For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)

                                                                                           

 

Seminar Recording

About the Event: The technology controlling United States nuclear weapons predates the Internet. Updating the technology for the digital era is necessary, but it comes with the risk that anything digital can be hacked. Moreover, using new systems for both nuclear and non-nuclear operations will lead to levels of nuclear risk hardly imagined before. This book is the first to confront these risks comprehensively.

With Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons, Herbert Lin provides a clear-eyed breakdown of the cyber risks to the U.S. nuclear enterprise. Featuring a series of scenarios that clarify the intersection of cyber and nuclear risk, this book guides readers through a little-understood element of the risk profile that government decision-makers should be anticipating. What might have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis took place in the age of Twitter, with unvetted information swirling around? What if an adversary announced that malware had compromised nuclear systems, clouding the confidence of nuclear decision-makers?

Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons, the first book to consider cyber risks across the entire nuclear enterprise, concludes with crucial advice on how government can manage the tensions between new nuclear capabilities and increasing cyber risk. This is an invaluable handbook for those ready to confront the unique challenges of cyber nuclear risk.

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About the Speaker: Since 2014, Herb Lin has been senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.  He also served as a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.

The greater Himalaya mountain range, known as the “roof of the world,” plays a central role in the environmental wellbeing of Asia and the world. It is the source of a system of rivers that sustain fertile food-producing land – and therefore populations – across the continent. But the recent race to develop infrastructure in the region, including hydropower dams, endangers the ecosystems that flourish around these rivers, and the populations that depend on them. This panel discussion will explore the causes and effects of those environmental changes. What is driving the competitive infrastructure development in India and China? How does this affect the hydrology and ecology of Asia’s major river systems? And how will these changes affect populations, and in turn state policy, in the many downstream countries?

Ruth Gamble is an environmental, cultural and climate historian of Tibet, the Himalaya, and Asia. She is writing her third book, a history of the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River. Her previous books were on the relationship between sacred geography and the reincarnation tradition (Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism) and a biography of the Third Karmapa (Master of Mahamudra). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on the region’s ecological politics, literatures, and histories. She completed her PhD in Asian Studies, and taught Tibetan language studies and Asian Religions, at the Australian National University.

Santosh Nepal is a water and climate specialist, and leads the Climate and Hydrology Group, at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu. He designs and implements climate change and hydrological assessments, including for climate change projections, flood modelling and predictions, upstream-downstream linkages, and integrated water resources management. He previously worked on integrated water resource management, disaster risk reduction, and wetland related issues. He holds a PhD from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany, on mountain hydrology.

Arzan Tarapore (Moderator) is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defense Department. Arzan holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

This event is co-sponsored by Center for South Asia and is part of Shorenstein APARC's fall 2021 webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia.

*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.

November 10, 5:00-6:15 p.m. California time / November 11, 9:00-10:15 a.m. China time
 

Based on his recent Oxford University Press book Protecting China's Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy, Dr. Andrea Ghiselli will discuss the role of the actors that contributed to the emergence and evolution of China's approach to the protection of its interests overseas. He will show how the securitization of non-traditional security threats overseas played a key role in shaping the behavior and preferences of Chinese policymakers and military elites, especially with regard to the role of the armed forces in foreign policy. 

While Chinese policymakers were able to overcome important organizational challenges, the future of China's approach to the protection of its interests overseas remains uncertain as Chinese policymakers face important questions about the possible political and diplomatic costs associated with different courses of action.

For more information about Protecting China's Interests Overseas or to purchase a copy, please click here.
 

Dr. Andrea Ghiselli is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University. He is also the Head of Research of the TOChina Hub's ChinaMed Project. His research focuses on the relationship between China's economic interests overseas and its foreign and defense policy. Besides his first monograph Protecting China's Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy published by Oxford University Press, Dr. Ghiselli's research has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals like the China Quarterly, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Armed Forces & Society, and the Journal of Contemporary China.

 

PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us on October 19th for our weekly seminar from 12 PM - 1 PM PT featuring Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law at University of Chicago's Law School and CPC Co-Director, Nate Persily. This series is organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

For years now, scholars have expressed alarm at the tendency of government officials to pressure—or “jawbone”—social media companies into taking down what the officials consider to be harmful or offensive speech, even when no law requires it. Scholars have worried, for good reason, that the practice of jawboning allows government officials to evade the stringent constraints on their power to regulate speech imposed by the First Amendment. But relatively little attention has been paid to the constitutional question of whether, or rather when, government jawboning itself violates the First Amendment. In fact, answering this question turns out to be quite difficult because of deep inconsistencies in the cases that deal with jawboning, both in the social media context and beyond. In this talk, I will explore what those inconsistencies are, why the case law is so unclear about where the line between permissible government pressure and unconstitutional governmental coercion falls, and what kind of jawboning rule might be necessary to protect free speech values in a public sphere in which both private companies and government officials possess considerable power to determine who can and cannot speak.

Speaker Profile:

Genevieve Lakier teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the role that legislatures play in safeguarding free speech values, and the fight over freedom of speech on the social media platforms.
 
Genevieve has an AB from Princeton University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Between 2006 and 2008, she was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. After law school, she clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand of the Southern District of New York and Judge Martha C. Daughtrey of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before joining the faculty, Genevieve taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law. She will serve as the Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Knight Institute at Columbia University for the 2021-2022 school year, where she will be supervising a project exploring the relationship between the First Amendment and the regulation of lies, disinformation and misinformation.

 

Wednesday, November 17, 2021, 8:00am - 9:30am (Shanghai time)

Designing effective climate change mitigation and adaptation policies requires comprehensive assessment of the projected damages from climate change. However,  current climate policy is informed by outdated models lacking empirical grounding. In this talk, we use subnational mortality records across 40 countries to generate data-driven estimates of the global mortality consequences of climate change. We show that both extreme cold and extreme heat raise mortality rates, especially for the elderly, the poor, and populations that experience these extremes infrequently. These heterogeneous nonlinear responses to warming lead to highly differentiated projected impacts of climate change across the globe. In this talk we focus in particular on the Asia-Pacific region, where mortality risk generally rises with a warming climate, but projected damages differ substantially within and across countries. We conclude by demonstrating how these results can be used to inform local adaptation policy within an individual city, using Chengdu, China as a case study, and point to new developments in climate science that will enable future improvements in mortality risk assessment across Asia. 

Tamma Carleton is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research combines economics with datasets and methodologies from remote sensing, data science, and climate science to quantify how environmental change and economic development shape one another. Tamma's current work focuses on climate change, water scarcity, and the use of remote sensing for global-scale environmental and socioeconomic monitoring. She is an active member of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary team conducting an empirically-grounded global assessment of climate change impacts. Tamma joined the Bren School after a postdoc at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, MSc.'s in Environmental Change and Management as well as Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Economics from Lewis & Clark College.

Jiacan Yuan is an Associate Professor of Climatology at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. She is interested in understanding fundamental dynamical processes of the climate system and improving climate models, which could give us stronger predictive power and more accurate risk assessment of the changing climate. Jiacan’s current work focuses on understanding the physical processes and uncertainties in climate changes, with major emphases on compound heat-humidity extremes and sea level rise. She is also an active member of the Climate Impact Lab. Before joining Fudan University, Jiacan was an Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in Meteorology from Peking University.

 This event is part of the 2021 Fall webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Egypt’s 2011 uprising is widely held to be a case of either failed democratic transition or inauthentic revolution. Scholars of democratic transitions blame Egypt’s bickering civilian politicians for failing to do the hard work of negotiated compromise to build an inclusive democracy. Scholars of revolution doubt that Egypt’s uprising counts as a revolution, since military generals did not cede the reins after Hosni Mubarak’s fall, and ultimately reconquered the state with their July 2013 coup. But what if instead of viewing Egypt as a uniform failure, we mine it for ideas on how to refresh our concepts of democracy and revolution? In this talk, based on her new book Bread and Freedom, Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, Mona El-Ghobashy presents an interpretation of Egypt’s 2011 uprising that brings out some lost connections between democracy and revolution.
 

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SPEAKER BIO

Mona El-Ghobashy is a scholar of the sociology and history of politics in Egypt, and the broader Middle East and North Africa. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Liberal Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of political contestation in Egypt before and after the 2011 uprising. Her first book, Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, was published by Stanford University Press in July 2021.

This event is co-sponsored by the "Ten Years on Project" and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University.