About the Event: 

The Strategic Posture Commission is a bipartisan group mandated by Congress in 2022 to examine the threat to the U.S. strategic posture in 2027-2035 and beyond. The group reported its unanimous findings and recommendations in October 2023, concluding that the United States is facing a strategic challenge requiring urgent action: a world where two nations, China and Russia, will possess nuclear arsenals on par with the United States. This outlook requires an urgent national focus and concerted actions not currently planned. Chair Madelyn Creedon and Vice Chair Jon Kyl will discuss this threat environment and present the findings and recommendations of the Commission. CISAC Director Scott Sagan will preside.

About the Speakers: 

CHAIR - Madelyn R. Creedon
The Honorable Madelyn R. Creedon had a long career in federal service; she served most recently as Principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) within the Department of Energy, a position she held from 2014 to 2017. She also served in the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs from 2011 to 2014, overseeing policy development in the areas of missile defense, nuclear security, combatting WMD, cybersecurity, and space. Creedon served as counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services for many years, beginning in 1990; assignments and focus areas included the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces as well as threat reduction and nuclear nonproliferation.During that time, she also served as Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at the NNSA, Associate Deputy Secretary of Energy, and General Counsel for the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. She started her career as a trial attorney at the Department of Energy. Following retirement from Federal Service in 2017, Creedon established Green Marble Group, LLC, a consulting company, and currently serves on several advisory and other boards related to national security. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and a research professor at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. She holds a J.D. from St. Louis University School of Law, and a B.A. from the University of Evansville.

COMMISSIONER - Gloria Duffy
Dr. Gloria Duffy has been president and CEO of The Commonwealth Club since 1996. She oversees the organizational strategy, programming, publications, outreach, membership and fundraising for the nation’s largest and oldest public affairs forum. Prior to becoming president and CEO of the Club, Duffy was U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Special Coordinator for Cooperative Threat Reduction, where she led Nunn-Lugar program negotiations and oversaw U.S. assistance for the dismantling of nuclear warheads and delivery systems in the former Soviet countries, as well as the disposal of chemical weapons and reemployment of WMD scientists on civilian research.

COMMISSIONER - Rose Gottemoeller
Professor Rose Gottemoeller is a Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute. Before joining Stanford Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO’s adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism.  Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation. Prior to her government service, she was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with joint appointments to the Nonproliferation and Russia programs. She served as the Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from 2006 to 2008, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program. At Stanford, Gottemoeller teaches and mentors students in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program and the CISAC Honors program; contributes to policy research and outreach activities; and convenes workshops, seminars and other events relating to her areas of expertise, including nuclear security, Russian relations, the NATO alliance, EU cooperation and non-proliferation. 

VICE CHAIR - Jon L. Kyl
Senator Jon L. Kyl served 18 years in the U.S. Senate, and before that, eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was elected unanimously by his colleagues in 2008 to serve as Republican Whip, a position he held until his retirement in 2013. Kyl served on the Intelligence, Judiciary, Finance and Armed Services committees among others. He was active in the Senate consideration of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, New START, and other arms limitation proposals, as well as strategic deterrence issues in numerous National Defense Authorization Acts. After retiring from the Senate, Kyl served as a member of the Board of Directors of Sandia Laboratory for three years. In 2018, he was a member of the National Defense Strategy Commission. On September 5, 2018, Kyl was appointed by Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to fill the seat of the late Senator John McCain through the end of 2018. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Speaker: Or (Ori) Rabinowitz, (PhD), a Chevening scholar, is an associate professor at the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. During the academic year of 2022-2023 she will hold the post of visiting associate professor at Stanford’s CISAC. Her research interests include nuclear proliferation, intelligence studies, and Israeli American relations. Her book, Bargaining on Nuclear Tests was published in April 2014 by Oxford University Press. Her studies were published leading academic journals, including International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, and International History Review, as well as op-eds and blog posts in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy and Ha’aretz. She holds a PhD degree awarded by the War Studies Department of King’s College London, an MA degree in Security Studies and an LLB degree in Law, both from Tel-Aviv University. She was awarded numerous awards and grants, including two personal research grants by the Israeli Science Foundation and in 2020 was a member of the Young Academic forum of the Israeli Academy for Sciences and Humanities.  

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

A Special Lecture with Professor Hui Qin
 

中西思想交流中的"问题错位"
Misalignment in the Exchange of Ideas between China and the West

Tuesday, November 7, 2023 | 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Pacific Time
William J. Perry Room C231, Encina Hall Central, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Please join us for a conversation with Professor Hui Qin. The lecture will be held primarily in Chinese, translation services will not be available. 

About the Speaker 
 

Professor Qin Hui (秦晖) is an economic historian best known for his work on peasant studies and an influential public intellectual.  He retired as Professor of History, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, in 2017 and then served as a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Qin’s academic research is focused on land ownership and peasant wars and, in the last two decades, he has written on many different aspects of China’s rural economy. As a leading figure in rural studies, Qin’s acerbic comments on a wide range of social issues, particularly those concerning  China’s rural population and migrant workers, have earned him many fans. He is a sought-after media commentator in print, on TV and online.

Questions? Contact Alexis Medina at amedina5@stanford.edu
 

Co-sponsored by Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development, and the Asia Health Policy Program

Plastic pollution and antibiotic resistance are significant threats to human health. The overuse of plastic products and antibiotics, often driven by individual behaviors, plays a major role in these challenges. The presence of externalities leads to further overuse, intensifying the problem. In this webinar, we will present two research studies that employ the nudge strategy to explore its effectiveness as a low-cost method in promoting socially desirable behaviors. We will focus on the contexts of disposable cutlery consumption and antibiotic utilization, providing insights into how subtle behavioral interventions can have a meaningful impact.

Title 1: Reducing single-use cutlery with green nudges: Evidence from China’s food-delivery industry

Rising consumer demand for online food delivery has increased the consumption of disposable cutlery, leading to plastic pollution worldwide. In this work, we investigate the impact of green nudges on single-use cutlery consumption in China. In collaboration with Alibaba’s food-delivery platform, Eleme (which is similar to Uber Eats and DoorDash), we analyzed detailed customer-level data and found that the green nudges—changing the default to “no cutlery” and rewarding consumers with “green points”— increased the share of no-cutlery orders by 648%. The environmental benefits are sizable: If green nudges were applied to all of China, more than 21.75 billion sets of single-use cutlery could be saved annually, equivalent to preventing the generation of 3.26 million metric tons of plastic waste and saving 5.44 million trees. 

Title 2: The Impact of Self- or Social-regarding Messages: Experimental Evidence on Antibiotics Purchases in China

We study two interventions in Beijing, China, that provide patients with information on antibiotic resistance via text message to discourage the overuse of antibiotics. The messages were sent once a month for five months. One intervention emphasizes the threat to the recipient's own health and is found to have negligible effects. The other intervention, which highlights the overall threat to society, reduces antibiotics purchases by 17% in dosage without discouraging healthcare visits and other medicine purchases. The results demonstrate that prosocial messaging can have the potential to address public health issues that require collective action.

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Yuhang Pan's research fields include environmental economics, health economics, and development economics, with a particular focus on using causal inference approach to study the impact of environmental pollution, public policy, and climate change on health and social welfare. His works have been published in both economics and scientific journals, such as Science, Nature Sustainability, and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Dr. Pan obtained his undergraduate degree from Beijing Normal University in 2015 and his doctoral degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2021. Prior to joining Peking University, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Hong Kong.

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Jianan Yang's primary research fields are health economics and development economics, with specific interests in health policy reform, medical behavior, and pharmaceutical innovation. She employs both experimental and quasi-experimental methods to explore policy-related questions, particularly examining their impact on patient welfare. She has published in top journals like the Journal of Development Economics. She earned her bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Mathematics from Renmin University of China in 2016, and her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego in 2022. Before joining Peking University, she was the 2022-2023 Developing Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. 

About the Event: Professor Sanford will discuss the weaponization of the Guatemalan judicial system, gender violence and migration in a conversation about her new book Textures of Terror that investigates the unsolved murder of a female law student and the pervasive violence against Guatemalan women that drives migration. Through a father’s determined struggle and other stories of justice denied, Textures of Terror offers a deeper understanding of US Policies in Latin America and their ripple effect on migration. Professor Sanford offers an up-close appraisal of the inner workings of the Guatemalan criminal justice system and how it maintains inequality, patriarchy and impunity. Presenting the stories of other women who have suffered at the hands of strangers, intimate partners and the security forces, she reveals the deeply gendered nature of power and violence in Guatemala.

About the Speaker: A public scholar, anthropologist and internationally recognized expert on the Guatemalan Genocide, Victoria Sanford is a writer, human rights advocate and Lehman Professor of Excellence at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of seven books including Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel & Her Father’s Quest for Justice and Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. She served as an invited expert in the Spanish National Court’s genocide case against the Guatemalan generals and in an indigenous land rights case in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and Bunting Peace Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has also held fellowships at the US Institute for Peace, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Fulbright Scholar awards at the Universidad Libre and Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia, among others. To learn more about Victoria Sanford’s work, visit: https://www.victoriasanford.info/

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

In the course of his reign as Cambodia’s prime minister from 1985 to 2023, Hun Sen forcibly dissolved the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) and turned his country into a one-party state under his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). After summarizing that history, Dr. Im will show how Hun Sen copied and expanded the CNRP’s commitment to social welfare, including cash transfers to Cambodia’s poorest and most vulnerable households. The 2013 election could have led to Hun Sen’s downfall. Instead, by combining coercive capacity with policy reform, he managed to legitimize his regime. Dr. Im will portray Hun Sen’s rule as a unique case study in authoritarian legitimation that stands in contrast to the survival strategies of other autocratic states such as China.

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Soksamphoas Im is a Research Affiliate at the University of Michigan’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. At Stanford, she is working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled Authoritarian Resiliency: The Politics of Social Protection Policy in Cambodia. Her latest writings on Cambodia (2023) have appeared in the Journal of Industrial Relations, Research on Ageing and Social Policy, Asian Politics & Policy, and forthcoming in Asian Studies Review, Routledge Handbook of Autocratization in Southeast Asia, and Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights. She holds an MA and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and an MSc in Defense, Development, and Diplomacy from Durham University in the UK.

In this hybrid seminar, Professor Lee will reflect on her pioneering and collaborative research on late-life cognition and dementia across multiple settings. Drawing on empirical evidence and carefully harmonized surveys of health and aging (e.g., for Korea, Japan, China, India, the US and Europe), Professor Lee will assess the state of knowledge and evidence regarding risk and resilience factors and the potential for preventing cognitive decline. Her talk will conclude with discussion of current initiatives and global dialogues (political, academic, and industry) about healthy brain aging.

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Dr. Jinkook Lee is a Research Professor of Economics and the Program Director of Global Aging, Health, and Policy at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the economics of aging, with interdisciplinary training and expertise in large-scale population surveys. As the Principal Investigator on several NIH-funded grants, she laid the groundwork for studying Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia and their risk factors and impacts in low and middle-income countries. She has developed the country’s first and only population representative dementia study in India and helped developing sister studies in China, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, and Malawi. She provides scientific advice for WHO, OECD, World Bank, and Asia Development Bank and serves on the editorial boards for several scientific journals. She previously held a professorship at Ohio State University and the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University and B.S. from Seoul National University.

Amir Magdy Kamel joins ARD to discuss his recently released book, Floundering Stability: US Foreign Policy in Egypt (University of Michigan Press, 2023). 

The United States has a record of pursuing global stability through international relations. This commitment is reflected in a US type of foreign policy that uses economic tools to pursue stability goals. To better understand the effectiveness of this notion, this talk will unpack the conceptual and contextual foundations of what Amir Magdy Kamel refers to as the US ‘Stability Policy’—how it evolved over time and how it was implemented in Egypt. From here, Kamel will reflect on what his book’s findings demonstrate for the relationship between economics and stability, along with how and why the stability policy performed the way it did in Egypt.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Amir Magdy Kamel currently holds visiting roles at Stanford University and the University of San Francisco. He is also an Associate Professor in the School of Security Studies and a Fellow in the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King's College London. His research projects focus on two areas: political and economic issues across the Middle East, including EU and US foreign policy towards the region, and transformative technologies and how they impact states and policymaking. Dr. Kamel also has over a decade of experience providing advice, analysis, and consultations to various government agencies, economic consultancies, and NGOs.