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. 

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Christopher Darnton has a PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. At CISAC, Christopher is writing a book on the hundred-year history of U.S. security cooperation in Latin America, using declassified military documents to analyze the day-to-day work of alliance politics from the vantage point of officers in the field. How should we explain and understand military roles in inter-American relations beyond specific cases of intervention, and what lessons should inform US defense cooperation and military diplomacy today? Christopher’s broader work examines the domestic and bureaucratic politics of foreign policy in the Americas, particularly related to enduring rivalries and regional wars; conflict resolution and public diplomacy; developing-country diplomacy in the Cold War and in contemporary great power competition; and the refinement of archival and case-study research methods in security studies.

Christopher is an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he has worked since 2016, teaching Latin American politics, international relations, and US foreign policy. Before NPS, Christopher taught for seven years at the Catholic University of America, and before that, for a year at Reed College. Christopher also served as president of the Foreign Policy section of the American Political Science Association; as a contributing editor to the Library of Congress' Handbook of Latin American Studies; and as a summer associate at the RAND Corporation.

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Ryan A. Musto is the Director of Forums and Research Initiatives with the Global Research Institute (GRI) at William & Mary.

He is currently completing a book manuscript on the international history of regional nuclear weapon free zones. With his work, Ryan seeks to better understand the geopolitical and geostrategic dynamics that lead to proposals for regional denuclearization and determine their outcome. He also looks to further situate nuclear weapons within our understanding of the global north-south divide. Ultimately, Ryan aims to produce works of “applied history” that can inform contemporary efforts towards the completion of denuclearized zones and nuclear arms control more broadly.

Ryan served as a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow with CISAC from 2020 - 2022. He has also served as a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and as a Nuclear Security Fellow with the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo, Brazil. His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Cold War History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, and Americas Quarterly, amongst other outlets. Ryan is a frequent contributor to the Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP).

Ryan holds a Ph.D. in history from The George Washington University, master’s degrees in international and world history from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and a B.A. (hons.) in history from New York University (NYU).

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Research Scholar
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Sulgiye Park is a Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Previously, she was a Senior Scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where she specialized in analyzing the nuclear fuel pathways of North Korea and China. She earned her Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Stanford, focusing on the behavior of nuclear materials under extreme environments, and later conducted research at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences on fabricating nanodiamonds for technological applications. As both a Stanton Foundation and MacArthur Foundation Fellow at CISAC, her work encompassed geologic analysis of North Korea’s uranium and critical metal resources, regulatory frameworks for nuclear waste management, and the production and supply chains of rare-earth and other critical metals in the United States.

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John R. Emery is an Assistant Professor of International Security at the University of Oklahoma in the Department of International and Area Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses broadly on the intersection of ethics of war, security studies and technology. His work on 1950s nuclear wargaming at the RAND Corporation and the impact of wargames on ethical intuition has been published in Texas National Security Review. Previous work on drones, ethics, counter-terrorism, and just war is published in Critical Military Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, and Peace Review. In 2017-2018 he was awarded the NSF-funded Technology, Law and Society Fellowship to undertake an interdisciplinary study of the impact of AI, Big Data, and blockchain on law and society scholarship.

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Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, sponsored by Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. His research agenda centers on technological change and international politics. His book project investigates how past technological revolutions influenced the rise and fall of great powers, with implications for U.S.-China competition in emerging technologies like AI. Other research papers tackle how states should identify strategic technologies, assessments of national scientific and technological capabilities, and interstate cooperation on nuclear safety and security technologies. Jeff's work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, The Washington Post, and other outlets. Jeff received his PhD in 2021 from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He has also worked as a researcher for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and the Centre for the Governance of AI at the University of Oxford.

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Austin R. Cooper is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed his PhD in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and SciencesPo’s Nuclear Knowledges Program.

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Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford Internet Observatory (2021-2022)
Predoctoral Fellow, Stanford Internet Observatory (2020-2021)
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Josh A. Goldstein is a past postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory. He received his PhD in International Relations from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Clarendon Scholar. At the Stanford Internet Observatory, Dr. Goldstein investigated covert influence operations on social media platforms, studied the effects of foreign interference on democratic societies, and explored how emerging technologies will impact the future of propaganda campaigns. He has given briefings to the Department of Defense, the State Department, and senior technology journalists based on this work, and published in outlets including Brookings, Lawfare, and Foreign Policy.

Prior to joining SIO, Dr. Goldstein received an MPhil in International Relations at Oxford with distinction and a BA in Government from Harvard College, summa cum laude. He also assisted with research and writing related to international security at the Belfer Center, Brookings Institution, House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Department of Defense.

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Daphne Keller
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Q&As
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Daphne Keller leads the newly launched Program on Platform Regulation a program designed to offer lawmakers, academics, and civil society groups ground-breaking analysis and research to support wise governance of Internet platforms.

Q: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter rely on algorithms and artificial intelligence to provide services for their users. Could AI also help in protecting free speech and policing hate speech and disinformation?   

DK: Platforms increasingly rely on artificial intelligence and other algorithmic means to automate the process of assessing – and sometimes deleting – online speech. But tools like AI can’t really “understand” what we are saying, and automated tools for content moderation make mistakes all the time. We should worry about platforms’ reliance on automation, and worry even more about legal proposals that would make such automated filters mandatory. Constitutional and human rights law give us a legal framework to push back on such proposals, and to craft smarter rules about the use of AI. I wrote about these issues in this New York Times op ed and in some very wonky academic analysis in the Journal of European and International IP Law.

Q: Can you explain the potential impacts on citizens’ rights when the platforms have global reach but governments do not?

DK: On one hand, people worry about platforms displacing the legitimate power of democratic governments. On the other hand, platforms can actually expand state power in troubling ways. One way they do that is by enforcing a particular country’s speech rules everywhere else in the world. Historically that meant a net export of U.S. speech law and values, as American companies applied those rules to their global platforms. More recently, we’ve seen that trend reversed, with things like European and Indian courts requiring Facebook to take user posts down globally – even if the users’ speech would be legally protected in other countries. Governments can also use soft power, or economic leverage based on their control of access to lucrative markets, to convince platforms to “voluntarily” globally enforce that country’s preferred speech rules. That’s particularly troubling, since the state influence may be invisible to any given users whose rights are affected.   

There is such a pressing need for thoughtful work on the laws that govern Internet platforms right now, and this is the place to do it... We have access to the people who are making these decisions and who have the greatest expertise in the operational realities of the tech platforms.
Daphne Keller
Director of Program on Platform Regulation, Cyber Policy Center Lecturer, Stanford Law School

Q: Are there other ways that platforms can expand state power? 

DK: Yes, platforms can let states bypass democratic accountability and constitutional limits by using private platforms as proxies for their own agenda. States that want to engage in surveillance or censorship are constrained by the U.S. Constitution, and by human rights laws around the world. But platforms aren’t. If you’re a state and you want to do something that would violate the law if you did it yourself, it’s awfully tempting to coerce or persuade a platform to do it for you. This issue of platforms being proxies for other actors isn’t limited to governments – anyone with leverage over a platform, including business partners, can potentially play a hidden role like this.

I wrote about this complicated nexus of state and private power in Who Do You Sue? for the Hoover Institution.    

Q: What inspired you to create the Program on Platform Regulation at the Cyber Policy Center right now?

DK: There is such a pressing need for thoughtful work on the laws that govern Internet platforms right now, and this is the place to do it. At the Cyber Policy Center, there’s an amazing group of experts, like Marietje Schaake, Eileen Donahoe, Alex Stamos and Nate Persily, who are working on overlapping issues. We can address different aspects of the same issues and build on each other’s work to do much more together than we could individually.

The program really benefits from being at Stanford and in Silicon Valley because we have access to the people who are making these decisions and who have the greatest expertise in the operational realities of the tech platforms. 

The Cyber Policy Center is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

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Q&A with Daphne Keller
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Keller explains some of the issues currently surrounding platform regulation

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In March 2020, when many U.S. states and localities issued their first emergency orders to address Covid-19, there was widespread acceptance of the government’s legal authority to respond quickly and aggressively to this unprecedented crisis. Today, that acceptance is fraying. As initial orders expire and states move to extend or modify them, legal challenges have sprouted. The next phase of the pandemic response will see restrictions dialed up and down as threat levels change.  As public and political resistance grows, further legal challenges are inevitable.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
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New England Journal of Medicine
Authors
Michelle Mello
David Studdert
Number
2020
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Urgent responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have halted movement and work and dramatically changed daily routines for much of the world’s population. In the United States, many states and localities have ordered or urged residents to stay home when able and to practice physical distancing when not. Meanwhile, unemployment is surging, schools are closed, and businesses have been shuttered. Resistance to drastic disease-control measures is already evident. Rising infection rates and mortality, coupled with scientific uncertainty about Covid-19, should keep resentment at bay — for a while. But the status quo isn’t sustainable for months on end; public unrest will eventually become too great.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
New England Journal of Medicine
Authors
David Studdert
Number
2020
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