About the event: Because no nuclear weapon has been used to attack a target since 1945, a tendency to project existing trends into the future could lead people to expect this pattern of nuclear nonuse to continue. But is it possible to have confidence about whether and how far into the future the record of nonuse will continue? In this talk, Dr. Knopf will argue that confidence about avoiding nuclear use is not possible because the probability of a nuclear attack or nuclear exchange cannot be predicted. This unpredictability reflects the nature of strategy and the available evidence about nuclear deterrence. Strategy involves making a prediction that a chosen course of action will lead to outcomes desired by a state. But attempts to make forecasts about nuclear deterrence are beset by uncertainty and trade-offs and by the interaction of those two problems. Using a thought experiment to illustrate, Dr. Knopf will suggest that the problems of uncertainty and trade-offs make it impossible to reliably estimate the likelihood that any given nuclear strategy will prevent nuclear-weapons use. If this analysis is correct, it should motivate greater efforts to reduce the chance of nuclear-weapons use and to find alternatives to nuclear deterrence. Steps that could help advance those objectives include measures to strengthen inhibitions against nuclear use, as well as renewed efforts to move toward nuclear disarmament.

About the speaker: Jeff Knopf is a professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where he serves as chair of the MA program in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies. Dr. Knopf received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford, and in 2018-19 he spent a sabbatical year at CISAC. Dr. Knopf has published extensively on topics related to deterrence, arms control, nonproliferation, and the defense industry. His most recent book is Coercing Syria on Chemical Weapons, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press in its Bridging the Gap Series.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world’s most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear test site, despite the isolation and the radioactive environment, rather than face marginalization or the rigors of a neoliberal world. Atomic Collective examines this nuclear legacy through a decade-long ethnographic examination of the village of Koian, situated on the border of the test site. Facing residual radiation all around them and isolation, Koianers persist, reshaping their pastoral existence among the ruins and scientific debates surrounding genetic damage.

Drawing on first-hand accounts and archival research, this book explores the resilience and everyday survival strategies of a community left behind to fend for itself in the shadow of nuclear testing. It offers a unique perspective on life in a nuclear zone and poses fundamental questions about human resilience and the impact of historical events on a collective identity. Atomic Collective sheds light on a community overlooked in the larger Cold War histories of atomic testing.

About the speaker: Magdalena Stawkowski is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. She earned her PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014 and has held roles at the Danish Institute for International Studies; the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, as a MacArthur and Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow. Specializing in cultural and medical anthropology, Stawkowski focuses on militarized and nuclear spaces, the political economy of health, and the socio-cultural legacies of Soviet era nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, where she has conducted more than a decade of fieldwork. She has collaborated on international projects examining Cold War radioactive legacies in Kazakhstan, the Marshall Islands, and French Polynesia. Currently, she is engaged in collaborative and comparative research on tritium bioaccumulation and biomagnification in the Semipalatinsk Test Site region and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Registration for this event is closed

About the event: Amidst momentous geopolitical shifts, changing leaderships, and evolving domestic priorities, the United States and Iran have maintained an antagonistic relationship for nearly half a century. Standard explanations pin the blame for this enduring hostility on Iran and its leaders’ revolutionary ideology and policies at odds with the United States and the West. While Iran bears significant blame for a deeply adversarial relationship—the country often engages in dangerous and repressive activities—this book demonstrates that “it’s them, not us” accounts cannot alone explain America’s posture toward this complicated but critically important country. Dassa Kaye's book explores how America’s Iran policy is made, the people who make it, and the underlying ideas and perceptions that inform it. Dassa Kaye looks back at U.S. policy toward Iran over the past four decades to help us look ahead, offering wider lessons for understanding American foreign policymaking and providing critical insights at a pivotal time of heightened military tensions in and around the Middle East.

About the speaker: Dr. Dalia Dassa Kaye is a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and director of its Initiative on Regional Security Architectures. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dalia is an internationally recognized expert on geopolitics and Middle East policy. During her fifteen years at the RAND Corporation, Dalia served as a senior political scientist and the director of the Center of Middle East Public Policy.

She has received numerous awards and held previous positions at an array of research and public policy institutions, including as a Fulbright Schuman visiting scholar at Lund University, a fellow at the Wilson Center, an advisor at the Foreign Ministry of The Netherlands, an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill.

She is a frequent public speaker and contributor to leading media outlets, including BBC, CNN, NPR, PBS, and Foreign Affairs. She is the author of dozens of articles and policy reports, as well as three books, including most recently Enduring Hostility: The Making of America’s Iran Policy (Stanford University Press, 2026).

Dalia holds her BA, MA, and PhD in political science 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.

As Taiwan’s national security is shaped by escalating military threat and great-power competition, how do Taiwanese citizens view key issues such as the extension of compulsory military service and increased defense spending? More importantly, are they willing to defend their country if a cross-Strait war breaks out, and what role does the United States play in shaping this willingness to fight? In this talk, Dr. Wen-Chin Wu will present findings from a series of surveys conducted among different groups of Taiwanese citizens, including military recruits, to address these interconnected questions and shed light on the public foundations of Taiwan’s defense policy.  

Speaker:

Wen-Chin Wu is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica (IPSAS), Taiwan, and a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University in 2025–26. His research focuses on comparative and international political economy, comparative authoritarianism, and cross-Strait relations, with a particular interest in economic statecraft and media dynamics in authoritarian regimes. Over the past five years, he has led a series of projects examining how Taiwanese citizens perceive cross-Strait relations and national security issues. His work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Public Opinion Quarterly, and The China Quarterly, among others. His co-authored article in Political Communication received the 2022 Kaid-Sanders Best Political Communication Article of the Year Award from the International Communication Association.

Who Gets into Government and How is Power Shared? Sona Golder revisits two classic government formation questions with new data and new methods.

Who gets into government? Empirical scholars conceptualize government choice as a discrete choice problem in which a government is selected from the set of potential governments. Existing studies define potential governments as any combination of parties that could form a government. However, potential governments with the same partisan composition are not necessarily equivalent. A potential AB government where A is the prime ministerial party is different from a potential BA government where B is the prime ministerial party. Neither political elites nor voters view these potential governments as interchangeable. In this paper, we demonstrate how a reconceptualization of potential governments allows us to jointly model the choices of prime ministerial party and government. Our proposed strategy narrows the gap between theory and empirics, allowing us to test previously 'untestable' hypotheses. It also allows us to integrate the previously separate literatures on the choice of prime minister and the choice of government in a unified framework.

How is power shared within governments? Is there a prime ministerial (PM) party advantage when it comes to ministerial portfolio allocation in coalition governments? Early models of government formation predicted that PM parties would be advantaged when portfolios are allocated. Empirical studies based on postwar Western Europe, though, show that portfolios are allocated fairly proportionally with, if anything, a slight PM party disadvantage. In recent years, scholars have sought to resolve this troubling disconnect between theory and empirics by developing new theoretical models that better match 'empirical reality.' In this paper, we question the purported empirical reality. Using original data on (i) a global sample of postwar non-presidential democracies, (ii) interwar European democracies, and (iii) subnational Indian governments, we find that PM parties are rarely disadvantaged across different regions, time periods, and institutional settings. Indeed, we generally find a significant PM party advantage. Our findings highlight a potential danger of repeatedly testing and revising theories based largely on the same empirical cases.

Sona N. Golder is Professor of Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on political institutions, especially in the context of coalition formation. In addition to articles in a variety of general and comparative politics journals, such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, and Politics & Gender, she has published four books, including The Logic of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation, Multi-level Electoral Politics, and Principles of Comparative Politics. She's currently working on a fifth book on Interaction Approaches to Intersectionality that's under contract at Cambridge University Press. She's also a co-PI on a multi-year project funded by the Norwegian Research Council examining party instability and party switching in parliaments (INSTAPARTY). 

Professor Golder has served as the lead editor of the British Journal of Political Science as well as on multiple editorial boards. She is currently an Associate Editor for Research & Politics and on the editorial board of Political Science Research and Methods. She also previously edited the Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Organized Section of the American Political Science Association.