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. 

State Building in Africa

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Gayle Smith is a renowned expert on African politics and economics. She has worked on failed states, post-conflict management, and transnational threats in Africa for over 20 years. She served as Special Assistant to the President of the United States and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council under the Clinton Administration. Smith negotiated a ceasefire between Uganda and Rwanda in 1999 and won the National Security Council's Samuel Nelson Drew Award for Distinguished Contribution in Pursuit of Global Peace for her role in the negotiated peace agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia. She has travelled extensively in active war zones and published pioneering analyses of political emergencies and humanitarian interventions in Africa in particular.

Encina Basement Conference Room

Gayle Smith Center for American Progress
Seminars

Nuclear weapons threaten global security, Robert McNamara argues at CISAC event

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Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara urged the elimination of nuclear weapons, in an address to CISAC members and supporters Oct. 18 at Encina Hall. Human infallibility introduces too much risk in maintaining nuclear weapons, he argued, adding that the weapons do not present a viable military strategy in any event.

Forty-two years ago this week, the United States and the Soviet Union came within a hair's breadth of unleashing nuclear destruction upon one another during the Cuban missile crisis, Robert McNamara, defense secretary under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, recounted to scholars and others gathered at a dinner Oct. 18 organized by the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

In post-Cold War meetings between principal players in the crisis, including Soviet generals and Fidel Castro, it became clear that the decision-making process of all three governments had been distorted by misinformation and misjudgment, he said. "Events will always slip out of control," McNamara said as he repeated one of the lessons delineated in the 2004 documentary Fog of War: The indefinite combination of human fallibility with nuclear weapons leads to human destruction. "The only way to eliminate the risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons," he said.

The current weapons policy of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is folly, the 88-year-old McNamara said. In 45 years of working on nuclear weapons issues, "I've never seen a document outlining a plan that shows how we would benefit by using nuclear weapons," he said. To use such weapons against a nuclear state is suicide, to use them against a non-nuclear state would be politically unwise and morally repugnant, he added.

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Paul K. MacDonald

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 724-5694 (650) 723-0089
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CISAC Fellow
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Paul K. MacDonald is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and a 2004-2005 predoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on how great powers utilize the institution of imperial rule in order to exert control over less powerful polities in the international system. Most recently, he has published research on the epistemological foundations of rational choice theory in the American Political Science Review and on the relevance of evolutionary biology to international politics in International Security.

Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: Implications for U.S. Policy in Northeast Asia

I am a child of the Cold War. As such, my thinking for decades was conditioned by the great issue of that era: How to maintain freedom in the face of our perceptions of Soviet ambitions for world domination?

For the first few decades of the Cold War, the United States strategy for achieving this objective was containment backed up with a powerful nuclear deterrence. But as the nuclear arms race heated up, it became increasingly clear that this strategy risked precipitating a nuclear holocaust. Thus, by the late sixties, nuclear arms control had become the overriding security issue - certainly it dominated my thinking on security during that era.

But with the ending of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear holocaust receded and arms control, as we had practiced it during that era, was no longer the dominant security issue. The most serious threat to the United States became nuclear weapons in the hands of failed states or terrorists - used not in a standard military operation, but in extortive or apocalyptic ways. Therefore, in the present era, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons replaces arms control as the organizing principle for our security. Certainly it has dominated my thinking on security for the last decade.

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Oksenberg Conference Room

William J. Perry
Lectures

Which Path to Peace? Autonomous Recovery and International Intervention in Comparative Perspective

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Assistant Professor of Political Science and CDDRL Faculty Associate, Jeremy Weinstein, will present a paper on whether or not states embroiled in violent conflict are better able to emerge with a stable peace when left to their own devices as opposed to receiving aid from the international community. Weinstein's research has focused on civil war and insurgencies in Africa in particular. He is the author of the forthcoming book manuscript, Inside Rebellion: The Political Economy of Rebel Organization.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Jeremy M. Weinstein Assistant Professor of Political Science , Faculty Associate Speaker CDDRL
Seminars
Conflict Resolution

Stanford hosts researchers from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

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On October 13, 2004 the Korean Studies Program at the Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region at the Center for International Security and Cooperation hosted a delegation from the Institute of Disarmament and Peace, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The discussion at today's workshop was wide-ranging, with participants exchanging views on the current state of relations in Northeast Asia. This gathering is part of ongoing efforts in both countries to enhance mutual understanding and to reduce tensions in the region.

The U.S. participants were, in alphabetical order, Ambassador Michael Armacost, Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow, APARC; Ellsworth Culver, founder and senior vice president, Mercy Corps; John W. Lewis, director, Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region; Daniel Okimoto, director emeritus, APARC; Gi-Wook Shin, director, Korean Studies Program at APARC; Susan Shirk, professor, University of California, San Diego; and Philip Yun, Pantech Fellow in Korean Studies, APARC. The guests from North Korea were Kim Myong Gil, Choe Kang Il, Jong Tong Hak, and Ri Hak Chol, all from the Institute of Disarmament and Peace.

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Social Protection Around the World

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Isabela Mares, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Victoria Schuck Faculty Scholar will discuss social security and social protection systems in the developed and developing world. Mares has written extensively on social welfare systems and social policy development in France and Germany. Her recent research has also touched on comparisons with developing states. Mares is the author of the 2003 Cambridge University Press book The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Isabela Mares Assistant Professor of Political Science Stanford University
Seminars

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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