About the event: Why do states draw security forces from the same social bases as insurgent groups in some conflicts, but rely on rival social outgroups in others? In identity-driven conflicts, recruiting insurgent-coethnics – personnel who share an ethnic or religious identity with insurgents – can improve access to local information, enhance state legitimacy, and enable selective violence. Yet it can also undermine discipline and cohesion within the coercive apparatus by raising the risks of defection, indiscipline, and divided loyalty. Existing scholarship has shown that such recruiting decisions can shape battlefield effectiveness and regime survival, but we know relatively little about how states decide whether to leverage or sideline personnel drawn from insurgents’ own social bases. Kaur argues that states strategically shape the ethnic composition and deployment of their security forces in response to the organizational risks that insurgent-coethnics may pose to the state’s coercive apparatus. Coethnics can be co-opted as counterinsurgents only when insurgencies are sufficiently weakened to make coethnics willing to collaborate with the state, and when the state’s coercive institutions are structured to reduce the risk of insubordinate collective action. She tests this argument through a mixed-methods design that combines within- and cross-conflict evidence from counterinsurgency campaigns in India and the British Empire. Taken together, the study shows how states manage organizational risk from internal conflict through the recruitment, reassignment, deployment, and withholding of coethnic personnel. In doing so, it demonstrates that the ethnicity of security forces is itself an ethno-political outcome shaped by wartime dynamics.

About the speaker: Dipin Kaur is an India-U.S. Security Studies Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ashoka University. Her research focuses on state strategy in the shadow of political violence, the politics of post-conflict transitions, and public opinion in polarized settings. Her book project draws on case studies from India and the British Empire to explain why states vary in their reliance on particular ethnic groups as counterinsurgents in response to conflict. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University (2022) and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

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About the event: Can international law and ethics lead to greater protection of civilians in war? How can these norms influence military conduct on the battlefield? This talk examines whether and how international law and ethical norms can contribute to the protection of civilians in war. Governments and militaries invest substantial resources in training soldiers in the law of armed conflict and professional military ethics, yet there is limited empirical evidence about whether these norms meaningfully shape conduct on the battlefield. Drawing on combatant surveys, interviews, and data on U.S. Army prosecutions, this research analyzes U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to assess how legal and ethical norms influence the behavior of combatants and the treatment of civilians during military operations.

About the speaker: Andrew Bell is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University, a J.D.–M.A. from the University of Virginia, and an M.T.S. from Duke Divinity School. He previously served with the U.S. Department of Defense Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and the International Committee of the Red Cross and was an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University. He is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and has deployed in support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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About the event: Criminal violence claims more lives globally than interstate and civil wars combined, yet it remains concentrated in certain regions while others escape this scourge. This project explains both why criminal violence is high in some places and not others, and why it becomes particularly intractable in democracies. While authoritarian regimes can avoid criminal violence through brutal repression or state-criminal collusion, democracies often become trapped in cycles where policy shocks – from housing demolitions to kingpin arrests to immigration enforcement – disrupt power balances between criminal groups and spark turf violence that mobilizes voters to demand “iron-fist” security policies and parties to compete on militarized security platforms. These policies tend to further shock the criminal distribution of power, locking countries in escalating cycles of criminal violence. Drawing on fine-grained data, ethnographic research, cross-national analysis, and case studies across Chicago, Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia, the project examines how democratic responses often perpetuate these vicious cycles, and offers evidence-based policy alternatives for breaking them.

About the speaker: Sarah Z. Daly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She is the author of Organized Violence After Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections (Princeton University Press, 2022), winner of the 2024 Gregory Luebbert Prize from the American Political Science Association. Her research spans war and peace, democracy, organized crime, and Latin America, and has appeared in International Security, World Politics, and British Journal of Political Science, among other outlets. Daly holds a BA from Stanford, MS from LSE, and PhD from MIT.

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About the event: This article examines how the Soviet Union transformed Sillamäe, Estonia and its oil shale deposits from a source of national independence into a cornerstone of the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Facing critical uranium shortages and logistical challenges in Central Asian mines, Soviet authorities seized upon Estonia’s oil-shale deposits, which contained extractable uranium essential for the construction of a nuclear bomb. Within weeks after recapturing the territory in 1944, Moscow established military exclusion zones, forcibly resettled the local Estonian population, and transferred jurisdiction over Sillamäe directly to the Main Directorate of the Atomic Energy Industry, bypassing Estonian SSR authority entirely. By August 1946, Sillamäe had become a closed city under Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) control, erased from maps and accessible only with special passes. The MVD deployed forced labor to construct uranium processing facilities while simultaneously recruiting informants to monitor all residents. Through infrastructure development, population control, and an expansive security apparatus, Moscow bound Estonian territory materially and demographically to Soviet imperial power, demonstrating how nuclear colonialism operated through the deliberate engineering of both built environment and communities.

About the speaker: Dr. Alexandra Sukalo is an Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs and Director of the Intelligence Studies Project at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. A historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, her research focuses on Russian and Soviet intelligence services and the Soviet military-industrial complex. She is completing a manuscript on the Soviet Union’s domestic intelligence services under Stalin. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and worked as a Eurasian analyst for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Central Intelligence Agency. She holds a PhD from Stanford University.
 

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About the event: Polarization is a defining feature of politics in the United States and many other democracies. Yet although there is much research focusing on the effects of polarization on domestic politics, little is known about how polarization influences international cooperation and conflict. Democracies are thought to have advantages over nondemocratic nations in international relations, including the ability to keep foreign policy stable across time, credibly signal information to adversaries, and maintain commitments to allies. Does domestic polarization affect these “democratic advantages”? This book argues that polarization reshapes the nature of constraints on democratic leaders, which in turn erodes the advantages democracies have in foreign affairs.

Drawing on a range of evidence, including cross-national analyses, observational and experimental public opinion research, descriptive data on the behavior of politicians, and interviews with policymakers, Myrick develops metrics that explain the effect of extreme polarization on international politics and traces the pathways by which polarization undermines each of the democratic advantages. Turning to the case of contemporary US foreign policy, Myrick shows that as its political leaders become less responsive to the public and less accountable to political opposition, the United States loses both reliability as an ally and credibility as an adversary. Myrick’s account links the effects of polarization on democratic governance to theories of international relations, integrating work across the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics to explore how patterns of domestic polarization shape the international system.

About the speaker: Rachel Myrick is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She studies the domestic politics of international security, with an emphasis on how polarization affects contemporary US foreign policy. Her first book, Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability, was published in 2025 by Princeton University Press in their Studies in International History & Politics. Her academic work is published in journals like International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Politics, among others. Dr. Myrick completed her PhD in 2021 at the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.

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About the event: The Middle East experiences plenty of religiously-motivated violence, but this violence is initiated by non-state actors, such as terror groups, secessionist movements, and national liberation movements. States have bigger fish to fry. They may intervene in ongoing conflicts between religiously-motivated organizations or employ these organizations as proxies. But whether they initiate or join wars, they do not do so for religious reasons. Hassner seeks to explain this pattern by contrasting state interests with non-state interests. He does so by investigating major Middle East wars in contrast to civil wars and insurgencies. Hassner also seeks to show that the security policy of religiously-motivated non-state actors undergoes a process of moderation when they assume the responsibilities of statehood. Their religious identities do not disappear, but their religious ambitions weaken, are supplemented by nationalist and secular ideological concerns, and their wars take on new motivations and goals. The “taming” of religion by states does not end wars but it changes their fundamental character.

About the speaker: Ron Hassner teaches international conflict and religion. His research explores the role of ideas, practices and symbols in international security with particular attention to the relationship between religion and violence. His published work focuses on territorial disputes, religion in the military, conflicts over holy places, the pervasive role of religion on the modern battlefield, and military intelligence. He is the editor of the Cornell University Press book series "Religion and Conflict" and the editor-in-chief of the journal Security Studies.

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About the event: How would the leader of a nuclear-armed state respond if they believed themselves to be the target of a decapitation strike? This project examines how fears of leadership targeting shape policy choices between pre-delegation and the automation of launch authority. Zhang argues that choices over command-and-control design are driven by three forces: a tradeoff between revenge and deterrence, domestic politics, and national risk cultures. These factors jointly determine whether a state gravitates toward pre-delegation or automation. Empirically, he analyzes the Soviet Perimeter system, known in the West as the “Dead Hand,” developed between 1974 and 1985 when Soviet leaders feared that the United States was acquiring the capability and the doctrine to eliminate them in a decapitation strike. Zhang then compares this to U.S. efforts to cope with similar fears of decapitation, such as the Emergency Rocket Communications System (ERCS), an American analogue to Perimeter, and the emphasis on Continuity of Government (COG) procedures. These case studies shed light on how states respond to the threat of nuclear decapitation, when they choose pre-delegation or automation as solutions, and how those choices shape the stability or volatility of nuclear deterrence. More broadly, the project contributes to research on the determinants of nuclear command-and-control design, its implications for strategic stability, and the broader debate over automation versus human-in-the-loop design.

About the speaker: X Zhang is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Zhang received a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and their research examines the political psychology of international security, with a focus on interstate conflict, public opinion, and the domestic foundations of foreign policy. Zhang is also a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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