About the Event: Nations and international organizations increasingly turned to sanctions as a coercive policy tool against other countries to influence their behavior without relying on the use of force. Sanctions are the most common nonviolent geopolitical tool, and their use is expanding with explosive frequency. However, decades of health research on sanctions plead for the cessation of this tool because of the widespread human suffering caused by certain types of sanctions.

Dr. Ruth Gibson considers sanctions as the equivalent of a chemotherapy drug––one that should be planned, titrated, and continually evaluated to determine if the treatment is having the intended consequence or killing off essential functioning for sustaining life.

The goal in this work is to improve human health, minimize humanitarian harm, and design systems for monitoring sanctions that are realistic for use by the United Nations and the main sanction-sending nation-states.

This talk presents the developments of Stanford Medicine’s work with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to develop an analytic system capable of assessing the potential and actual humanitarian effects of sanctions in different international settings. For the last three decades UN monitors and lawyers have called for the development of a universal system of agreed-upon metrics for human health. A team of scholars and doctors at Stanford Medicine is responsible for guiding the developments related to human health, specifically maternal and child health. There is an urgent need for a framework that would allow both sanctioning countries and international monitors to foresee and document the impacts of specific sanctions on human rights, including health, so that those impacts can be avoided or mitigated. Dr. Gibson will outline how we are designing the maternal and child health system of indictors for monitoring sanction regimes.

The goal of the question-and-answer period is to actively debate and brainstorm how to improve this work to balance preservation of human rights with the strategic goals of the US Department of State.

Dr. Gibson welcomes input from diverse communities and academic disciplines at Stanford and looks forward to the discussion.

About the Speaker: Ruth Gibson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford Medicine. She is cross appointed by courtesy as a postdoctoral trainee at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spoli Institute. She is supported by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, the most prestigious postdoctoral award given by the Government of Canada to future global leaders in medicine, engineering, and the humanities. Ruth spent ten years living abroad doing humanitarian and global health work in eight countries on five continents, focusing on fragile nations struggling with poverty, human rights abuses, and civil conflict. She then completed her PhD in Global Health and Strategic Studies at the University of British Columbia, where she was named a Killam Laureate, Canada’s highest honor for doctoral scholars. She is currently working with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to develop a universal system of monitoring to assess the impacts of unilateral sanctions on human rights. Ruth, Prof. Paul Wise, and Senior Associate Dean of Global Health Michele Barry are leading the maternal and child health component of this project. Ruth is co-PI on a SEED grant investigating the impact of humanitarian aid sanctions on maternal and child health. Ruth is also a research affiliate with the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, where she is assisting Dr. Daryn Reicherter with the preparation of expert reports on the mental health impacts of war crimes for the International Criminal Court. Her research is funded by the Center for Innovation in Global Health and the Maternal and Child Health Research Institute at Stanford Medicine.

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About the Event: One of the most consistent critiques of the Anthropocene among humanities scholars has been that its putative Anthropos ignores difference to encompass all human beings universally in terms of their essential human nature. Trace the conceptual history of the term, however, and it quickly becomes clear that the Anthropos of the Anthropocene takes shape as not simply a sly return of Enlightenment Man (with all of his characteristic hierarchies and exclusions), but something far stranger. This talk works backwards from Paul Crutzen’s public introduction of the term in 2000 through the Earth System science of the 1980s and the systems ecology of the 1960s, to contend that the conceptual precursors of the Anthropocene arose in the crucible of the 1950s. It was there that the unprecedented possibility of ‘universal death’ by thermonuclear weapons fused with the new science of cybernetics to produce a paradigmatically distinct approach to conceiving human beings in their totality. Born under the shadow of its own extinction, the Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene does not seek to define what all human beings essentially are (as Enlightenment Man did), but to account for what it is that all human beings collectively do. Rather than claim that this is inherently better or worse, the talk concludes by arguing that this approach to human universality is categorically different, introducing new kinds of conceptual and political challenges that urgently warrant being treated on their own terms.

About the Speaker: Dan Zimmer is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC and the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, where he researches the challenges that anthropogenic existential threats pose for the foundations of Western political thought. He holds a PhD in political science from Cornell University.
 

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About the Event: Why do states pursue chemical and biological weapons (CBW), despite their limited strategic utility and their prohibition (during some time periods) under international law? Utilizing original quantitative data, I find that internal threats to a state’s governing regime, while of- ten neglected in theories of arming and weapons proliferation, play a significant role in driving states’ choices to pursue chemical and biological weapons. Regimes may pursue CBW in response to two types of domestic threats: coup risk, and the risk of domestic rebellion or civil conflict. In particular, I find that governing regimes facing increases in the risk of a coup may be more likely to initiate chemical and biological weapons programs, and that regimes experiencing domestic unrest may be more likely to begin pursuing chemical weapons. I also examine evidence for external security pathways motivating weapons pursuit, and find that proliferators treat biological weapons more like other ‘strategic weapons’ than they do chemical weapons. These findings have important implications for counterproliferation policy, deterrence, and our theoretical understanding of arming and arms racing.

About the Speaker: Miriam Barnum completed her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). Her research is focused on understanding the motivations and constraints that shape states’ arming choices. In her book project, she examines the role that internal security threats play in driving choices between nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons pursuit options. Other ongoing projects relate to arming choices more generally, international conflict, and nonproliferation and arms control, with a focus on applying computational measurement models to enhance our understanding of these substantive areas.

While pursuing her Ph.D., Miriam was a US-Asia Grand Strategy predoctoral fellow at USC's Korean Studies Institute, and Director of Data Science for the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab. Before coming to USC, she worked as a research assistant in the National Security Office at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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About the Event: This book project is about the history, politics, and law of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal after World War II—the Asian counterpart to Nuremberg. From 1946 to 1948, the victorious Allies put on trial the senior leadership of Imperial Japan, including former prime ministers, generals, and admirals, for war crimes from Nanjing to Bataan. The project considers the Tokyo trial as a defining political event in the making of modern Asia, spanning the democratization of Japan, impending Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, decolonization in India and elsewhere, and the onset of the Cold War.

About the Speaker: Gary Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is the author of The Blood Telegram (Knopf), Freedom’s Battle (Knopf), and Stay the Hand of Vengeance (Princeton). The Blood Telegram was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won book awards from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, and other awards. He has written articles for Ethics, International Security, Philosophy and Public Affairs, The Yale Journal of International Law, and other journals. A former reporter for The Economist, he writes often for The New York Times.

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About the Event: There is a currently a great deal of momentum behind the integration of AI enabled technologies into the U.S. military. This includes desires to leverage the technology for purposes of command and control. Efforts, such as the Department of Defense’s Joint All Domain Command and Control, are predicated on dreams of AI and machine learning enabling U.S. commanders to make better decisions at a faster pace. However, this ongoing incorporation of AI into military decision-making processes promises to delegate elements of decision-making away from humans. This phenomenon challenges long-standing military traditions emphasizing the heroic archetype of the ‘decisive’, ‘intuitive’, and ‘audacious’ commander. As such, Ian Reynolds' research seeks to address how, in the face of these competing perspectives, did the prospect of delegating decisions in war to ‘intelligent machines’ gain its current momentum? He argues that this puzzle is resolved through particular visions of war that emerge in the post-WWII era, specifically related to the themes of speed and knowledge in American military thought. Reynolds' research investigates shifts in how members of the U.S. defense architecture conceive of and prioritize speed and knowledge and their relationship to war, suggesting that these changes serve as a form of ‘cultural resources’ in debates over the merits of AI related to command decisions. His findings point to the ways in which shared beliefs about how militaries should fight wars link to visions of technological capacity, having practical implications for important military practices such as command.  

About the Speaker: Ian Reynolds is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow as Stanford CISAC and HAI as well as a PhD Candidate at American University, School of International Service. His broad research interests focus on the intersection of science and politics as well as digital technologies and international security. More specifically, his dissertation work explores the history and cultural politics of artificial intelligence and its relationship to military command and control practices in the United States.

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About the Event: Political science emerged as a response to the challenges of imperial administration and the demands of colonial rule. While not all political scientists were colonial cheerleaders, their thinking was nevertheless framed by colonial assumptions that influence the study of politics to this day.

This book offers students a lens through which to decolonize the main themes and issues of political science - from human nature, rights, and citizenship, to development and global justice. Not content with revealing the colonial legacies that still inform the discipline, the book also introduces students to a wide range of intellectual resources from the (post)colonial world that will help them think through the same themes and issues more expansively.

Decolonizing Politics is a much-needed critical guide for students of political science. It shifts the study of political science from the centers of power to its margins, where the majority of humanity lives. Ultimately, the book argues that those who occupy the margins are not powerless. Rather, marginal positions might afford a deeper understanding of politics than can be provided by mainstream approaches.

About the Speaker: Robbie Shilliam is Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He is most recently author of Decolonizing Politics (Polity, 2021). His forthcoming book is entitled Move Outta Babylon: Rastafari Reason, Black Marxism and the Struggle for Global Justice (Penguin/Random House, 2024).

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About the Event: At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter.   In the early nuclear age, experts anticipated that all technologically-capable states would build these powerful devices. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late-1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and across decades the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons.   Why do most states in the international system adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements.  The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap.

About the Speaker: Rebecca Davis Gibbons is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine. She previously served as a fellow and associate of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs after receiving her PhD from Georgetown University in 2016. Her research focuses on the nuclear nonproliferation regime, arms control, disarmament, norms, public opinion, and global order. Her academic writing has been published in journals including Journal of Politics, Contemporary Security Policy, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Washington Quarterly, and Nonproliferation Review. Her public affairs commentary has been featured in Arms Control Today, The Hill, U.S. News & World Report, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage. Before becoming an academic, Dr. Gibbons taught elementary school among the Bikini community in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and served as a national security policy analyst at SAIC providing research and analytic support on arms control and nonproliferation issues to Headquarters Air Force Strategic Stability and Countering WMD Division (AF/A10-S). Her book The Hegemon’s Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.

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About the Event: The nature of evolving risks in life sciences research, a brief history of risk governance, and the case for the use of so-called “red lines” in the governance of life sciences research will be presented. The goals of this presentation are to elicit discussion about the benefits and pitfalls of red lines, or guardrails, in general, including a historical perspective, and options for public policy recommendations to address concerns about the present and future risks arising from life sciences research.

About the Speaker: David A. Relman is the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in Medicine, and a Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford University, and Chief of Infectious Diseases at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. He is also Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, and served as the Center’s Science Co-Director from 2013-2017. Relman was an early pioneer in the identification of previously-unrecognized microbial pathogens and in the modern study of the human microbiome. He served as President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and currently serves on the Defense Science Board at the Department of Defense and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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About the Event: Why and how do small and medium states create multilateral agreements to regulate or ban weapons, especially when they lack the support of great powers? This presentation develops a theory of why and how small and medium states pursue multilateral weapons governance and demonstrates it through the case of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It contends that multilateral weapons governance is a strategic tool for small and medium states in their efforts to reshape international relations. Specifically, these states develop these agreements to reduce their vulnerability to great powers and to exercise greater agency and influence in world politics. To create agreements that reflect their objectives, they frame weapons in humanitarian terms, build broad coalitions of support, and carefully choose institutional formats that deny great powers special rights and privileges. In doing so, they seek to challenge great powers' privileged position in world politics. The case study examines these dynamics drawing on elite interviews conducted with diplomats, international bureaucrats, and members of civil society in Geneva, Switzerland. In examining how relatively weak actors use weapons governance—an area in which relations among states are particularly asymmetric—to advance their goals, this article contributes to scholarship focused on small states’ contributions to other areas of global governance. Understanding why and how small and medium states pursue multilateral weapons governance is central to understanding how they seek to order relations among states and who benefits from these agreements.

About the Speaker: Naomi Egel is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. Her research examines the politics of arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament agreements, including why and how such agreements vary in their design, lessons from past agreements for future arms control, the implications of framing weapons in different ways, and public opinion regarding nuclear weapons. Her research has been published in the Journal of Politics, the European Journal of International Relations, and Research & Politics. Her commentaries have been published in War on the Rocks, Just Security, the Washington Post, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Foreign Affairs. 

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About the Speaker: Dr. Beth Van Schaack was sworn in as the State Department’s sixth Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice (GCJ) on March 17, 2022. In this role, she advises the Secretary of State and other Department leadership on issues related to the prevention of and response to atrocity crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Ambassador Van Schaack served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large in GCJ from 2012 to 2013. Prior to returning to public service in 2022, Ambassador Van Schaack was the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, where she taught international criminal law, human rights, human trafficking, and a policy lab on Legal & Policy Tools forPreventing Atrocities. In addition, she directed Stanford’s International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic. Ambassador Van Schaack began her academic career at Santa Clara University School of Law, where, in addition to teaching and writing on international human rights issues, she served as the Academic Adviser to the United States interagency delegation to the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda. Earlier in her career, she was a practicing lawyer at Morrison & Foerster, LLP; the Center for Justice & Accountability, a human rights law firm; and the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Ambassador Van Schaack has published numerous articles and papers on international human rights and justice issues, including her 2020 thesis, Imagining Justice for Syria (Oxford University Press). From 2014 to 2022, she served as Executive Editor for Just Security, an online forum fort he analysis of national security, foreign policy, and rights. She is a graduate of Stanford (BA), Yale (JD) and Leiden (PhD) Universities.

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