THIS EVENT STARTS AT 2:40PM. Introductions will start at 2:40pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes with a 10 minute discussion.

 

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

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Y4kF9dTJTJinogbJqvNSpw

 

About the Event: How do U.S. and UN targeted sanctions impact the behavior and strategies of militant groups? Despite several theories on the use of sanctions to punish non-state actors, scholars have largely neglected the impact of targeted sanction application on militant group behavior. This thesis combines an original dataset of 160 U.S. and UN sanction regimes with data on the activity of over 600 militant groups to examine the relationship between sanction imposition and militant activity. The results show mixed impact of sanctions on militant activity. While UN targeted sanctions precipitate falls in militant activity, unilateral U.S. sanctions are associated with a significant increase in violence committed by sanctioned groups. Comparative analysis of two militant groups in India –The National Democratic Front of Bodoland and Hizbul Mujahideen– explores the causality of this finding. U.S. sanctions strip militant groups of international legitimacy but often fail to limit their availability to resources. As a result, U.S. sanctions reduce the incentives of non-state actors to seek international recognition and constrain the forms of violence and insurgency they employ. This thesis illustrates the importance of international cooperation in ensuring targeted sanctions effectively limit the operating capabilities of militant groups.

 

About the Speaker: Nathalie is a senior from Kansas City, Kansas, studying Economics and Political Science. Her experiences working for the World Bank and studying at Oxford have made her passionate about the intersection of economic development, human rights, and violence prevention. After graduation, she plans on conducting economic analysis for the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity in Washington, D.C.

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The strategic competition between India and China has turned deadly in the Himalayas, but the stakes may be higher elsewhere, in the Bay of Bengal. While India gradually fortifies its island outposts in the Bay, China is preparing for a long-term naval presence there. Both countries are scrambling to build security cooperation with littoral states, especially Bangladesh and Myanmar. This webinar will explore what makes the Bay of Bengal a particularly important sub-region of the Indo-Pacific. It will consider how China’s growing political and military influence poses security risks for India, and how India and its partners – including the United States and the Quad – can build resilience and deterrence in the Bay of Bengal.  

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC's spring webinar series "The United States in the Biden Era: Views from Asia."

When this webinar is held, Joe Biden’s presidency will be exactly three months old. Enough time to allow for the evaluation of his administration, its policies, and his country by observers around the world, including in Southeast Asia. Ms. Ha will share and interpret the findings of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s latest annual survey of elite Southeast Asian opinions regarding the United States and other nations, which she co-led and co-wrote up with ISEAS colleagues.  Professor Liow will will share some observations on regional views on the Biden administration thus far, focusing on its evolving approach to the region .  Regional impressions and judgments of America now and prior to Biden’s term will also be contrasted, alongside the changing reputations of other countries such as China and Japan.  Policy implications will be drawn as well, especially in light of the unfolding political crisis in Myanmar.

Hoang Thi HA is Fellow and Lead Researcher on Political-Security Affairs at the ASEAN Studies Centre of ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. Her research focuses on political-security issues within ASEAN, including the South China Sea disputes, ASEAN human rights cooperation, ASEAN's relations with the major powers and ASEAN's institutional building. Ms. Hoang worked at the ASEAN Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam and the ASEAN Secretariat before joining ISEAS. She holds an MA in International Relations from the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam.

Joseph Chinyong Liow is Dean of College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he is also Tan Kah Kee Chair in Comparative and International Politics, and Research Advisor and former Dean at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He held the inaugural Lee Kuan Yew Chair in Southeast Asia Studies at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC, where he was also a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program.

Joseph’s research interests encompass Muslim politics and social movements in Southeast Asia and the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the Asia-Pacific region.

Joseph is the author, co-author, or editor of 14 books, has testified before the U.S. Congress, and has extensive teaching and consultancy experience. He sits on several editorial boards and governing boards of think tanks, and on the Social Science Research Council of Singapore.

 

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

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/L04_-G6N7Go

 

About the Event: What can wargames tell us about the ethics of decision-making under the threat of nuclear escalation? The “Cold War Game” (CWG) that took place from 1954-1956 at the RAND Corporation offers insights into the origins of deterrence and the dilemmas of contemplating the possible futures of war with rare events or little empirical data through the method of gaming. Based on extensive archival research at RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, this project identifies the methodological and epistemological issues faced by early systems analysts and social scientists in attempting to link political and economic issues to traditional military wargaming in the nuclear era. The CWG sought to both quantify the non-rational or social dimensions of nuclear decision-making as well as develop psychological insights, to recognize the ways that propaganda and psychology were used as techniques of warfare alongside the quantitative and rational analytics of game theory. I argue that discussions of the ethics of nuclear weapons were sidelined throughout the Cold War for nuclear strategists and my questions examine how ethics functioned even it its absence of explicit discourse. Nevertheless, a kind of ethical restraint became implicit throughout the CWG that tempered even the most bellicose players through the process of physical play by forcing strategists to face the weight of their decisions. Differing epistemological approaches to the game from the social science division and the mathematics/economics division at RAND offers a unique empirical test to compare qualitative and quantitative approaches to wargaming operating within the same context of uncertainty in the early Cold War period. The conclusions of this study offers insights for contemporary dilemmas of AI and wargaming the future of war today. Ultimately, the project offers both an in-depth look at the origins of the political-military wargames and interjects with the larger questions of how abstraction and technostrategic language enables and constrains the acceptable discourse for decision-making in the face of nuclear brinksmanship.

 

 

About the Speaker: John R. Emery is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine and then became a Tobis Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality at UC Irvine. His research agenda is at the intersection of security studies, ethics of war, and science and technology studies. His previous work on drones, ethics, AI, and counter-terrorism has been published in Law & Policy, Critical Military Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, and Peace Review. His current research agenda explores issues of human-machine interaction in the U.S. national security context analyzing both historical and contemporary cases.

On Wednesday, May 26 at 10 am pacific time, please join Andrew Grotto, Director of Stanford’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance, for a conversation with Nicole Perlroth, New York Times Cybersecurity Reporter, about the underground market for cyber-attack capabilities.

In her book “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race,” Perlroth argues that the United States government became the world's dominant hoarder of one of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, the zero-day vulnerability. After briefly cornering the market, in her account, the United States then lost control of its hoard and the market.

Perlroth and Grotto, a former Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the White House in both the Obama and Trump Administrations, will talk about the development and evolution of this market, and what it portends about the future of conflict in cyberspace and beyond.

This event is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Cyber Policy Center.

Praise for “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends”: “Perlroth's terrifying revelation of how vulnerable American institutions and individuals are to clandestine cyberattacks by malicious hackers is possibly the most important book of the year . . . Perlroth's precise, lucid, and compelling presentation of mind-blowing disclosures about the underground arms race a must-read exposé.” —Booklist, starred review

Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program, Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan

Shocking events obliterate context.  The coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 is a case in point.  Who could imagine the cruelty of the Burmese generals who on February 1^st 2021 grabbed power and proceeded to retain it by arresting thousands and murdering hundreds of its local opponents?  Who expected that on February 2^nd the country’s youth would launch a nonviolent Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) and keep it going and growing against such massively intimidating odds?  In this webinar, two experts will provide the essential but all too often missing contexts—current and historical, domestic and foreign, political and socioeconomic—within which the crisis can be understood, its future projected, and its implications assessed.  To those ends, the on-the-ground knowledge, personal experience, and close observer’s insights of Burmese scholar Moe Thuzar will interact with the insights of American professor David Steinberg based on his Burmese experiences and scholarship dating back into the 20^th century.

The webinar will consider in particular what the coup and its aftermath may imply for Southeast Asia and its relations with China.  Relevant in that regard is the involvement of all four panel members in a recent collection, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21^st Century—Steinberg and Ciorciari as authors, Emmerson as editor, and ­­Thuzar as an analyst who is using the book in her own research. 

David I. Steinberg is Distinguished Professor of Asian Studies Emeritus, Georgetown University, where he directed its Asian studies program (1997-2007). Other positions he has held include the presidency of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs and Southeast Asia-related US foreign-policy posts as a member of the Senior Foreign Service. He has also represented The Asia Foundation in South Korea, Burma, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.  His 15 books and monographs include one translation, more than 150 articles, and several hundred op-eds.. Among these books are: Myanmar: The Dynamics of an Evolving Polity (ed., 2015); Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013, 2^nd edition); Modern China-Myanmar Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual Dependence (with Fan Hongwei, 2012); Turmoil in Burma: Contested Legitimacies in Myanmar (2006); Burma: The State of Myanmar (2001); and Burma’s Road to Development (1981). His expertise includes the two Koreas, about which he has written widely. Professor Steinberg was educated at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Harvard University, Darmouth College, and Lingnan University in Canton (now Guangzhou), China.

Moe Thuzar joined the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore in 2008. Her responsibilities there have included managing or co-managing its Myanmar Studies Programme, serving as a lead researcher in its ASEAN Studies Centre, and helping the Centre engage with Myanmar regarding its turn to chair ASEAN in 2014. She spent the 2019-2020 academic year as a Fox International Fellow at Yale University's MacMillan Center researching the socio-cultural underpinnings of Burma’s Cold War foreign policy for her National University of Singapore PhD. Earlier she worked for a decade at the ASEAN Secretariat, where she headed its Human Development Unit. Her many publications include, as co-author, the 2020 and 2019 editions of ISEAS’s widely read State of Southeast Asia: Survey Report. Other recent writing includes chapters and articles in ASEAN-EU Partnerships: The Untold Story (ed., 2020); the Journal of Southeast Asian Economies (2019); Southeast Asian Affairs (ed., 2019); Human Security Norms in East Asia (ed., 2019); and, as co-author, ASEAN’s Myanmar Dilemma (with Lex Rieffel, 2018). Earlier works include Myanmar: Life After Nargis (with Pavin Chachavalpongpun, 2009).

Co-moderated by John Ciorciari, Director, Weiser Diplomacy Center, University of Michigan, and Donald K. Emmerson, Director, Southeast Asia Program, Stanford University

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

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/sFsmjTf9xUg

 

About the Event: Contemporary global politics are marked by a renewed debate over the significance and limits of state sovereignty. In the eyes of many, the COVID-19 pandemic has reasserted the importance of territorial sovereignty as well as of national identity and citizenship. Populations have become more acutely conscious of their rights and responsibilities as members of a particular political community, and their ultimate reliance upon their governments to protect them from the virus. Well before the outbreak of this pandemic, however, many scholars, policy-analysts, and state officials had already been highlighting the ‘return’ of sovereignty, often in juxtaposition to either the transnational economic forces of globalization or liberal international norms. Powerful economic and political trends (including protectionism and populism) were casting doubt on the reach and impact of liberal ideals such as free movement and economic interdependence. In part, these trends reflected a structural shift in international order in which the relative position of the United States was declining, and the standing of non-Western powers with attachment to what is loosely referred to as “Westphalian” sovereignty was increasing. Although some IR scholars have argued that today’s great powers (Russia, China and the US) are espousing and practicing a new form of “extra-legal sovereignty” (Paris 2020), the former two states - in order to garner wider support for their respective world views - regularly appeal to an understanding of sovereignty that underscores long-standing principles of territorial integrity and political independence.

This book project takes a step back, to more critically analyse the period preceding our current debate. Before we can address the question of whether and how Westphalian sovereignty has returned to shape contemporary global order, we should examine more deeply why sovereignty was alleged to have been transformed in the first place. In other words, what was the nature and reach of the post-Westphalian order that was proclaimed by so many in the first decades of the post-Cold War period?  While analysts and commentators have pointed to several manifestations of this changed understanding of sovereignty, I focus on the liberal idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, which, inter alia, seemingly underpinned the articulation in 2005 of the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’. According to this liberal understanding, sovereignty can no longer be conceived as unrivalled control over a delimited territory and the population residing within it – ‘sovereignty as authority’ – but rather as a status and set of rights which are conditional upon certain behaviours and capacities of states. Sovereignty is thus not solely the right of the state to be “undisturbed from without” but the responsibility to perform certain roles and tasks within its frontiers.

The central aim of this study is to examine the rise, contestation, and potential fate of what some have called this “revolutionary” understanding of sovereignty.  I ask three more specific questions. The first is conceptual and draws upon the history of ideas relating to sovereignty. Was the post-Cold War articulation of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ really so novel? Or was it juxtaposing itself to a very particular historical period, during which non-intervention was championed by newly decolonized states? The second set of issues is empirical. How has sovereignty been understood in the post-Cold War period, particularly through practices of intervention and state recognition? Have the key actors in international society spoken and acted in ways consistent with the liberal understanding of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’? And the final set of questions is normative. Is it desirable to understand sovereignty in this way? What are the benefits and limitations of viewing sovereignty as deeply connected with responsibility?

While the book project is organized around these three central themes, my presentation will focus in, for purposes of illustration, on the ‘responsibility to protect’ (RtoP). This chapter assesses the degree to which ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ has been widely accepted and practiced by states in their interpretation and implementation of this principle and, in so doing, seeks to both account for and analyse the nature and impact of the contestation that surrounds RtoP.  The chapter’s findings suggest that a conditional understanding of sovereignty was not necessarily shared or practiced across international society, even during the height of liberal internationalist ‘moment’ of the post-Cold War period - thereby posing a challenge not just to the proponents of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, but also to some of its fiercest critics, who overstate its negative effects on international politics.

I begin by arguing that while the 2005 Summit Outcome Document (SOD) was a significant intergovernmental agreement that provided greater precision about the source, scope, and bearer of the responsibility to protect, its particular formulation indicates that the logic of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ was not fully embraced.  Instead, the text reflected a horizontal logic, associated with respect for sovereign equality and positive international law, rather than a vertical logic that places the international community in a position of authority over states. While the notions of sovereignty and responsibility did come together, they did so in a way that did not override or replace sovereignty in situations of humanitarian emergency, but rather aimed to reinforce sovereignty and support states in protecting their populations.

In a second step, the chapter analyses the types of contestation that have accompanied RtoP’s development, which relate both to procedural matters (such as the appropriate intergovernmental body that should ‘own’ RtoP’s development) and to substantive elements of the principle – including, most notably, the relationship between national and international responsibility. I suggest that RtoP is particularly susceptible to contestation, given its complex structure and inherently indeterminate nature. I also argue that, far from establishing an independent international authority that specifies and enforces state responsibility, the most that RtoP creates within its so-called third pillar is a responsibility to consider a real or imminent crisis involving atrocity crimes - what in legal literature is sometimes called a ‘duty of conduct’.

In the final section of the chapter, I contend that the contestation surrounding RtoP can be better understood by giving greater attention to the normative underpinnings of contemporary critiques of the principle, most notably those which stress the importance of sovereignty equality. Given that RtoP has continued to be associated – rightly or wrongly – with the use of military force, it has frequently generated sharp debate among states about the meaning of sovereignty, and efforts to assert the continuing power of the principle of non-intervention. The result of this contestation, and the reshaping of RtoP by non-Western states such as China, has been a dampening of the original cosmopolitan roots of the principle and an increased focus on maintaining strong and capable states. In short, while RtoP has created a linkage in international discourse and practice between sovereignty and responsibility, it has not given effect to the liberal understanding of sovereignty as responsibility.

 

 

 

About the Speaker: Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. She was previously Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect.

Professor Welsh is the author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on humanitarian intervention, the evolution of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ in international society, the UN Security Council, norm conflict and contestation, and Canadian foreign policy.

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

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/5616166186207/WN_Zdzl0PrwR7CXSPoASOs5Xg

 

About the Event: Conventional wisdom on proxy warfare exclusively focuses on explaining governments’ provision of military, logistical, and financial support to rebel groups involved in conflict abroad. In reality, foreign militant groups play a much larger role in these partnerships than recognized: foreign militants often provide government partners with intelligence, logistical support, access to their military infrastructure, and send elite units to train and supplement their state partner’s troops. Because armed non-state actors are smaller and face greater difficulties accessing resources, the fact that they provide any type of support – let alone deploying their forces to conduct joint combat operations with state armed forces abroad – is puzzling. In this presentation, I provide insights into the strategic benefits that foreign militants receive from supporting states, identify factors that influence the types of support foreign militants provide to government partners once the decision to provide support has been made, and highlight how foreign militants can constrain and influence their government partners’ future behavior. To do so, I conduct an in-depth examination of the overtime trends in the various types of support that Shia paramilitary groups from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan provided to the Syrian regime and Russian forces throughout the course of the decade-long Syrian conflict.

 

 

About the Speaker: Melissa Carlson is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s Middle East Initiative. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. Her research examines cooperation between states and non-state actors in conflict, and her book manuscript explains variations in the types of support that governments and foreign militants provide to each other. Previously, Melissa has worked with the International Organization of Migration’s Missions in Jordan and Iraq to examine relations between refugees, host governments, and aid organizations.