About the Event: Hecker will discuss his new book, Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program, in which he describes how North Korea—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progressed from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of likely more than 50 such weapons today. He will also touch on how CISAC inspired his work on North Korea and what it was like in that environment to write the book. 

About the Speaker: Siegfried Hecker is professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and professor of practice in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University. He was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including serving as its fifth director from 1986 through 1997. He was at Stanford University for 17 years in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and CISAC, including serving as co-director from 2007 to 2012. Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea. Hecker is the editor of Doomed to Cooperate (2016), two volumes documenting the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation and Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program (2023) written with Elliot Serbin.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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

We study a commons problem in the context of the emergency ambulance service in Tokyo. Emergency ambulance service is free in Japan, and no one is excluded from using it. Because capacity is limited, individually rational ambulance use may delay the use by others, lowering the chance of survival. The Fire Department urges the proper use of ambulances to save lives that can be saved, but little is known about the extent of the negative consumption externality. In this paper, we first estimate how one's ambulance use affects others with respect to arrival delays and survival rates. Then, we analyze the impact of potential remedies that alter non-excludability and rivalry in ambulance use.

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Toshiaki Iizuka is a Professor at Graduate School of Economics, the University of Tokyo. His research interests are in the field of health economics and industrial organization. He has written articles on incentive and information in the healthcare markets, which appeared in leading economics journals, including American Economic Review, RAND Journal of Economics, and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Dr. Iizuka currently serves as Associate Editor of Journal of Health Economics and a member of the Central Social Insurance Medical Council, a council of the Japanese Health Ministry that determines provider payments and drug prices. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

This webinar will address the complexities and the unexpected outcomes of enforcing Sharia—Islamic law—through the machinery of inefficient statecraft in the Indonesian province of Aceh, which is located on the periphery of the world’s largest archipelagic nation. Of Indonesia’s 38 provinces, Aceh is the only one that has been granted the official right to implement Islamic law. Sharia promises to provide comprehensive guidance in all aspects of life.  Local authorities in Aceh have used the scope and force of the law to prohibit expression and criminalize conduct deemed to deviate from “Islamic ideals.” Movies, concerts, New Year’s Eve celebrations, punk and other “alternative” lifestyles were outlawed and seen as signs of calamity, moral disorder, and social disease. Yet the Sharia state’s efforts to limit the “acceptable” range of ways of being Muslim in Aceh are not impervious to opposition. Various forms of resistance to the everyday workings of state Sharia institutions have occurred. In the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, for example, several youth groups have creatively confronted government efforts to discipline them and control their space despite facing continuous harassment from Muslim hardliners and the Sharia Police. Beyond reviewing these conditions, Professor Idria’s analysis of the state enforcement of Islamic law on the periphery of a large country’s rapidly changing society will explore and explain how the implementation of Sharia in Aceh has both influenced and been shaped by broader contexts, political, economic, social, and cultural in character.

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Reza Idria is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology in the Ar-Raniry State Islamic University in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, where he chairs the Aceh Association of Oral Tradition.  He also serves in various scholarly and journalistic capacities and as a researcher in the International Center for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies. His writings have appeared in journals and books and he has given talks and presented papers in Asia, Europe, and the United States.  His post-graduate degrees are from Leiden University (Islamic Studies, MA 2010) and Harvard (Social Anthropology, MA 2016 and PhD 2020)

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) deserves credit for sustaining peaceful and consensual multilateral cooperation in a diverse and historically divided region.  Accordingly, in principle if not always in practice, outside powers have supported the regional centrality of ASEAN.  But what does that centrality mean and can it survive current challenges?  While still recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Southeast Asia faces the destabilizing consequences of intense US-China tensions, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and global economic uncertainty.  Nor has ASEAN responded effectively to the ongoing domestic repression by the junta in Myanmar, one of the grouping’s own member countries.  Are there steps that ASEAN’s 2023 chair, Indonesia, could take to help meet these challenges?  Should minilateral options be considered?  In the context of addressing these and related topics, Sharon Seah will share pertinent findings from a just-published regional survey of Southeast Asian opinion influencers, The State of Southeast Asia 2023.

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Sharon Seah, in addition to her work for ISEAS-Yusof Ishak’s ASEAN Studies Centre, coordinates the Institute’s Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme.  Her earlier service has included 15 years in Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its National Environment Agency.  Among her research interests are ASEAN, multilateralism, climate change, and the rule of law.  Her publications include, as co-editor, Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans (2019) and 50 Years of ASEAN and Singapore (2017). She has also served as the lead author of ISEAS-Yusof Ishak’s survey reports, The State of Southeast Asia and The Southeast Asia Climate Outlook.  She holds a Master in Public and International Law from the University of Melbourne (2018

About the Event: The talk will feature the 2022 volume, Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima (Routledge), and its three co-editors, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (U. Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne), Soraya Boudia (U. Paris Cité), and Kyoko Sato (Stanford). The book provides unique post-Fukushima reflections on nuclear history and politics from a long-term and transnational perspective, asking how nuclear technology has shaped the world we live in and how we have come to live with it and the peril it presents. A product of sustained, multi-year and interdisciplinary intellectual exchange among scholars on nuclear technology from different disciplinary (e.g., history, anthropology, STS, philosophy, nuclear sciences) and national (e.g., US, Japan, France) backgrounds, the volume tackles the global nuclear history backwards: how Fukushima shed new light on past efforts to spread and control nuclear technology. Through examining the politics of knowledge, technical innovation, and narratives, as well as the development of international standards and governance frameworks, it explores how we have managed nuclear violence and disasters, envisioned a bright future with the nuclear technology, and trivialized and normalized threats from the nuclear. The volume covers a variety of empirical cases, including the relationships between the expertise on radiation’s health effects and aids for a-bomb survivors in Japan; the development of films to capture nuclear tests and exposures; colonialist and imperialist contexts that dictated the legal status of Micronesia as a test site; rhetoric of “nuclear apartheid”; the constitutive roles of institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and networks to monitor radioactive contamination; a conceptual shift in transnational nuclear waste management; different paradigms in global governance of nuclear hazards; implications of the influx of Western medicine for child survivors of Chernobyl; the tension and co-existence of catastrophic and optimistic visions of nuclear future; and emerging practices to memorialize Fukushima and other nuclear disasters. Chapter authors include leading scholars of nuclear history and politics such as Joseph Masco (Chicago), Kate Brown (MIT), John Krige (Georgia Tech), Angela Creager (Princeton), and Maria Rentetzi (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), and up-and-coming new researchers.

We believe that the volume contributes new insights on how we have come to where we are with nuclear technology, and this event will offer an opportunity for promising and meaningful discussion relevant to the preservation of human future — especially given the current energy crisis and the global nuclear order destabilized by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

About the Speakers:

Kyoko Sato is Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Her research examines technoscientific governance in Japan and the United States. She is currently working on a manuscript to examine Japan’s nuclear history through the dynamics among global and national governance approaches, transnational development of expertise on radiation, and civil society mobilization. She is also part of a project that compares Covid-19 policy responses in East Asia. She has published in journals including Science, Technology and Human Values; East Asian Science, Technology and Society; Theory and Society; and Journal of Science and Technology Studies (in Japanese) and book chapters on the Fukushima disaster in English and Japanese.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, philosopher and historian of science is emeritus professor at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She is a member of the French Academy of Technology and of several ethics committees. She was the 2021 Sarton Medalist of the History of Science Society and the recipient of the Dexter Award for outstanding achievements in the History of Chemistry from ACS in 1994.  Her most recent publications include Temps-paysage. Pour une écologie des crises (2021) and Between Nature and Society. Biographies of Materials (2022).

Soraya Boudia is an STS scholar and professor of sociology at the Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and politics in the global environmental issues. She has extensively worked on the history of nuclear risks and toxicants governance. She has published with N. Jas, Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World (Berghann, 2014), and with A. N. H. Creager, S. Frickel, E. Henry, N. Jas, C. Reinhardt, J. A. Roberts, Residues, Rethinking Chemical Environment (Rutgers University Press, 2021). She is currently co-leading a national French research initiative on risk and crisis initiative on risk and crisis.

About the Discussants:

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

Dan Zimmer completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on the implications that anthropogenic existential risk (x-risk) poses for some of the foundational categories of Western political thought, paying particular attention to the historical dimension of ongoing engagement and avoidance with the subject. His doctoral dissertation examined how the political debates inspired by the thermonuclear fallout crisis of the 1950s came to be reformulated in light of the growing public preoccupation with ecological x-risks such as global warming and nuclear winter beginning in the 1980s. His research at Stanford seeks to bring this historical analysis up to the present by tracking how the contemporary study of x-risk came to be formalized in the early 2000s in response to growing concerns about the prospect of machine superintelligence. Previously, Dan spent a year as a Boren Fellow studying the tactics used by the Gezi Park protestors in Istanbul, Turkey.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.