relations with its neighbors.

Given China’s clearly superior size and power, is Beijing’s incremental domination of its neighbors foreordained? Strangio says no: “Southeast Asia’s future will not be one of linear and inexorable Chinese advance, but rather one in which past dynamics and contradictions reproduce themselves over time at varying pitches of tension.” Is he right? Hiebert calls for the US “to support the region as it faces a rising and more assertive China”—to “remain an actively engaged partner that shows up, brings some resources, and rewrites the perception that it is often unreliable and missing in action.” Is that good advice?  For Emmerson, “strategic autonomy necessarily begins at home. Outsiders can help or hurt. But nothing can substitute for the creativity of Southeast Asian states in individual and joint pursuit of their own and their region’s security.” Is that true, and even if it is, so what?

The webinar will explore these and other aspects of Sino-Southeast Asian relations.

Murray Hiebert, in addition to his position at CSIS, is research director for BowerGroup Asia. Before joining CSIS, he was senior director for Southeast Asia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Earlier, he was a journalist in the China bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Prior to his posting to Beijing, he reported from Washingon on US-Asia relations for the Wall Street Journal Asia and the Far Eastern Economic Review. In the 1990s he worked for the Review while based in Kuala Lumpur and, earlier, in Hanoi, having joined the Review's Bangkok bureau in 1986 to cover developments in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He is also the author of two books on Vietnam, Chasing the Tigers (1996) and Vietnam Notebook (1993). He has a master’s degree in news media studies from American University.

 

Sebastian Strangio has written from and on Southeast Asia for many publications including Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Economist, Forbes, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times. In addition to living and working in Cambodia, where he spent three years with The Phnom Penh Post, he has reported from Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and China, among other countries. Other previous affiliations include New America’s International Reporting Project; the Future Forum, a policy institute in Phnom Penh; and Chiang Mai University’s Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development. Foreign Affairs named his first book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia, a 2015 Book of the Year. He has a master’s degree in international politics from the University of Melbourne.

 

Donald K. Emmerson, in addition to his position in APARC, is a faculty affiliate of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. So far in 2019-2020 he has spoken on Southeast Asian topics to audiences in Bangkok, Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, New York, Singapore, and Washington, DC.  Recent publications include “‘No Sole Control’ in the South China Sea,” Asia Policy (2019) and ASEAN @ 50, Southeast Asia @ Risk: What Should Be Done? (edited, 2018). Before moving to Stanford in 1999, he taught political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Australian National University, among other institutions.  His doctorate in political science is from Yale University.