The term laser weapon implies the use of a laser as part of a so-called directed energy weapon (DEW). In that case, the laser energy is causing the target damage. Military research led to the development of experimental lasers with continuous output powers up to 140 kW in 1966 and two Megawatts in 1980. However, those systems were huge and not part of laser weapon systems.

Since the 1980s the development in the military continued. Remarkably, civilian lasers, developed for industrial machining, have now reached output powers, which can be useful for DEW applications, too. Recently, several prototypes came into operation. On the one hand, there are industry-funded projects that use civilian of-the-shelf industrial lasers. On the other hand, there is government-funded research, which aims at high power laser systems. Major defense companies in the United States and elsewhere are working on both tracks.

Anti-satellite (ASAT) laser engagements would be a revolutionary laser application, as they would in principle enable an option of attacks on satellites with only minor debris. At the moment, attacking satellites implies the use of missiles with kinetic or explosive warheads. A kinetic impact creates debris, which would be harmful to the attacker's space assets, too. For that reason, space faring nations are discouraged from using kinetic energy attacks.

This fact enacts a kind of "natural" arms control. Lasers could change this situation, if they are used to heat up satellites just to a point where their electronics are damaged or only to impair their sensors. Hence, attacks on satellites would be more likely, if laser DEW with anti-satellite capabilities are fielded in peacetime. In a time of crisis, this would create additional political instabilities, as satellites are important early warning and reconnaissance assets.  A deployment of laser ASATs could eventually lead to an arms race in space. In order to make this scenario less likely arms control mechanism could be implemented.

This talk will focus on the technological background of laser ASATs. After a short introduction into recent technological developments, it will be examined whether current laser technology has the ability to endanger satellites. To achieve this, a physics-based method has been devised to assess laser DEW engagements. Damage mechanisms as well as possible distinctions between industrial laser setups and laser weapons will be examined in greater detail.  Options for controlling laser ASATs and obstacles for the implementations of such controls will be introduced.

Jan Stupl is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. His research concerns the current developments in laser technology regarding a possible application of lasers as an anti-satellite weapon (ASAT), as well as the proliferation of ballistic missiles. The research on laser ASATs focuses on damage mechanisms, the potential sources and countries of origin of laser ASATs and ways to curb their international proliferation. Regarding missiles, Jan is interested in the methods which are used to acquire ballistic missiles and possible ways to control this process.

Before coming to CISAC, Jan was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH) at the University of Hamburg, Germany. His PhD dissertation was a physics-based analysis of future of High Energy Lasers and their application for missile defense and focused on the Airborne Laser missile defense system. This work was jointly supervised by the IFSH, the Institute of Laser and System Technologies at Hamburg University of Technology and the physics department of Hamburg University, where he earned his PhD in 2008.

Jan studied physics at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany and at Warwick University in Coventry, UK. He concluded his undergraduate physics degree with a thesis in laser physics, receiving a German National Diploma in Physics in 2004. His interest in security policy and international politics was fuelled by an internship at the United Nations in New York in 2003.

Clay Moltz joined the National Security Affairs faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in June 2007. Since November 2008, he has held a joint appointment with the Space Systems Academic Group at NPS. He currently teaches Space and National Security, Nuclear Strategy and National Security, International Relations, and Northeast Asian Security. Prior to his appointment at NPS, he served for 14 years in various positions at the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies, including: deputy director from 2003-2007, director of the Newly Independent States Nonproliferation Program from 1998-2003, and founding editor of The Nonproliferation Review from 1993-98. He was also a faculty member in the Monterey Institute’s Graduate School of International Policy Studies.

Dr. Moltz received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies and a B.A. in International Relations (with Distinction) from Stanford University. Dr. Moltz worked previously as a staff member in the U.S. Senate and has served as a consultant to the NASA Ames Research Center, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment. He held prior academic positions at Duke University and at the University of California, San Diego.

What happens to armed organizations after they sign peace accords? Why do they dissolve, return to war, or form non-violent political parties? This seminar addresses and seeks to explain this empirical variation in former armed groups’' trajectories, using extensive micro-level data on the Colombian paramilitaries. In so doing, it seeks to contribute an organizational-level study of peace-building. The trajectories explored in this seminar fundamentally shape prospects for peace, state-building, and democratization, influence post-war patterns of human rights abuses, and impact the legalization of war economies.

Sarah Zukerman Daly is a 2009-2010 Predoctoral Fellow and Visiting Scholar.  She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sarah holds a BA (2003) with Distinction in International Relations from Stanford University and a MS (2004) with Distinction in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. She is also an alumna of the 2002-2003 CISAC Undergraduate Honors Program.

Sarah's dissertation analyzes variation in demilitarized groups' post-war trajectories. Specifically, it asks, why, in the aftermath of peace agreements, do armed actors form political parties, remilitarize, or go out of business? Her other current projects seek to explain sub-national variation in insurgency onset in Colombia; state strategies towards ethnic minorities in the former Soviet Union; and the role of emotions in transitional justice.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe designed and sponsored this meeting as part of its series on global conflict, and peace and reconciliation.  This session was conducted as a high level, by-invitation discussion to bring together policy leaders and FCE Research Affiliates aimed to consider the potential benefit of Stanford research on conflict and negotiation for the continuing process of peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.  The meeting included the UK Permanent Secretary for Northern Ireland, with Stanford faculty and FSI/FCE Research Affiliates including

• Helen Stacy, Principal Investigator, Project on Human Rights
• Allen Weiner, Co-Director, Stanford Center for International Conflict Negotiation,
  
• Byron Bland, Co-Director, Stanford Center for International Conflict Negotiation, and
  
• Roland Hsu, Assistant Director, Stanford Forum on Contemporary Europe. 
  

Also participating were Robin Newman, UK Vice Consul Political, Press and Public Affairs, and Andy Pike, UK Consul for Northern Ireland in Washington, D.C.  Also invited were a select group of post-graduate scholars currently engaged in research with policy implications on human rights, global justice, and international law.

The meeting addressed multiple engagement and intervention strategies, including using the office of the Permanent Secretary with his deep knowledge of historically contested issues and parties, as well as appealing to international mediation from offices including the European Court of Justice and Court of Human Rights.  Participants also discussed possible lessons to be drawn from this peace process for long-standing conflicts in settings such as Darfur, Sri Lanka, and Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe expresses its appreciation for the Office of the UK Consul General in San Francisco co-sponsorship for this event.

Professor Joseph previously taught at Emory University, Dartmouth College, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), and the University of Khartoum (Sudan). He has held research fellowships at Harvard University, Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Development Studies (Sussex, UK), Chr. Michelsen Institute (Norway), and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France). Joseph has devoted his scholarly career to the study of politics and governance in Africa with a special focus on democratic transitions, state building and state collapse, and conflict resolution.

He directed the African Governance Program at the Carter Center (1988-1994) and coordinated elections missions in Zambia (1991), Ghana (1992), and peace initiatives in Liberia (1991-1994). He has been a longtime member of the Council of Foreign Relations. Joseph is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including a Rhodes Scholarship, a Kent Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2002-03, he held visiting fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the National Endowment for Democracy. He was a Fulbright Scholar in France and a Fulbright Professor in Nigeria.

He has written and edited dozens of scholarly books and articles including Radical Nationalism in Cameroun (1977); Gaullist Africa: Cameroon Under Ahmadu Ahidjo (1978); Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria (1987); State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa (1999); Smart Aid for African Development (2009) and the Africa Demos series (1990-94). His article, "Africa's Predicament and Academe", was published as a cover story by The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 7, 2003). One of his recent articles is "Challenges of a ‘Frontier' Region," Journal of Democracy, April 2008. Others are posted at www.brookings.edu/experts/josephr.aspx

» Joseph, Richard, "The Nigerian predicament" (NGR Guardian News)

Aqil Shah is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.  While at CDDRL, he will write his dissertation entitled "Controlling Coercion:  The Military and Politics in Pakistan and India."  His broad research interests include comparative democratization, civil-military relations, religion and politics and South Asian politics with a focus on Pakistan. His work has appeared in the Journal of Democracy and edited volumes.  

In the context of authoritarian states the internet has always been viewed as an unambiguous force for good, allowing citizens of such states to mobilise around particular political and social issues, and gain access to previously banned materials. However, many authoritarian governments are now actively exploiting cyberspace for their own purposes; some of them appear to be succeeding in subverting the internet's democratising potential. Have we overestimated the internet's ability to bring democratic change and underestimated? Drawing on numerous recent examples from Russia, China, and Iran, the talk will illustrate the darker side the use of social media in these countries.

Evgeny Morozov is a leading thinker and commentator on the political implications of the Internet. He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's influential and widely-quoted "Net Effect" blog about the Internet's impact on global politics (neteffect.foreignpolicy.com). Morozov is currently a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's E.A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Prior to his appointment to Georgetown, he was a fellow at George Soros's Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program (one of the leading and most experimental funders for technology projects that have an impact on open society and human rights). Before moving to the US, Morozov was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online.

• Morozov, Evgeny. "Texting Toward Utopia. Does the Internet spread democracy?" (via Boston Review)

• Morozov, Evgeny. "The Internet: A Room of Our Own?" (via Dissent magazine)

"I think that, by and large, the managers wouldn't know a good technique if it hit them in the face." The prominent computer scientist Alan Perlis spoke these words at a second NATO-sponsored Software Engineering conference in 1969. He underscored a conflict that would persist in the decade that followed that ill-tempered meeting, as computer professionals organized in the name of "software engineering," many sponsored by the U.S. defense department. Yet software cost overruns are frequent, and glitches occasionally turn deadly, leading many to argue that "software engineering" is not yet worthy of the name.
 
How should we understand the emergence of software engineering: the agendas of its proponents, sources of controversy, and its relationship to diverse defense department interests, including security, reliability, and timeliness, and costs? This chapter-in-progress addresses this question using both qualitative historical materials and social network data. The Defense Department's interest in software research was nurtured by budgetary cuts that followed anti-war protests in the early 1970, making economics a dominant, if controversial theme in "software engineering" research. Debates about the meaning and direction of software engineering often invoked binary divisions, between managers and technical people, industrialists and academics, pragmatists and theoreticians. After describing these debates from the ground up, I use network analysis to provide bird's eye view: to what extent were commonly evoked dualisms reflected in practices of publication, and how did this change as the field became institutionalized? More broadly, can network analysis contribute meaningfully to a historical account employing "thick description," and if so how?

Rebecca Slayton is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University and a CISAC affiliate. In 2004-2005 she was a CISAC science fellow. Her research examines how technical judgments are generated, taken up, and given significance in international security contexts. She is currently working on a book which uses the history of the U.S. ballistic missile defense program to study the relationships between and among technology, expertise, and the media. Portions of this work have been published in journals such as History and Technology and have been presented at academic conferences. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2004 she completed an NSF-funded project entitled Public Science: Discourse about the Strategic Defense Initiative, 1983-1988.

As a physical chemist, she developed ultrafast laser experiments in condensed matter systems and published several articles in physics journals. She also received the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship in 2000, and has worked as a science journalist for a daily paper and for Physical Review Focus. She earned her doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University in 2002.

Eric Roberts, after receiving his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1980, taught at Wellesley College from 1980-85, where he chaired the Computer Science Department. From 1985-90, he was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California, where he conducted computer science research, focusing on programming tools for multiprocessor architectures. In September 1990, Roberts joined the Stanford faculty, where he is now Professor of Computer Science and the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

From 1990 to 2002, Professor Roberts was Associate Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Computer Science. In that capacity, he was the principal architect of Stanford’s introductory programming sequence, which for many years held the distinction of being the largest course at Stanford. He has also written four computer science textbooks that are used at many colleges and universities throughout the world. His research focuses on computer science education, particularly for underserved communities. From 1998 to 2005, Roberts was Principal Investigator for the Bermuda Project, which developed the computer science curriculum for Bermuda’s public secondary schools.

Martha Crenshaw will present a research project, "Mapping Terrorist Organizations," recently funded by NSF.

The purpose of the project is to identify patterns in the evolution of organizations that practice terrorism, specify the causes and consequences of these patterns, and analyze the development of Al Qaeda and its cohort in a comprehensive comparative framework.

The project analyzes the organizational structure of different families of organizations and traces their relationships over time. It will produce a series of dynamic maps of the architecture of violent and non-violent opposition groups operating in the same conflict theater.

It will also identify common patterns of organizational evolution, as groups form, split, merge, collaborate, compete, shift ideological direction, adopt or renounce terrorism, grow, shrink, and decline. Models based on comparisons of historical genealogies of terrorism will be applied to the case of Al Qaeda and its affiliates and associates, including the Afghani and Pakistani Taliban. Theories generated from the study will thus shed light on an important and constantly evolving national security threat.

The project will also identify or develop computer software to assemble, organize, and display information about organizations and their interactions over time.

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI and a professor of political science by courtesy. She was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., from 1974 to 2007. Her current research focuses on innovation in terrorist campaigns, the distinction between "old" and "new" terrorism, why the United States is the target of terrorism, and the effectiveness of counterterrorism policies.

She has written extensively on the issue of political terrorism; her first article, "The Concept of Revolutionary Terrorism," was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1972. Her recent work includes "Terrorism, Strategies, and Grand Strategies," in Attacking Terrorism (Georgetown University Press), "Terrorism and Global Security," in Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World (United States Institute of Peace Press), and "Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay," in the journal Security Studies. She is also the editor of a projected volume, The Consequences of Counterterrorist Policies in Democracies, for the Russell Sage Foundation in New York.

She served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chaired the American Political Science Association (APSA) Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism. She has also served on the Council of the APSA and is a former President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2004 ISPP awarded her its Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution and in 2005 the Jeanne Knutson award for service to the society. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Orbis, Political Psychology, Security Studies, and Terrorism and Political Violence. She coordinated the working group on political explanations of terrorism for the 2005 Club de Madrid International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. She is a lead investigator with the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005-2006. She served on the Committee on Law and Justice and the Committee on Determining Basic Research Needs to Interrupt the Improvised Explosive Device Delivery Chain of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science. She was a senior fellow at the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City for 2006-2007.