When President John F. Kennedy established the US Agency for International Development (USAID) by executive order in 1961, it was with an eye both to national self-interest and the greater global good. Addressing Congress, Kennedy acknowledged that “economic collapse” of “less-developed nations” would be “disastrous to our national security, harmful to our comparative prosperity and offensive to our conscience.” Foreign aid was not a new undertaking for the US, but the context of both communist threat and a post-WWII proliferation of newly sovereign and/or economically striving nations, called for consolidation and expansion of those efforts. In making the world more prosperous and secure, the US aimed to protect itself and foster democracy. That effort persisted long after the cold war thawed, with the same mix of idealism and pragmatism, and altruism and self-preservation. USAID, and US support more broadly, has been vital to global efforts against famine, disease, dislocation, and more, saving countless lives, fostering stability, and seeding prosperity—in the process, containing threats ranging from epidemics, to transborder crime, to armed conflicts. 

Among Donald Trump’s first acts upon his inauguration in 2025, however, was to freeze all foreign aid for 90 days, to root out waste and fraud. Within days, efforts to shut down programs and lay off or furlough staff globally intensified, chaotically and with contested legality. The future not only of this agency—slated to be merged with the State Department, but currently in shreds—but of US foreign assistance and policy broadly remains uncertain. 

In few places is this dramatic shift more deeply felt than in Myanmar and along its borders. This webinar will explore both the context that made US support so vital—for its direct recipients and for the US itself—and the nature and implications of this abrupt change in US policy.

Panelists:

Scot Marciel – former US Ambassador to Myanmar, Indonesia, and for ASEAN Affairs; Lecturer at the Masters in International Policy Program, Stanford University

Alice Ba – Emma Smith Morris Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware

Kyaw Htet Aung – Head, Conflict, Peace and Security Program, Institute for Strategy and Policy, Myanmar

Su Mon Thazin Aung – Visiting Fellow, Myanmar Studies Programme, ISEAS–Yusuf Ishak Institute; Adjunct Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore

Moderator:

Meredith Weiss – Professor, Department of Political Science, University at Albany, SUNY; Lee Kong Chian Fellow on Southeast Asia, Stanford University

This event is co-sponsored by the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium

SCCEI Seminar Series (Spring 2025)

Friday, April 18, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Intergenerational Mobility, Marital Sorting, and Social Closure: Patterns and Trends in China

Intergenerational social mobility and marital sorting by socioeconomic status have long been regarded as key indicators of societal openness. Since China’s economic reform, a sharp rise in economic inequality has coincided with declining social mobility, as individuals’ socioeconomic status increasingly mirrors that of their parents. At the same time, marital sorting by education has intensified, exacerbating inequality among Chinese families. While both trends suggest a growing degree of social closure, how they reinforce each other remains poorly understood. In this talk, I first review recent research on trends in social mobility and marital sorting in China. I then introduce a new measure of social closure, defined as the intergenerational association in educational attainment at the family level. Using a simple decomposition, I demonstrate how intergenerational educational mobility at the individual level and marital sorting have jointly shaped the evolution of social closure in China, and how the relative importance of these forces has differed between men and women.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Xiang Zhou is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His research broadly concerns inequality, education, causal inference, and statistical and computational methods. His work has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Political Economy, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, PNAS, among other peer-reviewed journals. Before coming to Harvard, Zhou worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received a PhD in Sociology and Statistics from the University of Michigan in 2015.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

About the event: Studying the social construction of norms has been a fashionable way to approach understanding European Union politics. Indeed, following the outbreak of the Ukrainian war (2022- present day), scholars of the EU have published a large number of articles exploring norm-driven politics. Many scholars of the EU have seen its engagement with Ukraine as driven by common norms and/or a shared identity. However, this talk will argue that self-interest in the form of the balance of threat assessments of individual countries remains the most crucial factor in understanding patterns of support for Ukraine, as well as explaining the percentage of GDP spent on the military by EU member states. Moreover, defense priorities are driven by a broader set of threats than just that posed by Russia. This talk will further explore how free riding and defense spending are determined by states’ interests in survival rather than shared norms or solidarity. This talk will suggest that scholars should pay greater attention to smaller ad hoc alliances between states that share specific threats, a neglected dimension of the current security environment in Europe.

About the speaker: Stig Jarle Hansen was a Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) before joining Stanford in 2024. At NMBU, he led Norway’s only master's program in International Relations. In 2016-2017, he was a Renee Belfer fellow at Harvard University. He is also a senior nonresident associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. His work is at the intersection of crime, security, and great power politics.

Professor Hansen’s books have received good reviews in Foreign Policy (the best book of the year) and The Economist, and Newsweek published a chapter of one of them. He has contributed to Jane’s Intelligence Review, the MES Insights of the United States Marine Corps, and West Point’s CTC Sentinel. He has commented for CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, CCTV 4, and many other international media outlets.

Professor Hansen has also given presentations to various defense and governance institutions, including the NATO Intelligence Fusion Center, NATO Defense College in Rome, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), has testified in hearings in the British House of Commons, and has been invited to give presentations to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He is a board member of the RAAD institute in Mogadishu, the Abaad center in Aden, and a member of the editorial board of Small Wars and insurgencies.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Weaponized conspiracy theories and social media disinformation have increased exponentially since Facebook’s Frances Haugen testified before the Senate in 2021. Since January 6, 2021, QAnon has been portrayed by government agencies (DHS 2021, FBI 2019), think tanks (Moonshot CVE 2020, Soufan Group 2021) and the mainstream media as dangerous with the “potential for terrorist violence.” This talk will explore the origins of the conspiracy theory, discuss how foreign adversaries of the US weaponize and leverage QAnon to exacerbate polarization and how the conspiracy theory targets LGBTQ+ community and revives racist stereotypes from the period of reconstruction and antisemitic tropes.

Latest article: LGBTQ+ Victimization by Extremist Organizations: Charting a New Path for Research

About the speaker: Mia Bloom is an International Security Fellow at the New America and Professor at Georgia State University. Bloom conducts research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. Bloom is the author of six books and over 80 articles on violent extremism including Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (Columbia 2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing (Routledge 2007) Bombshell: Women and Terror (UPenn 2011) and Small Arms: Children and Terror (Cornell 2019) and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon with Sophia Moskalenko (Stanford 2021). Her next book, Veiled Threats: Women and Jihad was published by Cornell University Press in January 2025. Bloom is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held appointments at Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and McGill Universities. She serves on the Counter-Radicalization boards of the Anti-Defamation League, the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (UNCTED), Women Without Borders and several working groups for the Global Internet Forum for Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). Bloom has a PhD in political science from Columbia University, Masters in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and Bachelors in Russian, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill, and her Pre-Doctorate from Harvard’s Center for International Studies and a Post-Doctorate from Princeton.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Limited number of lunches available for registered guests on day of event.

About the event: How and why do nuclear delivery vehicles proliferate? This talk identifies a permissive environment for the proliferation of nuclear delivery systems in the international nuclear non-proliferation regime. There are three drivers of this dynamic: First, the multipurpose/dual-use nature of the technology to deliver nuclear weapons; second, the definitional obscurity in the non-proliferation regime about what constitutes a ‘nuclear weapon’; and third, the exclusion of legally-enforceable legislation on delivery systems in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. I identify the different pathways of proliferation that both supplier and recipient states use to take advantage of these enabling factors to acquire/disseminate nuclear delivery vehicles. Using qualitative historical evidence from archives across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and India, I use an international history approach to trace the trajectory of the nuclear non-proliferation regime’s regulation of nuclear delivery vehicles. Additionally, I conduct in-depth case studies of the United Kingdom, France, and India’s acquisition of nuclear delivery vehicles. At a time of increasing nuclear concerns in the Indo-Pacific, South Asia, and the Middle East, with states expanding their nuclear and missile arsenals, this talk highlights the different ways in which potential proliferators might acquire nuclear delivery systems and use the nuclear non-proliferation regime to do so.

About the speaker: Debak Das is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. His research interests lie at the intersection of international security, nuclear proliferation, crises, and international history. His research and writing have been published (or are forthcoming) in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Global Studies Quarterly, H-Diplo Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum, International Studies Review, Lawfare, Political Science Quarterly, Research and Politics, Security Studies, Texas National Security Review, The Washington Post, and War on the Rocks. Debak earned his PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2021. He was the MacArthur Nuclear Security Pre-Doctoral Fellow in 2019-2020, and a Stanton Nuclear Security Post-Doctoral Fellow in 2021-2022, at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Debak holds an M.Phil in Diplomacy and Disarmament, and an M.A. in Politics (with specialization in International Relations) from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Debak is also an affiliate at CISAC at Stanford University, the Centre de Recherche Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, Paris, and at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: What are the prospects for arms control agreements between the United States and China? Conventional wisdom is pessimistic, pointing to recent tensions between great powers. Yet we still lack a comprehensive review of the history of arms control negotiations, placing the current context in perspective. This presentation presents some initial findings of a data collection effort, conducted jointly with Matthew Fuhrmann (Texas A&M). We identify close to 200 arms control agreements from 1816 to 2017. We conclude that arms control agreements have served very different purposes. Some have been symmetric, imposing restrictions on all parties involved, while others have been asymmetric, cementing a balance of power after a global shock or excluding third parties from a technology. These agreements follow different logics and symmetric agreements, which the United States would be pursuing with China, have been rare. Even setting aside recent tensions, arms control agreements would be challenging.

About the speaker: Alexandre Debs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where he is also the Faculty Director of the Nuclear Security Program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

Alexandre’s research focuses on the causes of war and nuclear politics. His work has appeared in top political science and international relations journals. He is the author of the book Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (with Nuno Monteiro), published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Since June 2024, Alexandre has been serving as Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review.

Alexandre received a Ph.D. degree in Economics from M.I.T., an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and a B.Sc. in Economics and Mathematics from Universite de Montreal.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Harmful content on social media is a growing challenge with global consequences. Despite ongoing efforts to regulate major platforms, extremist groups continue to exploit gaps in content moderation to incite violence, recruit followers, and coordinate attacks.

In this talk, Tamar Mitts will present insights from her forthcoming book, Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism, which examines how militant and hate groups adapt their strategies in response to platform policies. Drawing on multi-platform data from over a hundred extremist organizations, Mitts reveals how inconsistent moderation across platforms creates safe havens where these actors evade detection, rebrand, and sustain their movements.

Mitts will argue that effectively addressing these challenges requires a paradigm shift -- moving beyond single "fixes" to recognize content moderation as a public policy challenge rather than a series of isolated platform decisions. Join us to explore how current efforts to combat harmful content often fall short, why extremist and hate groups remain so resilient online, and the questions we need to ask as we strive to better protect the digital public sphere from hate and violence.

About the speaker: Tamar Mitts is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Faculty Member at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, the Institute of Global Politics, and the Data Science Institute. Her research examines how digital platforms and emerging technologies shape conflict, security, and democracy. Her forthcoming book, Safe Havens for Hate (Princeton University Press), explores how gaps in content moderation allow extremist and hate groups to evade enforcement, adapt, and mobilize across platforms. Her work has been published in leading journals, including American Political Science Review, International Organization, and Journal of Politics.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.