Washington DC time:  7:00pm-8:30pm, 9-Nov. 2020
Sydney, Australia time: 11:00am-12:30pm, 10-Nov. 2020 

Expectations of India’s rise have been dented in 2020. Amid lackluster economic performance and creeping socio-political illiberalism, India also suffered a major strategic setback. Chinese forces that crossed the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh remain encamped at several tactically-valuable points, and although talks continue, India has few visible options to force a return to the status quo ante. India now sees China is more clearly adversarial terms – but does it have what it takes to compete effectively? This conversation will conclude the APARC South Asia’s fall 2020 colloquium series on the India-China strategic competition with a wider and deeper look at India’s political and military power. We will discuss India’s ability to deter and balance China, its strategies to build national power and align with new partners, and the prospects for the competition in 2021 and beyond.
 

Ashley J. Tellis holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously he was commissioned into the Foreign Service and served as senior adviser to the ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. While serving as the senior adviser to the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, he was intimately involved in negotiating the civil nuclear agreement with India. He also served on the National Security Council staff as special assistant to President George W. Bush and senior director for strategic planning and Southwest Asia. Prior to his government service, Tellis was senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation and professor of policy analysis at the RAND Graduate School. He is a counselor at the National Bureau of Asian Research and serves as an adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He is the author of India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture (2001), co-author of Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (2000), and co-editor of the sixteen latest annual volumes of Strategic Asia. He earned his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

 

Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, the Observer Research Foundation, and the East-West Center in Washington. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defence Department, which included operational deployments as well as a diplomatic posting to Washington, DC. Tarapore holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

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The Stanford China Program convenes an expert panel focused on the Decision of the fifth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which took place on October 26-29.  The Fifth Plenum Decision outlines not only China’s 14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025), but also Beijing’s economic blueprint through 2035 and the “goal of fully building a modern socialist country."  The CCP leadership recently articulated its “dual circulation” policy – viz., a drastic reduction in China’s dependence on U.S. technologies and increased reliance on domestic consumption while maintaining exports and attracting foreign direct investments.  At this critical juncture when the coronavirus pandemic has shrunk global trade and tensions between the U.S. and China continue to intensify, our panel members will be asked to examine what the Fifth Plenum Decision might signify.  Does it mark a significant shift in Beijing’s strategic economic orientation?  What are the short- and long-term implications of the Decision for China’s economic development strategy, U.S.-China relations, as well as the world’s economic and technology ecosystems?  
 

Speakers

James Green has worked for over two decades on U.S.-Asia relations. For five years, Green was the Minister Counselor for Trade Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (2013-2018).  As the senior official in China from the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Green was deeply involved in all aspects of trade negotiations, trade enforcement, and in reducing market access barriers for American entities.  In prior government service, Green worked on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and at the State Department’s China Desk on bilateral affairs. He also served as the China Director of the White House’s National Security Council.  In the private sector, Green was a senior vice president at the global strategy firm founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and was the founding government relations manager at the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, Asia’s largest AmCham.  Currently, Green is a Senior Research Fellow at Georgetown University's Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues and hosts a U.S.-China Dialogue Podcast.   

Xiaomeng Lu is a senior analyst in Eurasia Group's geo-technology practice. She focuses on the interactions of emerging technologies with geopolitics, market dynamics, and regulatory norms. Lu provides in-depth analysis on key policy issues such as cybersecurity, data protection, artificial intelligence, internet governance, 5G, and trade.

Before joining Eurasia Group, Lu was the China practice lead at the consulting firm Access Partnership. In this capacity, she helped top financial and cloud service providers of the US enter China's market amid the trade war between the two countries. She also played a key role in establishing and expanding the company's first office in Asia, which generated over $1 million in revenue in three years. Previously, Lu worked as a global policy director at the Information Technology Industry Council, where she conducted successful advocacy campaigns that led to the suspension of onerous regulatory regimes, helping global electronics manufacturers save billions in potential losses. Lu has a master's degree in international trade policy from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a bachelor's degree in economics from Renmin University of China.

Damien Ma is Director and co-founder of MacroPolo, the Think Tank of the Paulson Institute. He is also adjunct faculty at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Previously, Ma was a Senior Analyst at Eurasia Group, the political risk research and advisory firm. At Eurasia Group, he mainly focused on the China and East Asian markets, covering areas that spanned energy and commodities and industrial policy to elite politics and US-China relations. Prior to joining Eurasia Group, he was a manager of publications at the US-China Business Council in Washington, DC, where he was also an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins SAIS. 

In addition, Ma has published widely, including in The Atlantic, New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and Bloomberg, among others. He has also appeared in a range of broadcast media such as the Charlie Rose Show, BBC, NPR, and CNBC. He is the author or editor of the books, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade, The Economics of Air Pollution in China (by Ma Jun), and China’s Economic Arrival: Decoding a Disruptive Rise, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Ma was named a “99 under 33” foreign policy leader by the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. 

 

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This event is part of the 2020 Fall Colloquia series, Shifting Geopolitics and U.S.-Asia Relations​, sponsored by Shorenstein APARC.

This event is held virtually via Zoom. Please register for the webinar via the below link.

Registration Link: https://bit.ly/2SS6DpY

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Shorenstein APARC Japan Program and China Program.

Japan's economic challenge to the United States in the 1980s aroused more concern in the United States than people now realize. Japan took some very effective steps to stop it. China's challenge plays out across the economic, military, technological, and global influence spheres. China has not yet taken steps to stop it and the tensions are increasingly serious and show no signs of diminishing. Japan has also found better ways to reduce tensions with China than has the United States. While the circumstances are different between the 1980s and today, Japan’s dealings with the United States in the 1980s might offer some lessons for China today. Dr. Ezra Vogel, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, will discuss these topics and more during this webinar. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A moderated by Japan Program Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui and China Program Director Jean Oi.

SPEAKER

Professor Ezra F. Vogel is Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Vogel received his PhD at Harvard in 1958 in Sociology in the Department of Social Relations and was a professor at Harvard from 1967-2000. In 1973, he succeeded John Fairbank to become the second Director of Harvard's East Asian Research Center. At Harvard, he served as director of the US-Japan Program, director of the Fairbank Center, and as the founding director of the Asia Center. From fall 1993 to fall 1995, Vogel was the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. His book Japan As Number One (1979), in Japanese translation, became a best seller in Japan, and his book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), in Chinese translation, became a best seller in China. He lectures frequently in Asia, in both Chinese and Japanese. He has received numerous honors, including eleven honorary degrees.

Since the 2016 election, great attention has been paid to the impact of digital technologies on democracy in the United States and around the world.  Foreign intervention into the U.S. campaign through social media and online advertising, including the rise of "fake news" and computational propaganda, exacerbated concerns that new technologies posed a substantial threat to the normal workings of  the U.S. electoral process.  These concerns remain for 2020, alongside new threats related to the COVID-19 pandemic.  With in-person campaigning, voter mobilization, and even voting itself hindered by the pandemic, digital technologies promise to play an even more important role in 2020.  

On December 10, 2020, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center will bring together scholars, tech platforms, principals from the digital campaigns, journalists, and other key experts to explore the effect of digital technologies on the 2020 Election.  The conference will explore the role of digital technologies on election administration, campaign tactics, political advertising, the news media, foreign propaganda efforts, and the broader campaign information ecosystem.  It will also consider how changes in platform policies affected the campaign and information environment, and whether lessons learned in the 2020 elections suggest that further changes are warranted.  

9AM:   Introduction: Kelly Born, Stanford Cyber Policy Center

9:10:    Findings from the Stanford/MIT Healthy Elections Project:  Nate Persily, Stanford Law School

9:30:    Trends in 2020 Political Advertising:  Erika Franklin Fowler, Wesleyan Media Project

9:50:    Online Political Transparency:  Laura Edelson, New York University Political Ads Project

10:10:  BREAK

10:20: Center for Technology and Civic Life’s Elections Project:  Tiana Epps-Johnson, CTCL

10:40:  Platform Speech Policies and the Elections: Daniel Kreiss and Bridget Barrett, University of North             Carolina at Chapel Hill

11:00:  Findings from the Election Integrity Project:  Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta, Stanford Internet             Observatory

11:20: BREAK

11:30:  Experiences from the Platforms

• Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy at Facebook
• Clement Wolf, Global Public Policy Lead for Information Integrity at Google
• Yoel Roth, Director of Site Integrity at Twitter
• Eric Han, Head of Safety at TikTok

12:30:  Full Panel Q&A/Discussion

1PM     Close

This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department.  The application period opens on January 11, 2021 and runs through February 12, 2021.   CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

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

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

 

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

 

About the Event: Research on social media and politics has largely focused on two very different political contexts: authoritarian regimes and “normal” democratic polities. However, many countries’ political systems exist between these extremes: there is both “normal” online mobilization and efforts at manipulation that emanate in whole or in part from state-linked actors. In this article, we focus on a country with such a system: Pakistan. We investigate the politics of social media in the run-up to Pakistan’s 2018 general election. The campaign involved both intense, large-scale electoral mobilization and recurrent, credible allegations of influence by the country’s politically powerful army. We analyze millions of Twitter posts in English and Urdu by major political actors and their followers in Pakistan before and just after the 2018 election to identify patterns of 1) normal mobilization and 2) coordinated manipulation. Several findings emerge. First, the main political parties were highly active on social media, with the eventually-victorious Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan showing a noticeable edge in online enthusiasm that matches the substantial victory of the PTI in the election. Second, there was a noticeable “dissident sphere” on Twitter, seeking to get around a campaign of censorship and media influence by the military. However, dissidents’ messages were largely swamped by the broader party competition and narratives favorable to the PTI and the military. Third, we find evidence of coordinated activities. This appears to have largely favored the PTI and pro-military messages, which saw a substantially higher rate of amplification. Finally, we see evidence of narrative alignment between the PTI and the military – the clusters of their followers seemed to advance pro-PTI and anti-PML-N messages; pro-PTI and anti-PML-N narratives were pervasive in the PML-N and dissident clusters.

 

About the Speakers: 

Asfandyar Mir is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His research interests are in international security with current work focusing on counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, drone warfare, US counterterrorism policy, South Asia security issues, misinformation dynamics, and Al-Qaida. Some of his research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as International Security, International Studies Quarterly, and Security Studies. My commentary has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, H-Diplo, Lawfare, and Washington Post Monkey Cage.

 

Tamar Mitts is Assistant Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and a Faculty Member at the Data Science Institute and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Her research applies machine learning and text analysis methods to study political behavior in the digital age, and has been published in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Political Science Research and Methods, among other outlets.

 

Paul Staniland is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research focuses on political violence and international security in South Asia. Staniland’s first book, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, was published by Cornell University Press in 2014, and his second book, Armed Politics: Violence, Order, and the State in South Asia, will be published by Cornell in 2022.

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

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/Q6-ErAxGmQ0

 

About the Event: While research into why repression varies has thrived, essentially no effort has been made to examine stopping large-scale applications once underway. We put forward a new theoretical framework that conceptualizes repressive behavior as a rare/slow-changing process that is unlikely to terminate unless it is perturbed by a significant cost. As such, we maintain that repression is more likely ended by democratization than from diverse factors commonly espoused in the literature and policy community (e.g., military intervention, naming/shaming, international law and economic sanctions). Investigating a new database regarding 239 high-level repression spells for the period 1976-2007, we find that democratization is associated with spell-termination, while there is little systematic pacifying influence for other factors. Additionally, we find that non-violent movements for change largely drive democratization but that these movements have little direct impact on state repression themselves.

Draft Paper

 

About the Speaker: Christian Davenport is a Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and Elected Fellow at the American Association for the Arts and Sciences. Primary research interests include political conflict, measurement, racism and popular culture. He is the author of seven books and author of numerous articles appearing in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science and the Annual Review of Political Science (among others). He is the recipient of numerous grants (e.g., 12 from the National Science Foundation) and awards.

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

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/5-om1-NWqv0

 

About the Event: Traditional international law is not sufficient for the oversight of emerging uses of the space environment, such as in situ resource utilization and increased militarization and weaponization. The US is pushing the boundaries through innovative contracting, governance instruments such as the Artemis Accords and new institutions such as the Space Force to test the space governance system. This presentation outlines a framework for organizing the system as a whole, including international agreements, national space policy and stakeholder interactions and interrelations.

 

About the Speaker: Aganaba is an assistant professor for the School for the Future in Innovation in Society with a courtesy appointment at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.

She is most known in her industry for promoting the regulation of technologies to be utilized against climate change. This has expanded to the use of satellites to measure greenhouse gas emissions.

She has received the Young Space Leaders Award from the International Astronautical Federation. She has served as the executive director of the World Space Week Association and trainee legal officer for the Nigerian Space Research and Development Agency.