About the Event: All technology is dual use to some degree: it has both civilian and military applications. This foundational feature often makes it hard to limit military competition. In a recent International Organization article, Jane Vaynman and Tristan Volpe reveal why this is the case. They argue that the duality of technology matters because it shapes the tension between detection and disclosure at the heart of arms control: agreements must provide enough information to detect violations, but not so much that they disclose deeper security vulnerabilities. They characterize technology along two dual use dimensions: (1) the ease of distinguishing military from civilian uses; (2) the degree of integration within military enterprises and the civilian economy. As these attributes vary, so do prospects for cooperation. The study introduces a new data set to assess both variables and their impact on competition across all modern armament technologies.

Unfortunately, many modern technologies at the crux of US-China competition today—from space systems and cyber capabilities to AI foundation models—fall in what Vaynman and Volpe identify as a "dead zone" for arms control. They show how the dual use features of these capabilities sharpen the tension between detection and disclosure, thereby dooming the prospects for cooperation. For AI models, however, it may be more productive to consider how this general-purpose technology will shape the dual use attributes of existing weapon platforms, which stand a better chance of being governed. 

About the Speakers:

Jane Vaynman (Ph.D.) is assistant professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr. Vaynman’s work focuses on security cooperation between adversarial states, the design of arms control agreements, and the effects of technology on patterns of international cooperation and competition. From 2022-2024 she served a senior advisor in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability at the U.S. Department of State.  Her prior academic appointments include the Department of Political Science at Temple University and the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Dr. Vaynman received her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University and B.A. from in international relations from Stanford University, with honors from CISAC. 

Tristan A. Volpe (Ph.D.) is an assistant professor in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology (Oxford University Press, 2023). His work has been published in academic and general policy journals such as International Organization, Security Studies, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, and The Washington Quarterly. Prior to NPS and Carnegie, Dr. Volpe was a predoctoral fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He currently lives on the Monterey Peninsula in California.

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About the Event: This research proposal aims to apply lessons learned from the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament regime to the design and negotiation of a future global system for AI governance, with a particular focus on India's role and interests.

The emergence of the post 1945 global order was accelerated in part by the discovery and subsequent weaponization of nuclear energy, a disruptive technology at the time. There are  visible parallels with the development of Artificial Intelligence in the backdrop of the present geopolitical flux and redistribution of global power. The nuclear non-proliferation regime, established to govern the development, distribution and deployment of this technology, has been critiqued on account of structural and systemic inequities and its limited success in meeting its objectives. India’s unique position during the NPT negotiations is widely recognized as having paid dividends. 

The proposed research will use a combination of tools, including literature review, case studies and interviews with primary sources to examine the dynamics of international cooperation, compliance and deterrence that have shaped nuclear governance. By juxtaposing these with specific aspects of AI meriting global governance such as technology diffusion, ethical concerns, data security, data monetization etc, the research aims to identify transferable strategies, mechanisms, and norms that can inform the development of AI governance frameworks and evaluate the state of emerging structures and organizations in place to do so. Finally, it will attempt to identify a set of values and approaches India could prioritize in designing new or revamping existing structures for global governance of AI to secure both its own, as well as interests of the Global South.

 The research is timely and significant as it seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of how India could shape and influence international norms for responsible AI development and deployment, establish its leadership in the global AI landscape and ultimately contribute to its quest for technology sovereignty. 
 
About the Speaker: Mahima Sikand is currently a Visiting Scholar with the inaugural Critical and Emerging Technologies and the US-India Strategic Partnership Fellowship at the Center for Security and International Cooperation at Stanford University. At CISAC, Mahima is looking at the intersection of technology, national security and foreign policy as it relates to the evolution of Indian grand strategy, the India-US strategic partnership and shaping global governance frameworks for emerging technologies. Her research is focused on examining the the lessons India could draw from the nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime to future negotiations on establishment of a global AI Governance regime.

Mahima is an Indian diplomat with eight years of experience, and has served in various capacities at the Indian Embassy in Moscow and the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi. Mahima’s expertise lies in foreign policy, strategy formulation, diplomacy, multilateral negotiations, communications and community engagement.  She holds a Masters in International Relations from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Bachelors in Neurobiology and Physiology from the University of Maryland, College Park. 

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About the Speaker: Dr. Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), studying how to flag dual purpose physics research so we can prevent its weaponization. Before coming to CISAC, Bárbara got her physics Ph.D. at Columbia University working on astronomical instrumentation under a NASA FINESST fellowship. Born and raised in Brazil, she got her BS in physics at Yale, after which she worked at MIT’s Nobel-Prize-winning LIGO lab and got her master’s at Columbia. She was one of the inaugural fellows of the Next-Generation Fellowship from the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, and received the 2021 American Physical Society 5 Sigma Physicist Award for congressional advocacy in nuclear disarmament.

Before starting her post-doc, Bárbara did research in a variety of fields, from particle and atomic physics to quantum optics and astronomical instrumentation. Her CISAC post-doc research, however, focuses on how to identify dual-purpose research developed by academics/civilians but of military interest, especially in the physical sciences, as a means to help on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear threat reduction initiatives.

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About the Event: Historically, research on racial differences in political attitudes in the United States has focused heavily on domestic politics. Recent work indicates that Black and White Americans often hold differing views on the use of force abroad and free trade at home; however, this article shows that racial gaps on international affairs are not confined to the realm of security or economic issues. Using a unique dataset of 1,504 foreign policy questions from nearly 19,000 Americans surveyed from 1975-2018, we show that racial gaps in foreign policy attitudes exist well beyond the issues explored in previous scholarship. Our results have important implications for the study of both public opinion in IR and race and ethnic politics.

Paper co-authored with Joshua Kertzer (Harvard University), Chryl Laird (University of Maryland-College Park), and Julian Wamble (The George Washington University).

About the Speaker: Naima Green-Riley is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research interests include Chinese foreign policy, public opinion, and international political communication. Her ongoing work focuses on public diplomacy as performed by China and the United States and the role of race in public opinion about foreign policy.

Her research has been supported by the Wilson Center China Fellowship, the Morris Abrams Award in International Relations, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Coverage of her expertise and research have appeared in the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post, The Root, and a series at the National Bureau of Asian Research; furthermore, she has made public appearances at the Aspen Security Forum and the CSIS Future Strategy Forum.

She has a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University, an MPP from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in International Relations with honors from Stanford University.  Prior to pursuing a Ph.D., she was a Pickering Fellow and a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State, serving first in Egypt and then in China. 

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About the Event: The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is one of the most significant, observed, and contentious accords in world politics. How and why did the international community come to negotiate a treaty that divided nation-states between five authorized “nuclear-weapon States” and a teeming mass of nuclear unarmed? The Nuclear Club pushes back against interpretations that either attribute the NPT’s creation to the superpowers alone and to the United States in particular or that discount the importance of nuclear-security guarantees to the global nonproliferation regime. It also reveals the extent to which the Vietnam War both catalyzed and circumscribed U.S. support for nuclear internationalism as President Lyndon Baines Johnson sought to burnish his peacemaking credentials amid escalating military involvement in Southeast Asia. By reconnecting the origins of Washington’s commitment to nuclear containment to that of communist containment and by reconstructing the international consensus that arose for a closed nuclear club, processes that would go on to shape global nuclear politics for the rest of the Cold War and beyond are cast in sharper relief – an open-ended U.S. commitment to policing nuclearity across an endless frontier and an uneven nuclear order deliberately forged to avert great-power conflict while permitting and even legitimating limited wars.

About the Speaker: Jonathan R. Hunt is an Assistant Professor of History and Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in the Deterrence Studies Institute of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. His research comprehends the international and global history of the Cold War with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy on matters of war, peace, and commerce. He is the author of The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford University Press, 2022) and the co-editor with Simon Miles of The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell University Press, 2021). He received a B.A. in Plan II Liberal Arts Honors, History, and Russian and East European Studies and also a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin and has been a fellow or scholar at Stanford CISAC, RAND Corporation, and Harvard University, among others. He has previously taught at the University of Southampton and the U.S. Air War College. This year he is a fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs’ Nuclear Security Program, part of International Security Studies.

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About the Event: How do U.S. policy-makers develop national security strategy in the face of newly emerging dangers?  And why are many of these strategies deemed ineffective?  In my book project, Seeking Security: Threat Perception and Policy-Making in a Dangerous World, I examine the way in which the cognitive processes associated with threat perception influence policy-makers’ preferences for specific, but sometimes incompatible, national security policy measures.  My theory linking threat perception to policy preferences is grounded in an original meta-analysis of the neuroscientific literature on human threat perception, as well as in extensive evidence from biology and cognitive science on threat learning and threat response.  In this talk, I will discuss the theory alongside data from two chapters covering the design of NSC-68 and its successor national security strategies during the early Cold War.  I combine an original corpus of digitized archival documents and new tools from natural language processing to show that much of the individual-level variation in preferences for how best to counter Communism can be traced back to differences in beliefs about the kind(s) of threat that Communism posed.
 
About the Speaker: Marika Landau-Wells is an Assistant Professor in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.  She received a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the SaxeLab.  For the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Landau-Wells was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Her research is broadly concerned with the effects of cognitive processes - including perception, attention, learning, and memory - on political behavior and foreign policy decision-making.

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About the Event: How does artificial intelligence shift power in international security? A burgeoning literature in international politics and security studies has documented its effects on the balance of power, strategic stability, and the future of warfare. In this work, power is largely material, if not kinetic, and the specifics of technologies are treated mostly as peripheral. By recovering classical International Relations theory in the form of Hans Morgenthau’s work on the role of scientific rationalism in guiding political decision-making and combining it with insights from Science and Technologies Studies, this paper investigates the role of so-called intelligent technologies, in particular machine learning, in the knowledge production for conflict prevention. Such technologies are met with enthusiasm in the policy sphere, prompting a wide range of actors in the field of conflict prevention to integrate them into their analyses. Leveraging original elite interviews with conflict modelers, practitioners, and policymakers, this paper tentatively argues the rush towards integrating AI and ML is not primarily about improving predictive analytics in terms of scale, speed, and cost, but about creating options and justifications for (in)action. Due to the internal opacity (‘black-boxing’) of machine learning, policymakers can delegate the responsibility of the analysis from the human to the machine, thus transforming problems of politics and power into problems of process and technology. This research has implications for appreciating the internal mechanisms and characteristics of emerging technologies, as well as their  underlying rationalities, to understand how they shape actors’ options for decision-making.
 
About the Speaker: Johanna Rodehau-Noack is an International Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her current work investigates the role of (emerging) technologies in conflict prevention and anticipation, and in particular how the use and promise of artificial intelligence shapes conceptions of armed conflict. Previously, she was a Global Innovation Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House. She received her doctorate in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She also holds an MA in Political Science and a BA in International Development from the University of Vienna, Austria.

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About the Event: One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders’ Game sheds light on this enduring puzzle, arguing that the primary constraints on decisions about war and peace come from elites, not the public. Elizabeth Saunders focuses on three groups of elites—presidential advisers, legislators, and military officials—to show how the dynamics of this insiders’ game are key to understanding the use of force in American foreign policy. She explores how elite preferences differ from those of ordinary voters, and how leaders must bargain with elites to secure their support for war. Saunders provides insights into why leaders start and prolong conflicts the public does not want, but also demonstrates how elites can force leaders to change course and end wars. Tracing presidential decisions about the use of force from the Cold War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saunders reveals how the elite politics of war are a central feature of democracy. The Insiders’ Game shifts the focus of democratic accountability from the voting booth to the halls of power. 

The Insiders' Game by Elizabeth N. Saunders: 30% off with code P325 at press.princeton.edu

About the Speaker: Elizabeth N. Saunders is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  Her research and teaching focuses on the domestic politics of international security and U.S. foreign policy.  She is the author of Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2011) and The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press, 2024). She holds an A.B. in physics and astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard College; an M.Phil. in international relations from the University of Cambridge; and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

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This event has reached capacity. Please email Kate Ter Wee at katecole@stanford.edu or register to attend online using the link above. 

About the Event: Russia’s war on Ukraine, Iran’s Proxy Wars in the Middle East as well as the support Russia and Iran receive from each other, China, and other states such as North Korea, have clarified the nature of geopolitical competition. It is important to understand both the history of how crucial challenges to international security developed and of the ideology, emotions and aspirations that drive the axis of aggressors if we are to prevent conflicts from cascading further and restore peace. 

Lunch to be provided for registered attendees.

About the Speaker:  LTG (ret.) H. R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Upon graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1984, McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years. He retired as a Lieutenant General in June 2018 after serving as the 25th assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. He holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. McMaster is the host of Battlegrounds: International Perspectives on Crucial Challenges and Opportunities and is a regular on Goodfellows. He is a Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University.

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About the Event: When a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure and urging reform. Yet many of the most egregious violations appear to go unpunished. In many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but also incites a backlash, provoking resistance and worsening human rights practices. The Geopolitics of Shaming presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.

Drawing on a wide range of evidence—from large-scale cross-national data to original survey experiments and detailed case studies—Rochelle Terman shows how human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relationships. Arguing that preexisting geopolitical relationships condition both the causes and consequences of shaming in world politics, she shows how adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response, while friends and allies are the most effective shamers but can be reluctant to impose meaningful sanctions.

Upending conventional wisdom on the role of norms in world affairs, The Geopolitics of Shaming demonstrates that politicization is integral to—not a corruption of—the success of the global human rights project.

About the Speaker: Rochelle Terman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She specializes in international relations, with an emphasis on international norms, human rights, and the Muslim world. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press.

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