About the Event: In response to Hamas’s deadly attack against Israel and its citizens on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a significant ground invasion into Gaza in self-defense, aimed at eliminating Hamas’s military capabilities and removing it from political power. Israel’s military operations have generated extensive commentary about its compliance with international humanitarian law, particularly concerning the jus in bello principles of distinction and proportionality. However, there has been much less scrutiny of Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality, a well-established principle under international law that considers the overall scope of a state’s use of force and dictates that a war’s means must not be excessive in relation to its aims. Our paper assesses Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality. After providing an overview of the jus ad bellum proportionality principle, we rely on novel radar satellite imagery analysis to document the widespread destruction that has resulted from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Based on these data, we argue that Israel’s use of force is excessive, and that the war Israel is currently waging in Gaza is not in compliance with the principle of jus ad bellum proportionality.

About the Speakers:

Bailey Ulbricht is the founding Executive Director at the Stanford Humanitarian Program, where she works on legal research projects aimed at reducing harm in conflict settings and other insecure environments. She has a particular interest in how technology exacerbates harms, or conversely, how it can be used to document or reduce harms. Before coming to Stanford, she founded the humanitarian ed-tech nonprofit Paper-Airplanes, was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Turkey, and was a humanitarian worker with refugee communities on the Turkish-Syrian border. Bailey has two masters' degrees in Islamic Law and Islamic Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her B.A. in International Relations magna cum laude from Carleton College and her J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Allen S. Weiner, Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, is an international legal scholar who focuses primarily on international security and international conflict resolution. He also studies the challenges of online misinformation and disinformation. Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, the Stanford Humanitarian Program, and the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.  His scholarship is deeply informed by practice; he served as an international lawyer in the U.S. State Department for more than a decade before joining the Stanford faculty.  He earned his A.B. at Harvard and his J.D. at Stanford.

Jamon Van Den Hoek is an Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University where he directs the Conflict Ecology lab. Jamon's research focuses on using satellite and geospatial data to gauge the direct and indirect consequences of armed conflict on vulnerable people and landscapes. Before coming to Oregon State, Jamon was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Corey Scher is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Corey studies physical impacts of war and conflict using Earth observation data, geostatistics, and theory from the geosciences. His mapping of damage to urban areas in geographies including Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon has been featured in journalistic and humanitarian publications worldwide. He holds a master's degree in geology from the City College of New York and a bachelor's degree in geology from the University of California, Berkeley.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2024)

Friday, November 22, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Response to Competition: Gender, Domains, and STEM Choice
 

Women’s lower performance in competitive environments has been advanced as an explanation for gender inequalities in the labor market. Using broadly representative Chinese administrative data, and measuring response to competition (RC) by performance changes from a mock exam to the competitive High School Entrance Exam, we document higher RC for boys in STEM and for girls in non-STEM subjects, with the male STEM RC advantage weakened by random exposure to high-performing female classmates in STEM. Both domain-specific RC measures significantly predict subsequent STEM track choice, accounting for 26% of the adjusted gender gap in STEM specialization, a known precursor to the gender pay gap.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Jane Zhang is an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and a Visiting Scholar (2024-25) at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. Her research examines how preferences and beliefs are shaped by policy, how they interact with incentives, and the role that they play in determining a wide-range of social outcomes. Her approach combines the use of tools from the experimental economics field, with the exploitation of natural experiments, field experiments, and controlled lab manipulations to make causal inferences about the determinants of preferences and beliefs. Her work has been published in outlets such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review: Insights, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD in Economics from U.C. Berkeley and BA in Economics from Stanford University.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

Once the term "Japanification" was widely used in the Western media, cautioning that prolonged economic stagnation could spread to other countries like in Japan. But recently, "South Koreanification" has emerged, meaning that Korea's demographic crisis marked by low birth rates and rapid aging can become a reality elsewhere, too.

In this talk, Mr. Boo Kyum Kim, former Prime Minister of Republic of Korea, will examine the dual challenges of declining birth rate and accelerating aging population facing Korea, and discuss policy directions and strategies South Korea should take for its sustainable national growth. 

Mr. Boo Kyum Kim was the 47th Prime Minister of Republic of Korea (2021-22), and prior to that,  he was the First Minister of the Interior and Safety (2017-19). Since his college years in 1980s, Mr. Kim had been a leader of democratization movements, and he  served four terms as a National Assembly Member between 2000 and 2017. He received a BA in Political science from Seoul National University and an MA in public administration from Yonsei University in Korea.

Directions and Parking > 

BOOK TALK

Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (Stanford University Press, 2025) by Jennifer Jihye Chun and Ju Hui Judy Han offers insight into the utility and futility of protesting precarity under neoliberal capitalism. Based on long-term ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with key labor and social movement activists, the book follows the protests of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs, as they contend with what it means to be treated as disposable and what it takes to resist. Long-term protest camps, life-threatening hunger strikes, grueling prostrations, perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as affective catalysts of change. Through dramatic performances and rituals that are repeated across time and space, Against Abandonment finds that protesters cultivate repertoires of solidarity as a relational force that binds people and worlds together in a collective praxis of refusal. In doing so, Against Abandonment builds upon intersectional, transnational, and abolitionist feminist theorizing that has long emphasized the centrality of building relations of care and community in place-based struggles against capitalist abandonment.

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on labor and community organizing; gender, care, and migration; ethnography and intersectional feminist methods; and culture, power, and global capitalism. She is the author of the award-winning book Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press) and Against Abandonment: Repertoires Solidarity in South Korean Protest (co-authored with Ju Hui Judy Han; forthcoming, Stanford University Press). Chun is currently Chair of International Development Studies (IDS) and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. 

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The Fallacy of the China Model and its Long-term Consequences: A Roundtable Discussion 

Yasheng Huang, Skyline Scholar and MIT Professor of Global Economics and Management

This talk draws on Professor Yasheng Huang’s recently completed book manuscript, Statism with Chinese Characteristics: From Directional Liberalism to the China Model—A History of China’s Reforms and Reversals (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Based on detailed archival research and rare databases in the 1980s, he shows that China's healthiest and most inclusive growth took place during the most politically liberal period. The China Model, which asserts that autocracy and statist finance created the Chinese growth miracle, gets many facts wrong and gets causal order backward. But the China Model is the prevailing economic thinking in China, and it is the root cause of many problems in the Chinese economy today.  

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

About the Speaker 
 

Yasheng Huang is a Professor and holds the Epoch Foundation Professorship of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2013 to 2017, he served as an Associate Dean in charge of MIT Sloan’s Global Partnership programs and its Action Learning initiatives. His previous appointments include faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School.

Professor Huang is the author of 11 books and counting in both English and Chinese He is currently involved in research projects in three broad areas: 1) political economy of contemporary China, 2) historical technological and political developments in China, and 3) as a co-PI in “Food Safety in China: A Systematic Risk Management Approach” (supported by Walmart Foundation, 2016). He has published numerous articles in academic journals and in media outlets.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

About the event: A rigorous understanding of the past provides powerful insights and tools that enable better choices in the present. This is especially true for the extraordinarily consequential worlds of statecraft and strategy. This book proposes ways to apply historical knowledge to understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us.

It may seem obvious that we should employ history to improve decision-making, but it is rarely done. History is more often misused, deployed ineffectively, or exploited for problematic and even nefarious purposes. Our times favor other ways of knowing the world over historical thinking. Sadly, historians rarely engage decision-makers, and decision-makers seldom consult historians. This is unfortunate, as good historical work captures, perhaps better than any other discipline, the challenges and complexities the decision-maker faces. The academic discipline of history has not helped: in recent years it has de-emphasized the history of statecraft, strategy, and policy in favor of other subjects.

How can history be better understood and used more effectively? The book explains and deploys two key interconnected concepts: first, a historical sensibility, which is the foundation for the second, the act of thinking historically. Thinking Historically demonstrates how a historical sensibility, married to thinking historically, can generate better insights about the world while improving how we make critical choices facing a complex, uncertain future.

About the speaker: Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Previously, he was the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. From 2005 until 2010, he directed The American Assembly’s multiyear, national initiative, The Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions. He is the founding Chair of the Board of Editors for the Texas National Security Journal. Gavin’s writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971; Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age ; and Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (Brookings Institution Press), which was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His IISS-Adelphi book, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era in 2024. Thinking Historically – A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, will be published by Yale University Press, 2025.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.