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.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

Image

About the event: Can international law and ethics lead to greater protection of civilians in war? How can these norms influence military conduct on the battlefield? This talk examines whether and how international law and ethical norms can contribute to the protection of civilians in war. Governments and militaries invest substantial resources in training soldiers in the law of armed conflict and professional military ethics, yet there is limited empirical evidence about whether these norms meaningfully shape conduct on the battlefield. Drawing on combatant surveys, interviews, and data on U.S. Army prosecutions, this research analyzes U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to assess how legal and ethical norms influence the behavior of combatants and the treatment of civilians during military operations.

About the speaker: Andrew Bell is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University, a J.D.–M.A. from the University of Virginia, and an M.T.S. from Duke Divinity School. He previously served with the U.S. Department of Defense Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and the International Committee of the Red Cross and was an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University. He is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and has deployed in support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Criminal violence claims more lives globally than interstate and civil wars combined, yet it remains concentrated in certain regions while others escape this scourge. This project explains both why criminal violence is high in some places and not others, and why it becomes particularly intractable in democracies. While authoritarian regimes can avoid criminal violence through brutal repression or state-criminal collusion, democracies often become trapped in cycles where policy shocks – from housing demolitions to kingpin arrests to immigration enforcement – disrupt power balances between criminal groups and spark turf violence that mobilizes voters to demand “iron-fist” security policies and parties to compete on militarized security platforms. These policies tend to further shock the criminal distribution of power, locking countries in escalating cycles of criminal violence. Drawing on fine-grained data, ethnographic research, cross-national analysis, and case studies across Chicago, Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia, the project examines how democratic responses often perpetuate these vicious cycles, and offers evidence-based policy alternatives for breaking them.

About the speaker: Sarah Z. Daly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She is the author of Organized Violence After Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections (Princeton University Press, 2022), winner of the 2024 Gregory Luebbert Prize from the American Political Science Association. Her research spans war and peace, democracy, organized crime, and Latin America, and has appeared in International Security, World Politics, and British Journal of Political Science, among other outlets. Daly holds a BA from Stanford, MS from LSE, and PhD from MIT.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: This article examines how the Soviet Union transformed Sillamäe, Estonia and its oil shale deposits from a source of national independence into a cornerstone of the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Facing critical uranium shortages and logistical challenges in Central Asian mines, Soviet authorities seized upon Estonia’s oil-shale deposits, which contained extractable uranium essential for the construction of a nuclear bomb. Within weeks after recapturing the territory in 1944, Moscow established military exclusion zones, forcibly resettled the local Estonian population, and transferred jurisdiction over Sillamäe directly to the Main Directorate of the Atomic Energy Industry, bypassing Estonian SSR authority entirely. By August 1946, Sillamäe had become a closed city under Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) control, erased from maps and accessible only with special passes. The MVD deployed forced labor to construct uranium processing facilities while simultaneously recruiting informants to monitor all residents. Through infrastructure development, population control, and an expansive security apparatus, Moscow bound Estonian territory materially and demographically to Soviet imperial power, demonstrating how nuclear colonialism operated through the deliberate engineering of both built environment and communities.

About the speaker: Dr. Alexandra Sukalo is an Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs and Director of the Intelligence Studies Project at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. A historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, her research focuses on Russian and Soviet intelligence services and the Soviet military-industrial complex. She is completing a manuscript on the Soviet Union’s domestic intelligence services under Stalin. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and worked as a Eurasian analyst for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Central Intelligence Agency. She holds a PhD from Stanford University.
 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.