About the Event: Kim Jong Un’s recent remarks highlighting the goal of exponentially increasing North Korea’s nuclear arsenal underscore the regime’s aggressive pursuit of advanced nuclear capabilities. This growing threat poses a critical concern for global security, particularly amid escalating geopolitical tensions and the burgeoning military cooperation between Russia and North Korea. This study utilizes an integrated methodology, combining satellite imagery, geological analysis, and technical assessments, to evaluate North Korea’s fissile material production capacity and strategic resources availability necessary to fulfill its nuclear ambitions. By examining the evolving state of North Korea's plutonium production and uranium enrichment capacities, as well as its efficiency of mining operations and critical metal reserves, this research provides key insights into the country’s potential for sustained nuclear development, highlighting how control over strategic resources remains a pivotal factor in North Korea’s pursuit of military development and geopolitical leverage.

About the Speaker: Sulgiye Park is a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where she specializes in North Korea and China’s nuclear fuel pathway. She received her Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Stanford University, focusing on nuclear materials in extreme environments. She later worked at the Stanford Institute of Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), fabricating nanodiamonds for technological applications, which granted her a Jamieson Award. As a Stanton and MacArthur Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Dr. Park focused on the critical nexus between natural resource management, strategic supply chains, and nuclear security. Her work highlighted the foundational role of geologic resources in enabling nuclear ambitions, including geologic analyses of North Korea’s uranium and critical metal reserves. She utilized open-source intelligence to monitor nuclear activities, providing insights into nonproliferation challenges. Dr. Park also examined regulatory frameworks for U.S. nuclear waste management and studied rare-earth metal production and critical metal supply chain vulnerabilities, emphasizing their strategic importance for national security and technological innovation.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

This event will bring together experts on social movements in China and Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and Korea. It will open with a presentation by Wasserstrom, a China specialist, who will highlight how activists fighting for change in different parts of Asia have learned from and collaborated with one another during the past century and beyond. He will argue that, for over a century, repertoires of resistance in Asia have not only been flowing across national boundaries but also regional distinctions often used by scholars, with East Asian movements influencing Southeast Asian ones and vice versa. Focusing on recent events in Hong Kong and Bangkok, he will emphasize that, even in this era of rapid global flows, while today's young activists, versed in digital media, sometimes draw inspiration from occurrences and symbols in distant places, they are frequently most influenced by developments happening closer to home. Following Wasserstrom's presentation, Weiss and Shin — specialists in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia respectively — will join the conversation.

This event is part of our Contemporary Asia Seminar Series. This series hosts professionals in the fields of public and foreign policy, journalism, and academia who share their perspectives on pressing issues facing Asia today.

Speakers: 

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor's Professor of History at UC Irvine. The author of books such as  Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020), his new book will deal with protests in Bangkok and Burma as well as Hong Kong. It is titled The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing and will be published by Columbia Global Reports in 2025.

Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), inaugural Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC), and currently a Lee Kong Chian NUS–Stanford fellow. Her work addresses mobilization, identity, and civil society; electoral politics and parties; institutional reform; and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore.
 

Moderator:

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, a professor of sociology, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. At Stanford, he has also served as director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center since 2005 and as founding director of the Korea Program since 2001. His research concentrates on nationalism, development, and international relations, focusing on Korea/Asia.

Shin is the author/editor of more than 25 books, including South Korea’s Democracy in Crisis: The Threats of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization; The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security; Global Talent: Foreign Labor as Social Capital in Korea; and One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era. Shin’s latest book, The Four Talent Giants, a comparative study of talent strategies of Japan, Australia, China, and India, will be published by Stanford University Press in 2025.

In Summer 2023, Shin launched the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), which is committed to addressing emergent social, cultural, economic, environmental, and political challenges in Asia through interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, policy-relevant, and comparative studies and publications. He also launched the Taiwan Program at APARC in May 2024.

Shin previously taught at the University of Iowa and the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a BA from Yonsei University and an MA and PhD from the University of Washington.

THIS EVENT IS NOW SOLD OUT. Join us for our final seminar on December 3rd with Jeff Jarvis.

Limited number of lunches available for registered guests until 12:30pm on day of event.

About the Event: When and how do nationalist protests at home affect crisis bargaining at the international level? Though plausible, the overall effect and the scope conditions for nationalist protests to influence international crisis bargaining remain unspecified, particularly due to two uncertainties: the host government, which is uncertain whether a protest will escalate into an anti-government mobilization, and the foreign government, which is uncertain whether the observed protest constitutes a genuinely credible constraint or just a strategic misrepresentation of the host government’s preference over the disputed issue. The lack of ex-ante theoretical expectations has led to the proliferation of ad hoc ex-post justifications for nationalist protests’ determinant or indeterminate roles during international crises. Using a two-step modeling approach, this paper shows that the threat to the host government posed by the nationalist protests is a prerequisite for them to exert influence on international crisis bargaining. Moreover, the relationship between the threats to the host government from nationalist protests and the likelihood of bargaining failure is non-monotonic - that is, first decreasing and then increasing in the magnitude of the threat. This result is tested with an in-depth case study of the (in)effective signaling with the 2014 anti-China protest in Vietnam.

About the Speaker: Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods.

More broadly, Xinru’s research encompasses three main objectives: Substantively, she aims to better theorize and enhance cross-country perspectives on critical phenomena such as nationalism and its impact on international security; Methodologically, she strives to improve measurement and causal inference based on careful methodologies, including formal modeling and computational methods; Empirically, she challenges prevailing assumptions that inflate the perceived risk of militarized conflicts in East Asia, by providing original data and analysis rooted in local knowledge and regional perceptions.

Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Limited number of lunches available for registered guests until 12:30pm on day of event.

About the Event: In response to Hamas’s deadly attack against Israel and its citizens on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a significant ground invasion into Gaza in self-defense, aimed at eliminating Hamas’s military capabilities and removing it from political power. Israel’s military operations have generated extensive commentary about its compliance with international humanitarian law, particularly concerning the jus in bello principles of distinction and proportionality. However, there has been much less scrutiny of Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality, a well-established principle under international law that considers the overall scope of a state’s use of force and dictates that a war’s means must not be excessive in relation to its aims. Our paper assesses Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality. After providing an overview of the jus ad bellum proportionality principle, we rely on novel radar satellite imagery analysis to document the widespread destruction that has resulted from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Based on these data, we argue that Israel’s use of force is excessive, and that the war Israel is currently waging in Gaza is not in compliance with the principle of jus ad bellum proportionality.

About the Speakers:

Bailey Ulbricht is the founding Executive Director at the Stanford Humanitarian Program, where she works on legal research projects aimed at reducing harm in conflict settings and other insecure environments. She has a particular interest in how technology exacerbates harms, or conversely, how it can be used to document or reduce harms. Before coming to Stanford, she founded the humanitarian ed-tech nonprofit Paper-Airplanes, was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Turkey, and was a humanitarian worker with refugee communities on the Turkish-Syrian border. Bailey has two masters' degrees in Islamic Law and Islamic Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her B.A. in International Relations magna cum laude from Carleton College and her J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Allen S. Weiner, Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, is an international legal scholar who focuses primarily on international security and international conflict resolution. He also studies the challenges of online misinformation and disinformation. Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, the Stanford Humanitarian Program, and the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.  His scholarship is deeply informed by practice; he served as an international lawyer in the U.S. State Department for more than a decade before joining the Stanford faculty.  He earned his A.B. at Harvard and his J.D. at Stanford.

Jamon Van Den Hoek is an Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University where he directs the Conflict Ecology lab. Jamon's research focuses on using satellite and geospatial data to gauge the direct and indirect consequences of armed conflict on vulnerable people and landscapes. Before coming to Oregon State, Jamon was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Corey Scher is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Corey studies physical impacts of war and conflict using Earth observation data, geostatistics, and theory from the geosciences. His mapping of damage to urban areas in geographies including Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon has been featured in journalistic and humanitarian publications worldwide. He holds a master's degree in geology from the City College of New York and a bachelor's degree in geology from the University of California, Berkeley.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2024)

Friday, November 22, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Response to Competition: Gender, Domains, and STEM Choice
 

Women’s lower performance in competitive environments has been advanced as an explanation for gender inequalities in the labor market. Using broadly representative Chinese administrative data, and measuring response to competition (RC) by performance changes from a mock exam to the competitive High School Entrance Exam, we document higher RC for boys in STEM and for girls in non-STEM subjects, with the male STEM RC advantage weakened by random exposure to high-performing female classmates in STEM. Both domain-specific RC measures significantly predict subsequent STEM track choice, accounting for 26% of the adjusted gender gap in STEM specialization, a known precursor to the gender pay gap.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Jane Zhang is an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and a Visiting Scholar (2024-25) at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. Her research examines how preferences and beliefs are shaped by policy, how they interact with incentives, and the role that they play in determining a wide-range of social outcomes. Her approach combines the use of tools from the experimental economics field, with the exploitation of natural experiments, field experiments, and controlled lab manipulations to make causal inferences about the determinants of preferences and beliefs. Her work has been published in outlets such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review: Insights, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD in Economics from U.C. Berkeley and BA in Economics from Stanford University.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu