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Social media and digital technologies have come under fire for their contribution to the development of the groups that ultimately stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Following the insurrection attempt, Facebook, Twitter, Google and other major platforms have banned or suspended President Trump’s accounts. Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores, while Amazon removed the site from its cloud hosting service, putting an indefinite end to Parler’s reach. This panel will discuss the role of social media during the Trump presidency, including the role of platform policies in fomenting or responding to the recent violence, the benefits and risks posed by steps subsequently taken, and what this means for the future of speech online.

Panelists include:

• Nate Persily, faculty co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, director of the Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Professor at Stanford Law School
• Daphne Keller, Director of the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Platform Regulation
• Alex Stamos, Director of the Cyber Policy Center’s Internet Observatory
• Renee DiResta, Research Manager at the Cyber Policy Center’s Internet Observatory
• Moderated by Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
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As US-China competition intensifies, experts debate the degree to which the current strategic environment resembles that of the Cold War. Those that argue against the analogy often highlight how China is deeply integrated into the US-led world order. They also point out that, while tense, US-China relations have not turned overtly adversarial. But there is another, less optimistic reason the comparison is unhelpful: deterring and defeating Chinese aggression is harder now than it was against the Soviet Union. In this talk, Dr. Mastro analyzes how technology, geography, relative resources and the alliance system complicate U.S. efforts to enhance the credibility of its deterrence posture and, in a crisis, form any sort of coalition.

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Within FSI, she works primarily in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) as well. She is also a fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an inaugural Wilson Center China Fellow.

Mastro is an international security expert with a focus on Chinese military and security policy issues, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. Her research addresses critical questions at the intersection of interstate conflict, great power relations, and the challenge of rising powers. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Survival, and Asian Security, and is the author of The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019).

She also continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she works as a Strategic Planner at INDOPACOM. Prior to her appointment at Stanford in August 2020, Mastro was an assistant professor of security studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

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This event is being held virtually via Zoom. Please register for the webinar via the following link: https://bit.ly/3nNdqhW

With President Biden’s inauguration, a new era of US-Japan relations starts on January 20. Now that the cozy personal relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Abe is in the rearview mirror, what can we expect in the Biden-Suga era? While the Biden administration is widely expected to drop Trump’s America First foreign policy and return to multilateralism and alliance-based diplomacy, its foreign policy priorities in the Asia-Pacific are still largely unknown. What role will the US-Japan alliance play in the new geo-political landscape in the region, and how would it handle the growing influence of China and build partnerships with other players in the region? This panel, featuring a leading expert on US politics and US-Japan relations, Fumiaki Kubo (University of Tokyo), and a rising star in the Liberal Democratic Party and an alum of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rui Matsukawa (House of Councilors), examines these questions, moderated by the Director of APARC Japan Program, Kiyoteru Tsutsui.

SPEAKERS

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Fumiaki Kubo has been the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of American Government and History at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, the University of Tokyo since 2003. He is affiliated with the Nakasone Peace Institute as the Executive Research Director, the Japan Institute for International Affairs as a Senior Adjunct Fellow, the 21^st Century Public Policy Institute as the Director of the US Studies Project, as well as with the Tokyo Foundation as a Senior Research Scholar. He studied at Cornell University in 1984-1986, at the Johns Hopkins University in 1991-1993, and at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland in 1998-99. He was also an Invited Professor at SciencesPo in Paris in the spring of 2009, and a Japan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2014. Kubo received his B.A. in 1979 and Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Tokyo. He is the author of many books which include: Modern American Politics (with Hitoshi Abe), Ideology and Foreign Policy After Iraq in the United States ( editor ), A Study on the Infrastructure of American Politics( editor ). In 1989, he received the Sakurada-Kai Gold Award for the Study of Politics and the Keio Gijuku Award. Kubo was the President of the Japanese Association for American Studies from 2016 to 2018.

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Rui Matsukawa is a Member of the House of Councilors (Liberal Democratic Party), and her current responsibilities include Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Defense, Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Cabinet Office. She graduated from the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Law and earned an MS in Foreign Service from Georgetown. She joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1993, where she won the Southern Bluefin Tuna Case at the International Court of Justice, negotiated free trade agreements with Thailand, Philippines, and other countries, and worked on the negotiations for disarmament as a first Secretary of the Japan Delegation to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. She was in charge of analysis of China and the Korean Peninsula in the Intelligence and Analysis Service. She also promoted cooperation between Japan, China, and South Korea as Counsellor of the Embassy of Japan in Korea. In 2014, Ms. Matsukawa established WAW! (World Assembly for Women) to promote women’s empowerment and gender mainstreaming as the first Director of the Gender Mainstreaming Division in the Foreign Policy Bureau. In 2016, she left MOFA, and was elected to represent Osaka in the House of Councilors.

MODERATOR 

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Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he is also Director of the Japan Program, a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Professor of Sociology. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2021). 

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/JqN4Ga4DVss

About the Event: 

Much of the imagery and remote sensing analysis in the Open Source Community pertains to North Korea’s nuclear weapons pathway and military capability. However, many questions remain regarding economic and agricultural health in a nation known for denial of access to outside observation. But by applying emerging analytical and processing technology of satellite imagery and data, we can address the challenge of examining economic and environmental patterns in the North.

Machine Learning technology has been used to analyze rudimentary objects like roads or buildings on satellite imagery for years, but has yet to be successfully employed to better understand nuanced patterns of life. In our partnership with the analytics company Orbital Insight, we have undertaken a project of counting thousands of objects in satellite images taken over the past five years to uncover North Korea’s trade relationship with China.

This project includes counting number of trucks at each side of the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge as a measure of trade activity between North Korea and China. By applying artificial intelligence to more than 300 satellite images, we observed fluctuations of truck counts, which peak during the month of November. A significant drop in the truck counts during the year of 2020 is noticed as a result of restricted traffic from the global pandemic, although as much as 30 trucks were observed in the month of June on both sides of the border. The project demonstrates the utilities of machine learning in analyzing emerging datasets. Careful monitoring of trade between the two states can aid in better understanding the China-North Korea economic relationship and how it evolves over time.

CISAC is also partnering with international organizations and geospatial systems specialists to apply data derived from public space mapping systems to better understand macro-environmental, agricultural, and water security trends over the past twenty years in North Korea. For decades, scientists of every discipline have been analyzing remotely-sensed images and data sets to extract otherwise-imperceptible insight pertaining to broad aspects of environmental health including coastal erosion, deforestation, land subsidence, and global thermal changes. But because of a post-war technology vacuum and broadly-applied sanctions against space-derived information, North Korea has never had access to this data or the advanced software and data storage architecture necessary to support it. The potential for direct collaboration with the North on environmental analysis may enhance North Korea’s ability to mitigate its own agricultural risk and potentially facilitate informal international collaboration.

About the Speaker: Allison Puccioni has been an imagery analyst for over 25 years, working within the military, tech, media, and academic communities. After honorably serving in the US Army as an Imagery Analyst from 1991 - 1997, Allison continued the tradecraft as a civilian augmentee to US and NATO operations in the Kosovo airstrike campaign, and as a Senior Analyst and Mission Planner for Naval Special Warfare Group One. After earning her Master’s Degree in International Policy, Allison established the commercial satellite imagery analysis capability for the British publication company Jane's. In 2015, Allison joined Google to assist with the establishment of applications for its commercial small-satellites. Today, Allison is the Principal and Founder of Armillary Services, providing insight on commercial imaging satellites and associated analytics to the governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the commercial sector. Concurrently, Allison manages the multi-sensor imagery analysis team at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/TV8ye_OVdzY

About the Event: Proof that France had become the world’s fourth nuclear power exploded above the Algerian Sahara in February 1960, during the Algerian War for Independence (1954–62). Sixteen more blasts would take place before France abandoned its Saharan test sites in 1966, which had continued to host French explosions underground during the first years of Algerian Independence. Well before the first airborne detonation, and even after French testing went below ground, the likelihood that radioactive debris (known as fallout) would contaminate the desert environment and its human inhabitants animated an international controversy. Saharan fallout loomed at once as a new threat to Algerian and African sovereignty and to Cold War negotiations that promised to limit weapons testing, revealing historical intersections between African decolonization and the nuclear arms race.

About the Speaker: Austin Cooper is a Predoctoral Researcher at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a PhD Candidate in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/trpJJ0-nJzE

About the Event: In the middle of the twentieth century, geophysical science and new technologies pried open three of Earth's most remote and inhospitable regions: Antarctica, the ocean floor, and the exosphere—that is, outer space. As human activity in these frigid zones increased, so too did their status as “global commons,” domains belonging to all, and therefore none. This presentation examines how one issue in particular, nuclear weapons, galvanized the politics of the global commons from the 1950s to the 1970s and sheds light on how the United States navigated the new spaces as part of its Cold War foreign policy.

About the Speakers: 

Stephen Buono is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. He earned his PhD in History from Indiana University. At Stanford, he is at work on his first book, The Province of All Mankind, a history of how outer space became a realm of American foreign policy and international law in 1950s and 1960s. Before arriving at CISAC, Stephen was an editor for the journal Diplomatic History and an Aerospace History Fellow with the American Historical Association and the National Aeronautical and Space Administration.

Ryan A. Musto is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC. He holds a PhD in history from The George Washington University and master’s degrees in international and world history from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. Prior to joining CISAC, Ryan served as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MIT. His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Polar Record, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Americas Quarterly, amongst other outlets. Ryan is currently writing a book manuscript on the international history of regional denuclearization.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/zrDq0xRWnhk

About the Event: Determination and verification of the nuclear activities of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are critical to ongoing disarmament and nonproliferation efforts. This study assesses the complete nuclear fuel cycle of the DPRK, from its capacity to produce fissile material precursors at mining and milling facilities in Pyongsan, to activity at the main Nuclear Scientific Research Center in Yongbyon. An interdisciplinary approach is used to analyze the different stages of the DRPK’s nuclear fuel cycle. In investigating the uranium ore grade and ore production capacity at the mining and milling facilities, we combine analysis of archival geological maps, geological field survey reports, and first-hand collection and geochemical analysis of comparable rock samples from the Korean Peninsula. In analyzing the ongoing activities at fissile material production facilities, we integrate satellite imagery analysis with machine learning algorithms, allowing for automated analysis of large image sets.

About the Speaker: Sulgiye Park is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC, Stanford University, where she focuses primarily on investigating the front-end of uranium pathway in North Korea. She looks at the uranium mining and milling processes for disarmament and nonproliferation efforts. Prior to joining CISAC, Sulgiye was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Geological Sciences and Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, where Sulgiye studied materials' behaviors at extreme environments.

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 disruption of the 2020 pandemic, coupled with significant economic tensions between China and the US, have resulted in global companies rethinking their supply chains.  Many have called for drastic changes - reshoring, near-shoring, regionalization of vertical supply chains, increasing redundancies, or diversification of Chinese manufacturing to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa or Latin America, etc.  Empirical data, however, reveal that many are taking a more cautious approach.  Leading companies are continuing to develop innovative ways to redesign their supply chains that still preserve China as their key supply source.  This talk will share some of these innovative ways that, in the end, may provide better long term values.

Hau L. Lee is the Thoma Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.  He was the founding faculty director of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (SEED), and is the current Co-Director of the Stanford Value Chain Innovations Initiative.  Professor Lee’s expertise is on global supply chain management and value chain innovations.  He has published widely in top journals on supply chain management.  He was inducted to the US National Academy of Engineering, and elected a Fellow of MSOM, POMS; and INFORMS.   He was the previous Editor-in-Chief of Management Science.  In 2006-7, he was the President of the Production and Operations Management Society.  His article, “The Triple-A Supply Chain,” was the Second Place Winner of the McKinsey Award for the Best Paper in 2004 in the Harvard Business Review.  In 2004, his co-authored paper in 1997, “Information Distortion in a Supply Chain: The Bullwhip Effect,” was voted as one of the ten most influential papers in the history of Management Science.  His co-authored paper, “The Impact of Logistics Performance on Trade,” won the Wickham Skinner Best Paper Award by the Production and Operations Management Society in 2014. In 2003, he received the Harold Lardner Prize for International Distinction in Operations Research, Canadian Operations Research Society.  Professor Lee obtained his B.Soc.Sc. degree in Economics and Statistics from the University of Hong Kong, his M.Sc. degree in Operational Research from the London School of Economics, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.  He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Engineering degree by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

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