About the Event: On August 15, 2021, a spokesperson of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s self-proclaimed state, declared on Twitter: “With the help of God, and the support of the nation, we are now in control of all parts of the country. We would like to congratulate our nation on this big achievement.” Written in English, this tweet was the culmination of the Taliban’s two-decade long campaign - both online and on the battlefield - to win the hearts, minds, and territories of Afghanistan. 

Employing a quantitative descriptive methods approach, this talk will offer the most comprehensive review of the Taliban’s use of social media to date, analyzing 112,354 tweets sourced from a network of key accounts linked to the Taliban’s leadership, over a period of five and half months, before, during, and after the takeover. It will provide a detailed analysis of the Taliban’s social media repertoire and tactics, preliminary documentation of the Taliban’s use of social media to complement on-the-ground military operations, and introduce a novel dataset. In this talk, Dr. Courchesne argues that during the summer takeover, the Taliban invested considerable time and organizational resources developing and amplifying a sophisticated online information campaign in real-time. She also argues that the Taliban made use Twitter’s platform features to amplify their messaging and engage in both domestic and international outreach, including developing specialized hashtags to push specific propaganda narratives and leveraging mentions to attempt to garner a response from humanitarian organizations, key political players, and journalists. This analysis contributes to ongoing discourse on the role of social media in conflict, provides additional insight on how non-state armed groups approach weaponizing social media to further political and military goals, and offers a greater understanding of how the Taliban used the online environment during the 2021 takeover.

About the Speaker: Dr. Laura Courchesne is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Her work focuses on the role of the online environment in shaping and augmenting conflict dynamics. Her research spans topics including state-sponsored influence operations, non-state armed groups’ weaponization of social media, the economics of disinformation, and patterns of technology adoption by militaries. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Conflict.

Previously, Laura was a Research Fellow at the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University. Since 2020, she’s taught on armed group use of social media with the UN Systems Staff College. She was formerly a Strategic Advisor at Google’s Jigsaw, conducting fieldwork in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2018. She completed her Ph.D. in International Relations at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

This event is free and open to the public. Please join us afterward for refreshments in the Dwight Living Room in the Alumni Center.

About the Event: On a daily basis, hospitals are being attacked in conflict zones. Is it time to rethink our global protection systems for civilians and health facilities in war?  A testimony on the current reality on the ground.

About the Speakers: 

Dr. Joanne Liu is a Canadian pediatric emergency room physician and former International President of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). A graduate of the McGill Medicine class of 1991, Liu first joined MSF in 1996, working with Malian refugees in Mauritania. Since then, she has provided and coordinated emergency medical aid across the globe, whether it be resulting from natural disasters like tsunamis or earthquakes or viral outbreaks such as Ebola in 2014. As a member of the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response, Liu has been contributing to a set of comprehensive recommendations to protect people from future outbreaks. In 2021 she was conferred an Honorary Fellowship by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the most prestigious honor the School awards. Dr. Liu is currently a professor focusing on pandemic and health emergencies at McGill University’s School of Population and Global Health (SPGH).

Dr. Paul H. Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society and Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine.  Dr. Wise is also a Senior Fellow in the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. He is also co-Director of the March of Dimes Center for Prematurity Research at Stanford University.

Dr. Wise received his A.B. degree summa cum laude in Latin American Studies and his M.D. degree from Cornell University, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and did his pediatric training at the Children’s Hospital in Boston.  His former positions include Director of Emergency and Primary Care Services at Boston Children’s Hospital, Director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health, and Vice-Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.  He served as Special Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General, Chair of the Steering Committee of the NIH Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health Research, and currently is a member of the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH. 

Dr. Wise’s research focuses on health inequalities, child health policy, and global child health.   He leads a multidisciplinary initiative, Children in Crisis, which is directed at integrating expertise in political science, security, and health services in areas of civil conflict and unstable governance.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Online ‘fake news’ and disinformation have been widely (and rightly) attributed to polarisation, uncertainty, and violence – including, in extreme cases, mass atrocity crimes. What has not received much scholarly attention, however, is whether it might be permissible, or even required, to deceive potential perpetrators of atrocities via online disinformation campaigns to prevent genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansings. In other words: Does the responsibility to protect trump our responsibility not to deceive? Or, more concretely: might there be a ‘Responsibility to Deceive’ (R2D) via online disinformation to fulfil the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine? In this presentation, Rhiannon Neilsen will introduce a typology of ‘Atrocity Suppressing Disinformation Campaigns’ (ASDCs). She defines ASDCs as the use of targeted online disinformation and ‘fake news’, based on analyses of individuals’ big data, to deter individuals from committing mass atrocities by rendering them epistemically worse off. In the talk, Neilsen will then consider the ethical arguments for and against the use of ASDCs, concluding that such online campaigns of deception and disinformation are – like armed humanitarian interventions to protect populations – sometimes justified. According to Cian O’Driscoll: although the Ancient Greeks “conced[ed] that deception might be necessary in certain circumstances… such activities should be a last resort.” However, Neilsen submits that spreading disinformation to prevent atrocities is not even a ‘last resort’. The last resort for human protection rightfully remains armed humanitarian interventions – with its bullets, bombs, and bodybags. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Rhiannon Neilsen is currently the Cyber Security Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her research focuses on new technologies in conflict, cyberspace operations, atrocity prevention, dis/misinformation on social media, and the ethics of algorithms. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University, a Research Consultant for the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence. Rhiannon has briefed the United Kingdom Foreign Office and the Armenian Foreign Ministry. At CISAC, she is developing her monograph, “On Algorithms and Atrocities”.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: What effects will emerging technologies such as cyber, hypersonic strike, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing have on nuclear stability in wartime? It is hard to know, because studying the effect of new technology on the propensity for nuclear war amounts to examining the impact of something that does not yet exist on the likelihood of something that almost never happens. This presentation, based on work in progress, will offer a research strategy for addressing these twin methodological difficulties. It first generates an original typology of nuclear escalation risks, distinguishing among different mechanisms that could link new technologies to heightened instability. It then examines the impact of emerging technologies in past eras on the propensity for wartime escalation, using carefully chosen cases from past conflicts that witnessed the debut of new capabilities. Preliminarily, the evidence suggests that although new technologies could certainly contribute to escalatory dangers in war, they have rarely been the primary driver of such pressure in the past. Furthermore, the relationship between new technologies and escalation, where it exists, has usually been deliberated engineered by policymakers, and not arisen as a result of mistakes or accidents. This finding holds important implications for reducing nuclear risk in future conflicts.

About the Speaker: Caitlin Talmadge is Associate Professor of Security Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, as well as Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Research Affiliate in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines nuclear deterrence and escalation, civil-military relations, military strategy and operations, and defense policy, with a particular focus on security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell University Press, 2015), as well as co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, now in its fourth edition (Routledge, 2021). She is currently on research leave from Georgetown University as the Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: As governments, corporations, and citizens have become critically dependent on cyberspace, a transnational field of expertise has emerged to protect them from cyberattack. But unlike engineers whose goals are more quantifiably demonstrated—a missile hits its target with a particular probability, computer chips fail at a known rate—cybersecurity experts cannot prove that a system is “secure.”  In fact, experts paradoxically demonstrate skills in cybersecurity by demonstrating insecurities—for example, hacking systems to reveal their vulnerabilities. So how can these experts offer any authoritative assurance of security? What does growing reliance on cybersecurity experts—and the multinational industry in which they often work--mean for national sovereignty and international relations? Conversely, how have the distinctive interests of various private and government actors shaped the development of this relatively new field of expertise? And what does all this mean for our understanding of the relationships between expertise, transnationalism, and power in an age of global interdependence and vulnerability? These questions are addressed by Rebecca Slayton's book in progress, Shadowing Cybersecurity. The working hypothesis is that cybersecurity experts established themselves as authorities by developing ways of making risks visible and apparently controllable—a process Slayton calls shadowing cybersecurity. In this talk Slayton will present early findings and invite feedback.

About the Speaker: Rebecca Slayton is Associate Professor, jointly in the Science & Technology Studies Department and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, both at Cornell University. She is also a 2022-23 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her research examines the relationships between and among risk, governance, and expertise, with a focus on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count, shows how the rise of computing reshaped perceptions of the promise and risks of missile defense, and won the 2015 Computer History Museum Prize. Slayton’s second book, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Anna Weichselbraun interrogates how trust is constituted as a cultural norm and becomes mediated through future-building technologies. She probes the effort to “engineer” trust in Web3—a movement of software engineers, designers, and artists to resist centralized authorities through decentralization based on blockchain—a tamper-proof digital ledger. Web3’s advocates imagine themselves “builders and owners” of radically inclusive and participatory online worlds and alternative economies. Participants deploy blockchains and tokenization to build virtual communities—often in the form of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations)—that run on carefully considered social values. These values are encoded in algorithmic processes, the “smart contracts” by which participants’ behavior is governed along presumably universal incentives. Web3 proponents envision networked organizations of technologically-mediated trust that can supplant “untrustworthy” institutions like the state and the corporation. Web3 seeks to transform the future through technology and Weichselbraun's research follows projects and approaches that seek to democratize and decentralize work, community, and politics.

About the Speaker: Anna Weichselbraun is an anthropologist of knowledge, technology, and governance. She holds a postdoc at the University of Vienna and is currently a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She received her Ph.D. in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology from the University of Chicago, and has previously worked at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her book manuscript on the knowledge practices of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency is under review with Cornell University Press. Her newest research project examines novel forms of governance in Web3.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: For decades now, the use of ionizing radiation technologies in medicine has been to treat diseases and save lives. There is, however, an association of potential risk if the sealed radioactive source in such a device originates from a nuclide such as cobalt-60 and is handled maliciously. Deeply embedded human health challenges in treating diseases such as cancer in challenging environments also increase the complexity of this risk. While ionizing radiation technologies are available in multiple modalities, the non-source-based radiation technology tends to face greater difficulties with adoption in developing countries due to barriers associated with operation. Given these challenges, cancer patients in the developing world may only have access to one treatment modality in the form of a radioactive-isotope-based medical device that is easy to operate but poses as a potential security risk and clinically less customizable for treatment. As such, there is a growing intersection between security and health due to the variability of two major types of ionizing radiation technologies used for cancer treatment. While both technology modalities are used widely, there are known disparities in low-resource environments regarding the management and use of source-based and non-source-based technologies, requiring further investigation and problem-solving.   

About the Speaker: Pallabi M. Chakrabarti is a staff member at the Sandia National Laboratories Livermore, California campus and supports the International Nuclear/Radiological Security program office. She currently coordinates activities related to the security of radioactive materials across a diverse set of partners including international and domestic government officials, other US government laboratories, NGOs, industry, and academia. Through her role, Pallabi also provides recommendations and develops innovative methods and approaches to enhancing awareness of radioactive material security.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In Trafficking Data, Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fueled China's technological gold rush. DrawIn turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.

About the Speaker: Aynne Kokas is the C.K. Yen Professor at the Miller Center, the director of the UVA East Asia Center, and an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. Hollywood Made China (University of California Press, 2017) is Kokas’ multiple-award-winning first book. Her newest book is Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Her writing and commentary have appeared globally in more than 50 countries and 15 languages. In the United States, her research and writing appear regularly in media outlets including CNBC, NPR’s Marketplace, The Washington Post, and Wired. She has testified before the Senate Finance Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the U.S. International Trade Commission.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: 

In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables.

The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger.

The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, brings together a diverse collection of rigorous and creative scholars who analyze how the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. Scholars, pundits, and policymakers who think that the spread of nuclear weapons can create stable forms of nuclear deterrence in the future will be forced to think again. The volume was produced under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project “Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age”, co-chaired by CISAC Director Scott D. Sagan.

About the Speakers:

Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She works in the areas of political psychology.  She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has also taught at Cornell and UCSB.   She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences twice. She is the author of five books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over two hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as American foreign and defense policy, experimentation, national security intelligence, gender, social identity, cybersecurity, emotion and decision-making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.

Amy Zegart is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Political Science by courtesy at Stanford University. She is also the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Chair of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence and International Security Steering Committee, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She specializes in U.S. intelligence, cybersecurity, emerging technologies and national security, and global political risk management.

The author of five books, Zegart’s award-winning research includes the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022); Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (Brookings, 2019), co-edited with Herb Lin; Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (Twelve, 2018), co-authored with Condoleezza Rice; and the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11 – Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton 2007).  Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and elsewhere. 

Zegart has been featured by the National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. She served on the Clinton administration’s National Security Council staff and as a foreign policy adviser to the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. She has also testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and advises senior officials on intelligence, homeland security, and cybersecurity matters.

Previously, Zegart served as co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, founding co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Program, and chief academic officer of the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Stanford, she was Professor of Public Policy at UCLA and a McKinsey & Company consultant.

She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Political Science Association’s Leonard D. White Dissertation Prize, and research grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Hewlett Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Zegart received an A.B. in East Asian studies magna cum laude from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. She serves on the board of directors of Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (KTOS) and the Capital Group. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 raised fears of the world’s single largest wave of nuclear proliferation in history, when the Soviet Union’s enormous nuclear arsenal found itself on the territory of not one but four newly sovereign states: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Of those only one nuclear successor would emerge: Russia. The other three ultimately decided to join the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons as non-nuclear-weapon states and proceeded to disarm. Of the three, Ukraine followed the most contested path to nuclear renunciation, becoming a serious proliferation concern but in the end negotiating a deal that included security assurances from nuclear states, Russia among them. Inheriting the Bomb is a story of why Ukraine decided to give up its nuclear weapons and how it shaped the post-Soviet security settlement. As Russia’s war against Ukraine rages on, the causes and consequence of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament gain new relevance and urgency.  

About the Speaker: Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. She is the author of a new book Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (2022, Johns Hopkins University Press). Formerly, she held appointments of a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, and a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana’s research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is a Global Fellow. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.