Stanford University

Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

The Provenance Problem: Research Methods and Ethics in the Age of WikiLeaks

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

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

 

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

View Written Draft Paper

 

About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

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Christopher Darnton Associate Professor of National Security Affairs Naval Postgraduate School
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Some Humility About Transparency

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Daphne Keller
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I am a huge fan of transparency about platform content moderation. I’ve considered it a top policy priority for years, and written about it in detail (with Paddy Leerssen, who also wrote this great piece about recommendation algorithms and transparency). I sincerely believe that without it, we are unlikely to correctly diagnose current problems or arrive at wise legal solutions.

So it pains me to admit that I don’t really know what “transparency” I’m asking for. I don’t think many other people do, either. Researchers and public interest advocates around the world can agree that more transparency is better. But, aside from people with very particular areas of interest (like political advertising), almost no one has a clear wish list. What information is really important? What information is merely nice to have? What are the trade-offs involved?

That imprecision is about to become a problem, though it’s a good kind of problem to have. A moment of real political opportunity is at hand. Lawmakers in the US, Europe, and elsewhere are ready to make some form of transparency mandatory. Whatever specific legal requirements they create will have huge consequences. The data, content, or explanations they require platforms to produce will shape our future understanding of platform operations, and our ability to respond — as consumers, as advocates, or as democracies. Whatever disclosures the laws don’t require, may never happen.

It’s easy to respond to this by saying “platforms should track all the possible data, we’ll see what’s useful later!” Some version of this approach might be justified for the very biggest “gatekeeper” or “systemically important” platforms. Of course, making Facebook or Google save all that data would be somewhat ironic, given the trouble they’ve landed in by storing similar not-clearly-needed data about their users in the past. (And the more detailed data we store about particular takedowns, the likelier it is to be personally identifiable.)

For any platform, though, we should recognize that the new practices required for transparency reporting comes at a cost. That cost might include driving platforms to adopt simpler, blunter content rules in their Terms of Service. That would reduce their expenses in classifying or explaining decisions, but presumably lead to overly broad or narrow content prohibitions. It might raise the cost of adding “social features” like user comments enough that some online businesses, like retailers or news sites, just give up on them. That would reduce some forms of innovation, and eliminate useful information for Internet users. For small and midsized platforms, transparency obligations (like other expenses related to content moderation) might add yet another reason to give up on competing with today’s giants, and accept an acquisition offer from an incumbent that already has moderation and transparency tools. Highly prescriptive transparency obligations might also drive de facto standardization and homogeneity in platform rules, moderation practices, and features.

None of these costs provides a reason to give up on transparency — or even to greatly reduce our expectations. But all of them are reasons to be thoughtful about what we ask for. It would be helpful if we could better quantify these costs, or get a handle on what transparency reporting is easier and harder to do in practice.

I’ve made a (very in the weeds) list of operational questions about transparency reporting, to illustrate some issues that are likely to arise in practice. I think detailed examples like these are helpful in thinking through both which kinds of data matter most, and how much precision we need within particular categories. For example, I personally want to know with great precision how many government orders a platform received, how it responded, and whether any orders led to later judicial review. But to me it seems OK to allow some margin of error for platforms that don’t have standardized tracking and queuing tools, and that as a result might modestly mis-count TOS takedowns (either by absolute numbers or percent).

I’ll list that and some other recommendations below. But these “recommendations” are very tentative. I don’t know enough to have a really clear set of preferences yet. There are things I wish I could learn from technologists, activists, and researchers first. The venues where those conversations would ordinarily happen — and, importantly, where observers from very different backgrounds and perspectives could have compared the issues they see, and the data they most want — have been sadly reduced for the past year.

So here is my very preliminary list:

  • Transparency mandates should be flexible enough to accommodate widely varying platform practices and policies. Any de facto push toward standardization should be limited to the very most essential data.
  • The most important categories of data are probably the main ones listed in the DSA: number of takedowns, number of appeals, number of successful appeals. But as my list demonstrates, those all can become complicated in practice.
  • It’s worth taking the time to get legal transparency mandates right. That may mean delegating exact transparency rules to regulatory agencies in some countries, or conducting studies prior to lawmaking in others.
  • Once rules are set, lawmakers should be very reluctant to move the goalposts. If a platform (especially a smaller one) invests in rebuilding its content moderation tools to track certain categories of data, it should not have to overhaul those tools soon because of changed legal requirements.
  • We should insist on precise data in some cases, and tolerate more imprecision in others (based on the importance of the issue, platform capacity, etc.). And we should take the time to figure out which is which.
  • Numbers aren’t everything. Aggregate data in transparency reports ultimately just tell us what platforms themselves think is going on. To understand what mistakes they make, or what biases they may exhibit, independent researchers need to see the actual content involved in takedown decisions. (This in turn raises a slough of issues about storing potentially unlawful content, user privacy and data protection, and more.)

It’s time to prioritize. Researchers and civil society should assume we are operating with a limited transparency “budget,” which we must spend wisely — asking for the information we can best put to use, and factoring in the cost. We need better understanding of both research needs and platform capabilities to do this cost-benefit analysis well. I hope that the window of political opportunity does not close before we manage to do that.

Daphne Keller

Daphne Keller

Director of the Program on Platform Regulation
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Q&A with Daphne Keller of the Program on Platform Regulation

Keller explains some of the issues currently surrounding platform regulation
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In a new blog post, Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Cyber Policy Center, looks at the need for transparency when it comes to content moderation and asks, what kind of transparency do we really want?

CISAC Scientists Join Open Letter to Obama on Iran

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Three CISAC scientists have joined 26 of the nation’s top nuclear experts to send an open letter to President Obama in support of the Iran deal struck in July.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) the United States and its partners negotiated with Iran will advance the cause of peace and security in the Middle East and can serve as a guidepost for future non-proliferation agreements,” the group of renowned scientists, academics and former government officials wrote in the letter dated August 8, 2015.

“This is an innovative agreement, with much more stringent constraints than any previously negotiated non-proliferation framework.”

CISAC senior fellow and former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Sig Hecker is a signatory to the letter, along with CISAC co-founder Sid Drell, and cybersecurity expert and CISAC affiliate Martin Hellman.

Six Nobel laureates also signed, including FSI senior fellow by courtesy and former Stanford Linear Accelerator director Burton Richter.

The letter arrives at a crucial time for the Obama administration as it rallies public opinion and lobbies Congress to support the Iran agreement.

You can read the full letter along with analysis from the New York Times at this link.

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CFIUS and the “America First” Investment Policy: Nine Recommendations for Executive Action

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In early 2025, President Donald Trump unveiled his “America First Investment Policy,” an effort to make the United States a more appealing destination for foreign capital from U.S. allies. Since then, President Trump has secured commitments from many trading partners to significantly ramp-up their investment in the United States. Regulators now should focus on reducing red tape and eliminating unnecessary barriers to investment to ensure that this wave of foreign capital generates returns for the American people and advances U.S. national security.

One area ripe for reform is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency regulatory body chaired by the Treasury Department and accountable to the President.

Read the full paper here.

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Hannah Chapman | REDS Seminar - The Information Paradox: Citizen Appeals and Authoritarian Governance in Russia

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HannahChapmanREDS

Russia's shift from informational autocracy toward overt repression has made understanding public sentiment more urgent yet increasingly difficult. One channel remains: appeals systems, through which hundreds of thousands of citizens each year bring grievances directly to the state. What concerns do citizens raise, and how does the regime respond? Drawing on original data from Russia's presidential appeals system, this talk examines what appeals reveal about everyday citizen-state relations, governance challenges, and how autocratic institutions that promise responsiveness actually function under pressure. Appeals offer a unique behavioral measure of citizen concerns, capturing the experiences of those most affected by governance failures—offering insight into a regime that has become increasingly opaque.

Hannah S. Chapman is the Theodore Romanoff Assistant Professor of Russian Studies and an Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies. Previously, she was a George F. Kennan Fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Her research, teaching, and service are in the fields of comparative political behavior with a substantive focus on public opinion, political participation, and political communication in non-democracies and a regional focus on Russian and post-Soviet politics. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in authoritarianism, Russian domestic and international politics, and comparative politics.

Her book project, Dialogue with the Dictator: Information Manipulation and Authoritarian Legitimation in Putin's Russia, examines the role of quasi-democratic participation mechanisms in reinforcing authoritarian regimes. Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics,  Democratization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Washington Post.


REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY


The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

 

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Anna Grzymała-Busse
Kathryn Stoner
Anna Grzymała-Busse, Kathryn Stoner

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Hannah Chapman Theodore Romanoff Assistant Professor of Russian Studies and Assistant Professor, International & Area Studies Presenter Oklahoma University
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Laia Balcells — The Impact of Transitional Justice Museums: Comparative Evidence from three Randomized Control Trials

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LaiaBalcellsSeminar

Societies transitioning from conflict and/or authoritarianism have increasingly built Transitional Justice (TJ) museums to explore their legacies of violence and repression, and to contribute to a culture of democracy, pluralism, and societal reconciliation. However, until recently, the impact of such museums had been assumed and not rigorously evaluated. This talk will be presenting results of three different experimental studies conducted in TJ museums/exhibits around the world: the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile (with Valeria Palanza and Elsa Voytas), the "Troubles and Beyond" exhibit in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland (with Elsa Voytas), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (with Francesca Parente and Ethan vanderWilden). The talk will offer comparative lessons from these three studies. In addition, it will present evidence from a recently built TJ museum database (with vanderWilden and Voytas) with the goal to examine macro-level patterns of post-conflict memorialistic initiatives around the world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Laia Balcells is the Christopher F. Gallagher Family Professor of Government at Georgetown University, where she is also core faculty of the M.A. in Conflict Resolution, and a faculty affiliate of Gui2de, the BMW Center for German and European Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS).

Balcells's research and teaching are at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. She received my BA (with highest distinction) in Political Science from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), including a full academic year as an Erasmus student at Sciences Po (Toulouse). Balcells began her graduate studies at the Juan March Institute (Madrid), and earned her Ph.D. from Yale University.

Balcells has been an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University (2012-2017), a Niehaus Visiting Associate Research Scholar at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (2015-16), and Chair of Excellence at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2017).

Her first book, Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence during Civil War, was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics). The book  was a runner-up for the Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Award (2018).

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

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Laia Balcells Christopher F. Gallagher Family Professor of Government Presenter Georgetown University
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Emil Kamalov — Reversing Brain Drain from Autocracies: Autocratic Policies, Regime Change, and Return Migration

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EmilKamalovSeminar1.15.26

Autocratic regimes often view emigration as a safety valve to reduce dissent, yet this strategy creates costly brain drain. Can autocracies draw politically motivated emigrants back with selective incentives, or is regime change the only viable option? We develop a three-dimensional model of return decisions, integrating conditions in host, home, and potential third countries. We argue that return is unlikely unless the home country restores core conditions—especially political freedoms—whose erosion triggered emigration, making selective incentives or return-promotion policies largely ineffective. Even when political change occurs, return remains limited among those who already enjoy political liberties abroad or can re-emigrate elsewhere. We test our theory using a conjoint experiment with 7,500 war-induced Russian emigrants across 100 countries, supplemented by open-ended feedback and longitudinal data. Democratization emerges as the minimum threshold for return, giving autocracies little leverage to reverse brain drain; where return occurs, it may ultimately strengthen opposition rather than incumbents.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Emil Kamalov has focused his research at the intersection of autocratic control, political behavior, migration, and repression, utilizing advanced quantitative methods complemented by qualitative data.

In his PhD thesis and papers, Emil develops an integrated account of extraterritorial opposition politics, examining how geopolitical tensions and host-country conditions shape emigrant activism, diaspora resilience, and migrant well-being. His findings demonstrate that under certain conditions, transnational repression by autocratic regimes can strengthen rather than weaken diaspora activism.

In collaboration with Ivetta Sergeeva, Emil co-founded and co-leads the OutRush project, the only ongoing multi-wave panel survey focusing on Russian political emigrants following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The OutRush project includes over 18,000 survey observations across four waves, covering respondents from more than 100 countries. The project has garnered substantial international media coverage and has drawn attention from policymakers and experts. Emil received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute.

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

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Emil Kamalov

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SURF Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-26
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Emil Kamalov's research interests lie at the intersection of autocratic control, political behavior, migration, and repression, utilizing advanced quantitative methods complemented by qualitative data.

In his PhD thesis and papers, Emil develops an integrated account of extraterritorial opposition politics, examining how geopolitical tensions and host-country conditions shape emigrant activism, diaspora resilience, and migrant well-being. His findings demonstrate that under certain conditions, transnational repression by autocratic regimes can strengthen rather than weaken diaspora activism.

In collaboration with Ivetta Sergeeva, Emil co-founded and co-leads the OutRush project, the only ongoing multi-wave panel survey focusing on Russian political emigrants following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The OutRush project includes over 18,000 survey observations across four waves, covering respondents from more than 100 countries. The project has garnered substantial international media coverage and has drawn attention from policymakers and experts.

Emil is expected to receive his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in September 2025.

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Sanjeev Khagram — Innovating an AI-Powered Global Resilience Intelligence Platform and Partnership (GRIPP) for Good Governance, Human Security, and Sustainable Development

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Sanjeev Khagram seminar

This seminar will introduce the prototype of an innovative new AI-powered decision-making intelligence platform that forecasts country trajectories with scenario analysis, predictive analytics, hotspot detection, causal explanations through large language models, etc., for a range of outcomes central to CDDRL and FSI's missions — effective governance, human security, and sustainable development. The initial use case is for political resilience and its inverse, fragility, conflict, and violence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is a world-renowned leader, entrepreneur, scholar, and professor across the academic, private, public, and civic sectors. His specialities include global leadership and management across sectors, entrepreneurship and innovation, the data revolution and 4th Industrial Revolution — including AI, sustainable development and human security, good governance and accountability, globalization and transnationalism, public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks. Dr. Khagram holds all of his transdisciplinary bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the GCC, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Management Science and Engineering.  He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Emerging Markets Working Group, where he leads the Global Reslience Intelligence Platform Partnership (GRIPP), and at the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness, where he leads the AI and Sustainability Initiative at Stanford.

Khagram was most recently CEO, Director-General, and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, 2018-2024, which he took to #1 in International Trade with QS World University Rankings. He is on leave from his position as Foundation Professor of Global Leadership and Global Futures at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.  Previously, he was the inaugural Young Professor of Global Political Economy at Occidental College, Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Founding Director of the Lindenberg Center for International Development, Professor at the University of Washington, and Associate Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Khagram is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Dr. Khagram has published widely including the award winning book Dams and Development with Cornell University Press; Restructuring World Politics with University of Minnesota Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability with Brookings Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance" in Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, “Towards a Platinum Standard for Evidence-Based Assessment,” in Public Administration Review, “Social Balance Sheets” in Harvard Business Review, “Evidence for Development Effectiveness” in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, and “From Human Security and the Environment to Sustainable Security and Development,” in the Journal of Human Development.

Dr. Khagram has worked extensively in global leadership roles across international organizations, government, business, and civil society from the local to the international levels around the world. Dr. Khagram has established and led a range of global multi-stakeholder initiatives over the last three decades, including the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the World Commission on Dams, authoring its widely acclaimed final report.  

Dr. Khagram was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, was a senior advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and Founder/CEO of Innovations for Scaling Impact – a global technology enterprise solutions network. He is currently Chair of the Board of United Platform Solutions (an African AI-IOT Pollution Monitoring Venture) and Vice Chair of Altos Bank (the first new bank in Silicon Valley since 2008).

Dr. Khagram was born in Uganda as a fourth-generation East African Indian.  He and his family were expelled by Idi Amin and spent several years in refugee camps before being provided asylum in the United States in the 1970s.  He has lived and worked across all regions of the world and travelled to over 140 countries.

Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner

Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456
Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Philippines Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Sanjeev Khagram

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, 2025-26
CISAC Visiting Scholar, 2024-25
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Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is a world-renowned leader, entrepreneur, scholar, and professor across the academic, private, public, and civic sectors. His specialities include global leadership and management across sectors, entrepreneurship and innovation, the data revolution and 4th Industrial Revolution — including AI, sustainable development and human security, good governance and accountability, globalization and transnationalism, public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks. Dr. Khagram holds all of his transdisciplinary bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the GCC, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Management Science and Engineering.  He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Emerging Markets Working Group, where he leads the Global Reslience Intelligence Platform Partnership (GRIPP), and at the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness, where he leads the AI and Sustainability Initiative at Stanford.

Khagram was most recently CEO, Director-General, and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, 2018-2024, which he took to #1 in International Trade with QS World University Rankings. He is on leave from his position as Foundation Professor of Global Leadership and Global Futures at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.  Previously, he was the inaugural Young Professor of Global Political Economy at Occidental College, Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Founding Director of the Lindenberg Center for International Development, Professor at the University of Washington, and Associate Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Khagram is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Dr. Khagram has published widely including the award winning book Dams and Development with Cornell University Press; Restructuring World Politics with University of Minnesota Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability with Brookings Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance" in Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, “Towards a Platinum Standard for Evidence-Based Assessment,” in Public Administration Review, “Social Balance Sheets” in Harvard Business Review, “Evidence for Development Effectiveness” in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, and “From Human Security and the Environment to Sustainable Security and Development,” in the Journal of Human Development.

Dr. Khagram has worked extensively in global leadership roles across international organizations, government, business, and civil society from the local to the international levels around the world. Dr. Khagram has established and led a range of global multi-stakeholder initiatives over the last three decades, including the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the World Commission on Dams, authoring its widely acclaimed final report.  

Dr. Khagram was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, was a senior advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and Founder/CEO of Innovations for Scaling Impact – a global technology enterprise solutions network. He is currently Chair of the Board of United Platform Solutions (an African AI-IOT Pollution Monitoring Venture) and Vice Chair of Altos Bank (the first new bank in Silicon Valley since 2008).

Dr. Khagram was born in Uganda as a fourth-generation East African Indian.  He and his family were expelled by Idi Amin and spent several years in refugee camps before being provided asylum in the United States in the 1970s.  He has lived and worked across all regions of the world and travelled to over 140 countries.

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Examining the Past, Present, and Future of Silicon Valley’s Relationship with the Government

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Melissa Morgan
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The story of Silicon Valley is one of perpetual reinvention and innovation. During the Cold War, farmlands that had grown produce transformed into research facilities where major breakthroughs in aerospace, defense, and data processing were made. With support from  the U.S. government, technologies like GPS, Google, Siri, would grow.

This ecosystem of innovation continues to evolve today. While public sector programs continue to lead in areas such as nuclear weapons research and classified defense technologies, private companies and startups are increasingly outpacing government labs in critical technology areas such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, energy systems, and space launch. 

With so much economic, defense, and societal potential built into these technologies, creating effective partnerships between private companies and government is more important than ever.

In “Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government,” Stanford students, and now the public, have a front row seat to hear how these collaborations took root. First launched by Ernestine Fu Mak in 2016 as small, closed-door sessions, the series has expanded into a class where students and the public alike can hear directly from technology experts, business executives, and public service leaders about the past, present, and future of how their industries overlap.

“When national missions generated in Washington meet the ingenuity and drive resident in our nation’s premier hub of innovation, world changing technological breakthroughs follow,” says Joe Felter, a lecturer and director of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, which is based at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “The Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government series exposes students in real time to how this partnership and collaboration continues to help us meet national security and other critical emerging challenges.”

The course is offered through the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department and Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program, and co-led by Mak, Steve Blank, Joe Felter, and Eric Volmar, with ongoing support from Steve Bowsher. All of the seminars are available via the playlist below, with more being released throughout fall quarter.

Mak, who is co-director of Stanford Frontier Technology Lab and an investor in national security startups at Brave Capital, explains the importance of fostering these kinds of connections and bringing students into the conversation.

“The future of national security depends on collaboration, and this seminar is our effort to help forge those connections,” she says. “It’s been exciting to watch it evolve—and continue to grow—into a platform that bridges communities that rarely share the same room: students, technologists, policymakers, investors, and public-sector innovators.”

In its early years, the series featured government leaders like former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, founders of pioneering companies in satellite imagery and robotics, and leaders from organizations such as the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. More recently, CEOs like Hidden Level's Jeff Cole, whose company develops stealth and radar technology, and Baiju Bhatt of Aetherflux, a space solar power venture, have joined the discussion series.

Strengthening this flow of expertise between government and innovation hubs like Silicon Valley is key to the future and success of both sectors, and the students of today will be the leaders and policymakers of tomorrow driving those ventures, observes Eric Volmar, the teaching lead at the Gordian Knot Center.

"In modern entrepreneurship, every founder needs to be thinking about the policy aspects of their technologies. In modern government, every leader needs to be thinking about how emerging technologies affect national priorities,” says Volmer. “Tech and policy are fusing together, and our whole purpose is to prepare students for this new era.”

By giving students the opportunity to hear the personal accounts of innovators who have paved the way in addressing national issues and societal challenges through entrepreneurship, the co-leaders of “Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government” hope to encourage students to do the same.

“Students are looking to be inspired—to be mission-driven. Service to the country is one of those missions. Hearing how others have answered the call is what these seminars are all about," says Steve Blank, a lecturer and founding member of the Gordian Knot Center.

“Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government” meets once per week each fall and spring quarter. It can be found in the Stanford Courses catalogue as CEE 252, and is cross-listed for students in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program as INTLPOL 300V. Recent sessions of the course are posted online every two weeks.

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Students from Gordian Knot Center classes at the White House with NSC Senior Director for Technology and National Security Tarun Chhabra in Washington D.C.
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AI-augmented Class Tackles National Security Challenges of the Future

In classes taught through the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Gordian Knot Center, artificial intelligence is taking a front and center role in helping students find innovative solutions to global policy issues.
AI-augmented Class Tackles National Security Challenges of the Future
Amy Zegart
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Studying the secret world of spycraft

Amy Zegart has devoted her career to understanding national security challenges and emerging threats in the digital age.
Studying the secret world of spycraft
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Recordings of the course “Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government,” co-led by instructors from FSI’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation and the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department, are available online for free.

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Mary Elise Sarotte — Post-Cold War Era as History

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Mary Elise Sarotte — Post-Cold War Era as History

Professor Mary Elise Sarotte, award-winning historian and author of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, will offer reflections on the difficult task of writing history that is still unfolding. Covering the pivotal years from 1989 to 2022, her work traces how early decisions at the end of the Cold War shaped the trajectory of U.S.–Russia relations and contributed to the impasse that continues to trouble the international order today. In this conversation, Sarotte will explore the historian’s challenge of disentangling myth from evidence, of balancing archival distance with contemporary resonance, and of reckoning with a legacy that remains deeply contested and urgently relevant.

The event will begin with opening remarks from Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). The event will conclude with an audience Q&A.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

speakers

Mary Elise Sarotte

Mary Elise Sarotte

Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Kravis Professor of Historical Studies
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Mary Elise Sarotte received her AB in History and Science from Harvard and her PhD in History from Yale. She is an expert on the history of international relations, particularly European and US foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and Western relations with Russia. Her book, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, was shortlisted for both the Cundill Prize and the Duke of Wellington Medal, received the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize Silver Medal, and won the Pushkin House Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book on Russia. Not One Inch is now appearing in multiple Asian and European languages, including a best-selling and updated version in German, Nicht einen Schritt weiter nach Osten. In 2026, Sarotte will return to Yale for a joint appointment as a tenured professor in both the Jackson School of Global Affairs and the School of Organization and Management.

Kathryn Stoner

Kathryn Stoner

Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
full bio

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford, and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner

William J. Perry Conference Room, 2nd Floor
Encina Hall (616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford)

This is a hybrid event. For virtual participation, if prompted for a password, use: 123456

Mary Elise Sarotte Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Presenter Johns Hopkins University
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