International Security Brown Bag Seminar

Note New Date

Speaker: Katrina Ponti, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

As the United States emerged as an independent state after the Revolution, it faced the world with a State Department staffed by five clerks and initially led by an absentee Thomas Jefferson. How did the nation secure its place in global affairs with such a small bureaucracy? What was the diplomacy of a democracy supposed to look like?

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJErdeyrqzsuHd0PyAHYv3lQQoGGLh7Lm4P-

Speaker: Lt. Col. Charles Bursi, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's August 2022 trip to Taiwan made headlines around the world because she was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit in decades. Her trip to this small democratic island only 100 miles from Communist China set off a firestorm of internal debates on U.S. East Asia strategy (New Yorker link). Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials trumpeted their frustration with the United States' incoherent diplomacy and launched aggressive military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. Ultimately, Pelosi's visit brought focus to the value of Taiwan in U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAlc-iqqzorGNYnXhuQt8-rznQ1v7nnlvBW

Speaker: Nate Grau, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This seminar traces the evolution of France's Cold War counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine from the Second World War to France's 1954 defeat in Indochina. Grau reveals the underappreciated roles of civilian colonial reformers in this process, tracing a network of "Free French" policymakers circulating from Algeria to the French wars in Madagascar (1947–1948) and Indochina (1945–1954). In each of these revolutionary independence struggles, reformist plans to encourage economic growth and develop local state capacity became tools of counterinsurgent repression that only escalated inter-communal cycles of violence.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAud-qurjkpE9LULcdi7fEzEUmflmTOWvYC

Speaker: Matthew Hartwell, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

When and why is population protection considered an element of U.S. nuclear deterrence? While civil defense played a negligible role in nuclear strategy throughout the early part of the Cold War, beginning in the late 1950s, the limits to the program materialized twice as a potential gap in the U.S.-Soviet nuclear balance. Examining the public and congressional reaction to the programs, this seminar will demonstrate how domestic political barriers undermined the Kennedy and Reagan administrations' attempts to alter the role of population protection in U.S. nuclear strategy.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ld-qrrzkpHtGKfE1mVLLIZ2s8dLCBcSp1

Speaker: David M. Allison, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

As geopolitical and technological shifts challenge the underpinnings of nuclear deterrence, the implications of a nuclear taboo become increasingly important. Crucially, if the prohibition against nuclear use is binding, improved counterforce capabilities should have no effect on support for use. This seminar presents the results of a series of experiments designed to identify taboo believers and measure the durability of their commitment to nuclear non-use by increasing their perceptions of the military effectiveness of counterforce strikes. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvc-uorTkoG9C3zILDI0wrhkBFNJWCkWIU

Speakers: So Jin Lee, Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program; Pei-Yu Wei, Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, Duke University

What impacts domestic support for economic sanctions? Although existing research on sanctions and public opinion have focused on how sanctions have impacted or shifted public opinion in target states, domestic factors are also important determinants in the implementation and design of economic foreign policy, including sanctions. Yet, less work has been undertaken to distill the roots of public support for economic sanctions, despite research showing policymakers benefit politically from imposing economic sanctions and are incentivized to use sanctions as a tool to "play to the home crowd." What, though, are the conditions under which the public of the sanction-sending state would lend their support to sanctions? 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMkc-2uqjIjHtYgvSKjeIQYWO7yzHffEjo9

Speaker:  Paula O'Donnell, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This seminar traces the origins of Argentine juridical thought concerning the perennial dispute with Great Britain over the Falklands/Malvinas Islands. Looking at legal scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, O'Donnell shows that the war of 1982 can be partially attributed to local understandings of "territorial integrity" which hinge upon the legal principle known as "uti possidetis juris of 1810." This international law doctrine provides the basis for the enduring maxim that still resonates with many Argentines today: that Argentina "inherited" the archipelago from Spain.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwsfuivqzIiH93snkXsZZCknA2eD5aVcSIM

Speaker: Anatol Klass, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This presentation follows the careers of a group of Chinese foreign policy experts who were chosen as college students in the 1930s to receive specialized training at the ruling Nationalist Party's civil service school. The speaker traces this cohort from the shared experience of an experimental educational program meant to instill the expertise necessary for modern diplomacy, through its bifurcation after the 1949 revolution. Almost half of the Kuomintang-trained experts stayed in Mainland China to work for the foreign policy apparatus of the new communist state while the other half followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan and continued to work for the Republic of China. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAqfuCtqDIjE92P1HubU-5jia7a5zl1QVWj

Speaker: Joshua A. Schwartz, Grand Strategy, Security, & Statecraft Fellow, International Security Program

A fierce debate in international relations concerns the impact that past actions have on a state's future reputation and ability to deter adversaries. According to Hawkish Reputation Theory, states inevitably harm their reputation for resolve by backing down and enhance it by choosing to stand firm and engage in military conflict. This logic has been used to justify consequential and extremely costly military interventions like the Vietnam War. On the other hand, adherents of Skeptical Reputation Theory posit that a state's past actions—whether backing down or standing firm—do not matter much, if at all, for its future reputation and deterrence efficacy. The speaker advances a new theory of reputation—Dovish Reputation Theory—which challenges both of these existing theories. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwpdOiorjorHtIGt-AzN1bBLMAnHmibeCZs

Speaker: Mina Erika Pollmann, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Pro-alliance leaders would rather form an alliance by persuasion than by coercion. Whether pro-alliance leaders have to escalate from persuading to coercing anti-alliance leaders to form an alliance depends on how strongly anti-alliance leaders are motivated to oppose the proposed alliance. There are three distinct reasons possible for why anti-alliance leaders would oppose a proposed alliance: entrapment concerns, provocation concerns, and relative capabilities. The cases examined in this seminar suggest that entrapment concerns and provocation concerns both motivate anti-alliance leaders, though entrapment concerns have a slightly stronger correlation with when pro-alliance leaders must escalate to coercion. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0uduyopzsuHt3wAapgUd2AGTbkPuLJThca 

Speaker: Linde Desmaele, Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, Security Studies Program, MIT; Senior Associate Researcher, Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy, Free University of Brussels (VUB)

Linde Desmaele presents insights from her ongoing research project about the impact of the unfolding shift to a tripolar nuclear age on the United States’ extended nuclear deterrence commitment to Europe. She proposes a framework to account for implications of the evolution from a Eurocentric nuclear deterrence regime to a world in which the United States faces two nuclear power competitors.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0vceCprT4oGtDWYUCLPtCQv38JSuzntwNY

Élodie Giraudier, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

Élodie Giraudier presents findings from her ongoing research project on the U.S.-Chilean Catholic networks, focusing on Ralph A. Dungan's relationship with Chile. Special assistant to John F. Kennedy, he was appointed ambassador to Chile in 1964.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAqc-itrDsvGt1JdjHPJYRm4r_lZhiTzErN

Speaker: Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs, HKS

Most bids for regional hegemony have been disastrous failures, however, and for reasons that defensive realists have long emphasized. The sole exception is the United States, which succeeded in becoming a regional hegemon because the main obstacles to hegemony were absent in its case. Because the conditions that facilitated U.S. hegemony are less prevalent today, a Chinese attempt to establish hegemony in Asia is likely to fail, and Beijing would be unwise to attempt it.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcufuqhrD4iG9eWjbOzRTHYkt5hz8FfcG7Z 

Speaker: Mailys Mangin, Associate, Project on Managing the Atom

How can scholars and policymakers explain the IAEA's sudden involvement in nuclear proliferation "crises" from 1990 onwards? This seminar explains the transformations of the IAEA's nuclear non-proliferation activities based on a double transformation of the logic of the situation, or context of action, in which it intervenes. On the one hand, the reconfiguration of the position of the United States on the international scene, and on the other hand, the consequent reconfiguration of the internal struggles in the United States to define "national security," in particular the threat posed by the horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJckfumqrT8sHdx6OkaJWeVDe10QfsSuvwyz

Speaker: Megan Turnbull, Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar explains how election violence is jointly organized by political elites and different nonstate groups in Nigeria. Around the world, incumbents increasingly resort to violence and intimidation to manipulate elections. In doing so, they often turn to various nonstate actors to carry out violence on their behalf. Under what conditions do politicians seek to organize election violence, and why do different nonstate groups agree to perpetrate violence for them? Through four comparative case studies from Nigeria, the project demonstrates how local political orders shape the capacity and the incentives for politicians and nonstate groups to organize violence during elections.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMuceuqrT0iEtCwmotshvWef8t0UOvI7pz-

Speaker: Meghan Garrity, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar examines why and how governments expel ethnic groups en masse. What motivates them to implement expulsion policies and why don't more governments do the same? Isolating policies of intentional group-based population removal—distinct from genocide, massacre, and coercive assimilation—more precisely identifies the motivations of expulsionist governments. However, not all governments motivated to expel move forward with its implementation. Through a novel paired comparison of South Asian minorities in post-colonial Uganda and Kenya, this presentation introduces a new framework to conceptualize the process of government mass expulsion policy decisions. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIuceygrT0vGNUIa_e-PGPLPT1NTaLVGvId

Speaker: Renanah Miles Joyce, Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar theorizes the problem of influencing security partners under conditions of strategic competition, drawing on evidence from the Cold War battle for "hearts and minds" that played out in Tanzania during the 1960s as Canada and China competed for influence over the development and geopolitical orientation of the Tanzanian People's Defence Forces. The project, which is part of a broader book project, Exporting Might and Right: Security Assistance and Liberal International Order, informs key policy questions about when and how the United States and its allies can influence sovereign and autonomous states in the security domain.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrfumvrDMjH9UxzvdAIVedhuOVdgj3vzUo

Speaker: Patrick O. Cohrs, Professor of International History, University of Florence; Author, The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860–1933

This magisterial new history elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860–2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric "world order" of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system — a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0pdeygqTIuGtECMknPfnJEAvLRktGNfQIO

Speaker: Grant Golub, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This presentation traces how the War Department shifted from the fringes to the center of U.S. government power during World War II and examines how it sought to influence U.S. politics and grand strategy through its attempts to gain leverage over its bureaucratic rivals and compete to achieve its preferred policy outcomes.  

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0pd--pqjoiGdLIB9nJtv_yO1BPePsSoZJN

Speaker: Mayumi Fukushima,  International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom Postdoctoral Fellow

This seminar offers a new realist theory about what causes the differences among junior allies and should be able to contribute to current scholarly debates over whether the United States should strengthen its security commitments to its allies in different regions — and help answer critical policy questions such as: Should the United States maintain its strategic ambiguity with regard to Taiwan, and if the United States were to end some of its legacy alliances, where could it start retrenching safely without causing instability?

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJElcO-urTMiHtGEpMz0-cd-4iYltLxtWSuj

Speaker: Graeme Thompson, Associate, Applied History Project

What is the relationship between globalization and world order? Though some international relations theories credit economic interdependence with promoting geopolitical stability, modern imperial history suggests that the causal arrow points in the other direction — that processes of globalization depend, in large part, upon favorable, and often fleeting, geopolitical conditions. Surveying the history of Britain's "liberal empire," this seminar charts the rise and fall of 19th century globalization and its dynamic connection to the shifting balance of imperial power.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAuce-sqjIjGtcduvszq8uiTd9nbVpb_CSv

Speaker: Shahryar Pasandideh,  Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar explores the relationship between advances in military technology and shifts in military capabilities with a focus on the processes of technological development and measure-countermeasure dynamics. By doing so, it offers new perspectives on the effects of technological change on international politics.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIqc-iurzwvG9wHgCj30qUwwbp9jOB4K5yE

Speaker: Lukas Paul Schmelter, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

The late 1960s marked a watershed in the history of West German foreign policy, as larger geopolitical forces reshaped the Cold War and West Germany's role in it. Amongst the politicians responding to these changes was Franz Josef Strauss, whose ideas presented a clear alternative to the course of Ostpolitik pursued by Bonn from 1969. This seminar will explore Strauss' strategic framework in the context of the domestic and international circumstances of the mid to late 1960s, and in doing so, address fundamental questions of post-war German foreign policy that remain relevant to the present day.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvduyqqzstG9eqhQbiQxA9GT5Knnv3PzhT

Speaker: Samuel Ramani, Associate Fellow, Royal United Services Institute 

Since 2014, Russia has re-emerged as a great power in Africa. Russia has signed mining and energy contracts with African countries, exploited anti-Western sentiments in Africa, and used sinister tactics, such as election interference and private military contractor deployments, to bolster its influence. Russia's geopolitical position in Africa has weathered the storm of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This seminar will examine the foundations of Russia's current influence in Africa and the threat that the Kremlin poses to Western interests on the continent. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpc-GhrzMuEt3IRcXKSRqyc8bqtDZJR_5Z

Speaker: Nicole Grajewski, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine and embattlement with the West has signified the fundamental divergences in Moscow's approaches to international order. Rather than an aberration, present-day Russian foreign policy has been consistent with the persistent factors in Moscow's international thought. This presentation offers a framework for interpreting Russian foreign policy thinking and Moscow's approaches to the maintenance and transformation of international order.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtdeqoqzsoG9FhW7bqUJ8vFPuWvEGbHjKB

Speaker: Andrew Porwancher, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

As Theodore Roosevelt launched his re-election bid for the White House, Russian-American relations took center stage. Russia was then denying visas to U.S. passport–holders of Jewish faith, and the "Passport Question" became a critical issue for Jewish voters. This seminar will explore Roosevelt's strategic, and often secretive, campaign to leverage diplomacy at the ballot box.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qfu6trToiHtFzUuzqYHFQjRDWxl98jzMg 

Speaker:  Justin Key Canfil, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

If defense planners are paid to imagine the future of war, and military R&D is costly and uncertain, why do states so often invest in building technologies before banning them? This seminar advances a theory to explain why states expend limited resources on new weapons destined for the scrapheap and concludes with implications for the management of 21st century emerging military technologies.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrdOisrDIoGtdmmrICWwepLUSA-gR1pIMP

Speaker: Antonia Juelich, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Most people assume that civilians cooperate with rebels when they share their cause, and that the absence of cooperation signifies tacit or active resistance. However, this seminar seeks to reveal greater variation in civilian motivations and behavior in rebel-controlled territory. Based on interviews with people who have lived under Boko Haram's rule in Northeast Nigeria, it sheds light on the interplay between rebel structures and civilian agency in war zones. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYrc-2rrDIoGdeObnA5JECzhYXlRjnqkaOR 

Speaker: Vivien L. Chang, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

What role(s) did sub-Saharan African elites play in the movement for a New International Economic Order? After achieving postcolonial statehood, African statesmen, intellectuals, and diplomats sought to leverage their newfound representation within regional and international organizations into political and economic power. Central to their efforts was the imperative to attain an equitable share of the world's wealth and resources. This presentation traces how this vision of anticolonial unity and economic sovereignty evolved and expanded through its interactions with national bureaucracies, international agencies, and grassroots organizations in the 1960s and 1970s.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtcOirpzkuHNUZwH7sNHckBOvZg48ZKqKn 

Speaker: Christopher Wiley Shay, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Previous research has yielded mixed results about whether transitional justice prosecutions help liberalize states. Some scholars have even warned that prosecutions are likely to backfire. This seminar shines new light on this debate by specifying the conditions under which trials are likely to help — either by bolstering the rule of law or diminishing human rights abuse. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpceitqzwvGtZLXXfOxtAAyX4ipdZ2IWh2

Speaker: Daniel Sobelman,  Assistant Professor of International Relations, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In contemporary Middle Eastern politics, the term "resistance" connotes a strong anti-Western, pro-Iranian, geo-political, and ideological orientation. But in addition to representing a quest for a new regional order, "resistance" has come to signify a coherent strategy of asymmetric intra-war deterrence. As a strategic approach, "resistance" has been pursued, among other places, in conflict areas such as Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. This seminar will discuss the regional diffusion of "resistance" as an asymmetric strategy, a fact that has led to multiple attempts to employ it. Drawing on various case studies, the seminar will explain the within- and between-case variation in the different "resistance" actors' ability to constrain and deter their militarily superior adversaries.

Everyone is invited to join us via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrcO6rrD0sH91wcgu0ZlEQ4u-QmaVuoau0 

Speaker: Michael Poznansky, Associate Professor, U.S. Naval War College

How has the liberal international order shaped American foreign policy? Proponents argue its impact has been profound. Critics charge that it has failed to prevent the United States from violating rules and norms. The answer lies in between. While rule violations have been a constant feature of the postwar order, the nature of violations have varied in unappreciated ways. America's approach toward the liberal order, including whether leaders feel the need to conceal rule violations at all, is a function of two factors: (1) the burden of complying with the liberal order’s core tents and (2) the intensity of great power competition. Together, these factors help explain broad patterns of U.S. behavior over time.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYpd--uqD4iHdB-PvxChRUwx_-R6Sj2Z3nL

Speaker: Andrew D. Taffer, Associate, International Security Program

Why has China risked alienating the region — and undermining its grand strategy of rising peacefully in Asia — to advance its claims in the South China Sea (SCS)? How has Beijing managed the tension between its interests in the SCS and its broader strategic objectives? This seminar examines the evolution of China's conduct in the SCS from its entry into the Spratly islands in 1988 until 2015. A framework is developed for conceptualizing the strategic costs and risks associated with Chinese conduct, and it is used to explain variation in China's behavior both over time and among its three major rivals — Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvc-mhrTkqE9DzXTy0XlhAG7QVdsuAETpu

Speaker: Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Associate, International Security Program

This is a story of external rule creating and supporting long-term political order over 100 years in what was then the state of Sarawak, in Southeast Asia. The success of the Brooke family is puzzling given the difficulties of empire over three centuries and current frustrations with Western state-building efforts. The Brookes flourished without the trappings and tools of empire; used personal influence; organized violence by a small number of armed Englishmen sufficient to balance power among armed indigenous groups; and made partnerships with indigenous peoples to take and retain power. Their success as outsider rulers rested on their use of balancing and bandwagoning.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIlcuqvqDkvGtIDPr8oVb0n2M1n_gBkqvjT

Speaker: Barnaby Crowcroft, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

The historical debate over the British empire tends to be preoccupied with its role — whether for good or for ill — in spreading some form of "liberal modernity" throughout its territories. However, this has tended to neglect the much wider British practice of empire through alliance, treaty, and protection-style arrangements, which had little if any connection with liberal reform. This presentation will introduce this "other" British empire, discuss some of its primary locations, institutions, and motivating ideas and reflect upon its possible lessons for international and foreign policy.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcscOGgpj8rHNJuCVOSMvoqXABgfshFxBbn

Speaker: Annette Idler, Director, Global Security Programme, Pembroke College; Senior Research Fellow, Dept. of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

50 years after U.S. President Nixon declared the War on Drugs, this "War" has failed to significantly reduce the scale or impact of illicit drug production and trafficking. Yet consensus on the way forward is missing from the international policy debate: some states have introduced national reforms; others continue to champion militarized approaches.  How can the international community tackle the complex causes and consequences that this war is intended to address? 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuf-CgqzgsHNcwtJ0Vz3hVVjKJWHqj8UdO 

Speaker: Andrew Ehrhardt, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

The historical scholarship focusing on the creation of the United Nations Organization tends to be skewed towards the role played by the United States. Often overlooked is the influence of the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, to say nothing of other powers, from Australia and New Zealand to the Netherlands and China. This presentation will focus on the role of the United Kingdom, in particular, and will discuss the way in which Foreign Office officials worked to deliver on plans for a post-war international organization. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJckde2hpzkiHNb91pdfngqcuFufpFmJKIRa

Speaker: J. Andrés Gannon, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

Why do capable states sometimes possess seemingly inefficient militaries that leave them vulnerable to security threats? The speaker argues that vulnerable force structures are not just the result of poor planning or resource constraints; rather, these observed "inefficiencies" are often a strategically motivated decision to specialize one's force structure. States can engage in strategically motivated functional differentiation by specializing their militaries when they engage in cooperative security alignments. 

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIvdO-hrz8sHNwj-C-c2-eR6zc7PSeYbbUA

Speaker: Heather Williams, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Why would states give up nuclear weapons? What can historical cases of disarmament teach scholars and policymakers about a pathway to nuclear elimination? One model of disarmament is delegitimization, when humanitarian concerns, legal mechanisms, or changes in international norms cause the elimination of weapons. Another explanation is that disarmament occurs when there is an easing of tensions in geopolitics. But both of these models fail to consider advances in military technology and how these changes inform reliance on certain weaponry. This seminar offers a third model, disarmament by replacement, whereby the relative military utility of a weapon is a decisive factor in disarmament.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0scOmqqjsrGd1U6PSgtcfQE4VP3o-yDvUH

Speaker: Megan Turnbull, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do governments and armed groups cooperate in some places and times, violently engage each other in others, and reluctantly tolerate one another still elsewhere? Megan Turnbull argues that the management of coalitional threats in the periphery and the nature of armed groups' ties with local communities (protective or predatory) explain when national-level incumbents collude with, repress, or reluctantly tolerate armed groups. She draws on comparative case studies from Nigeria and Kenya to empirically support her argument and assess rival explanations. The findings contribute to scholarship on armed politics and political orders.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEuc--uqDMpEtWAJuYMx-ANgjOL3CI1k3Al 

Speaker: Élodie Giraudier, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

Élodie Giraudier presents findings from her ongoing research project on the U.S.-Chilean Catholic networks, showing that political and religious actors collaborated to fight against communism in Chile, especially during the John F. Kennedy administration.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEldOuvqzooGNUSWbvDACZUej9cF7Admaea 

Speaker: Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia, Council on Foreign Relations

What are rising powers? Do they challenge the international order? Why do some countries, but not others, become rising powers? In Why Nations Rise, Manjari Chatterjee Miller argues that some countries rise not just because they develop the military and economic power to do so, but because they develop particular narratives about how to become a great power in the style of the great power of the great power of the day. She uses historical cases to understand the divergent paths of contemporary China and India.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:  https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcqd-2tpzgoHdZeCSyFAH44oU1oVMx03Xyo 

Speaker: Charli Carpenter, Research Fellow, International Security Program

What do Americans really think about the noncombatant immunity norm? Charli Carpenter presents findings from her ongoing research project on U.S. public opinion on civilian immunity and on the nuclear taboo, showing that norms are both stronger and more fragile than scholars believe.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwodeytqDkrH9JNskJaQJJJ1_PeaFq3c9d8

Speaker: Ryan Skaggs, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Lt. Col. Ryan Skaggs presents findings from his ongoing research project on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) use of Information Warfare against Australia, Micronesia, Melanesia, the Philippines, and Thailand and their effects on U.S. access, overflight, and basing arrangements within the Indo-Pacific Theater. This seminar explores the underlying concepts of Information Warfare, examines CCP strategic use and approaches to Information Warfare, and introduces a methodology for characterizing and assessing CCP influence campaigns within the Indo-Pacific.

Speaker: Joshua A. Schwartz,  Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Fellow, International Security Program

Despite the substantive importance of nuclear weapons to international peace and security, there is significant disagreement among scholars about whether the normative constraints on their use are strong or weak. This seminar presents a theory of in-group bias and tests it using three survey experiments; two in the United States and one in India. Promisingly and in accordance with theoretical expectations, the results show that the public is significantly less likely to approve of a nuclear attack when it is conducted by a non-allied government compared to their own domestic government or that of a close ally.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwuceGrrj4uH93VW_G-E4f9u12dPtpVZBci

Speaker: Marino Auffant, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

How did the 1970s Energy Crisis reorder the world? Until 1973, successive U.S. administrations had relied on Venezuela and Canada as the country's main energy partners and had actively restricted oil imports from the Middle East. However, with the promise of Saudi petrodollars inflows, the United States ended these longstanding partnerships and tied its economic fate to that of the Persian Gulf. This shift had long-lasting consequences: Not only did the United States make itself vulnerable to the Arab oil embargo, but this First Oil Shock gave rise to the world's current monetary architecture, entangled the United States geopolitically in the Persian Gulf, and destabilized the Middle East by spawning the Iranian and Iraqi nuclear programs.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYud-2oqjgtGNQql4LL49mfK3w1KHzWmm1b 

Speaker: David M. Wight, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Dr. David M. Wight will discuss his book Oil Money, which offers a new framework for understanding the course of Middle East–U.S. relations during the 1970s and 1980s: the transformation of the U.S. global empire by Middle East petrodollars. During these two decades, American, Arab, and Iranian elites reconstituted the primary role of the Middle East within the global system of U.S. power from a supplier of cheap crude oil to a source of abundant petrodollars, the revenues earned from the export of oil.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYvdeuprDgjHtBXnMPUS-FwCo1LlJklN1JX

Speaker: Mesrob Vartavarian, Fellow, Harvard University Asia Center

The recent U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has raised a host of questions regarding America's future strategic direction and geopolitical policies. This seminar argues that President Biden's hard pivot to Asia can potentially succeed in curbing China's revisionist aspirations if it takes the needs and distinct historical trajectories of America's Asia-Pacific alliance partners into account. It uses Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the Philippines as case studies.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEocO6vrzspG9PQ2WLcKxrXmgG52yENsVyk 

Speaker: Stephen Herzog, Senior Researcher in Nuclear Arms Control, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich; Associate, Project on Managing the Atom

Why do some treaties face difficult entry-into-force prospects after negotiators agree on their legal provisions? Multilateral nuclear arms control treaties, for example, often face far more contentious journeys to enter into force than their bilateral counterparts. These treaties usually indicate the number of states that must deposit ratification instruments, or may even require participation by specific states. To better understand such delays, Stephen Herzog presents a theory of treaty entry-into-force.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUkd-mhqjsvHdH15Dg8RHMId9xyGBgKSpQB 

Speakers: Hyun-Binn Cho, Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Studies, The College of New Jersey; Associate, Project on Managing the Atom; Alex Yu-Ting Lin, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Verbal threats between President Trump and Kim Jong Un, the killing of an Iranian general by a U.S. drone strike, and maritime clashes in the South China Sea have all led to concerns about "provocations" resulting in unwanted conflict. This seminar explores how individuals react to foreign provocations depending on how they process information. By doing so, it offers new insights into the links between provocation and international conflict.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Please register before the event: 
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEudeyopzgiEt2El6d8hTfrH698FK0ajQi_

Speaker: Nicole Grajewski, Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar will examine the nature of the Russia-Iran relationship, drawing on research of Moscow and Tehran’s domestic foreign policy debates, archival documents, and elite interviews. It offers a framework that accounts for multiple expressions of power and the norms, ideas, values, and solidaristic bonds inherent in the evolution of the Russia-Iran relationship. 

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Please register before the event:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUpduispzgsEtK5f7O-Ro6HT-HNvlfeklJz 

Speaker: Abolghasem Bayyenat, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Drawing parallel with domestic and international conditions leading to the successful conclusion of the JCPOA in 2015, this research seeks to put Iran's nuclear policymaking during the Trump administration into perspective and explain why Iran pursued the strategy of calibrated resistance, how this strategy became possible, and why alternative policies became unthinkable or impossible.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Please register before the event:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqfuGqrjIiE9WN_u4jDdSGCkYNnTLu1_31 

Speaker:  Leonardo Davoudi, Researcher, Global History of Capitalism project, Oxford Centre for Global History, Oxford University; Author, Persian Petroleum

Striking oil in the Middle East transformed the modern geostrategic landscape. It galvanized great-power rivalries, exacerbated regional fractures, and fostered animosity towards foreign interference. Using newly-uncovered private papers, Persian Petroleum delves into the region's first oil find, at the turn of the twentieth century, to reveal the geopolitical setting, domestic context, and widespread intrigue that led to the creation of one of the world's largest oil companies.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Please register before the event:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIlf-uvrT8uHtybNp4cdpEdxDQ9KmCVr5TV 

Speaker: Nathaniel L. Moir, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

Great power competition is not synonymous with conventional approaches to warfare. Over the last sixty years, irregular conflict — including insurgency and counterinsurgency, information operations, and other ways of war — predominated in most conflicts. Through seven chronologically organized case studies, the speaker will focus on conflicts in East and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to analyze how vanguard movements formed parallel hierarchies to gain socio-political control over competitors. 

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https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0kdO-oqTwsHtxbixwYOATzKist2pZ0hjN1 

Speaker: Aditi Verma, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral  Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

The design and creation of complex socio-technical systems require the production and use of both tacit and explicit knowledge. This seminar explores the role of tacit knowledge in the transfer and reinvention of complex, dual-use technologies — in this case, pressurized heavy water reactors — and the implications of the generation of this tacit knowledge for technology control.

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https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYucOGgpj4iG9ChfkgqbBwsu3OKLDyJ6Uwh 

Speaker: Ashley Serpa, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

In this seminar, the speaker will discuss the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA)’s history, from its inception as a tool to combat Nazi propaganda in the WWII-era to its use against suspected communists in the early Cold War. She will also discuss the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's investigation on foreign agents in the 1960s, which inspired the last successful FARA amendment, to help scholars and policymakers understand why so many proposed amendments failed and FARA proved ineffective in the decades following.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Please register before the event:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvdumhrDoqEtIim84pzzBIbyZEKNCAMp42

Speaker: Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Associate, International Security Program

In her new book, the speaker challenges the claim that winning "hearts and minds" is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and enables military and political victory. Hazelton argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Please register before the event:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcudOytrzovGtL_lCnvAJzYNe5X0RwkVgKY 

Speaker: Jamil Musa, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Marshal Hubert Lyautey served as France's first Resident-General in Rabat from 1912–1925 and set the tone for the French Protectorate in Morocco from 1912–1956. Lyautey's principles of population-centric warfare would form the foundations for the French doctrine de la guerre révolutionnaire (DGR)—doctrine of revolutionary war—in the mid-20th century and later have a veiled influence upon American counterinsurgency (COIN) in the early 21st century.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYpcOugrTorHtBRoA4VXMFgF5QGoe0PnDhj 

Speaker: Huseyin Rasit, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Despite all the misery they cause, breakdowns of existing states also create ample political opportunities for new actors to rise. This is why, among all the destruction witnessed in Syria and Iraq in the 20th century, new political entities that exercise authority in regions effectively out of reach of their central governments have emerged. The seminar will focus on three: Kurdistan-Syria, Kurdistan-Iraq, and the Islamic State. 

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcld--prjgpEtHQ0htp9TQScs6tNWQJbFLz 

Speaker: John Holland-McCowan, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Since the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and their affiliated People's Protection Units (YPG) fighting forces gained world-wide attention with their role in rescuing the Yazidis on Sinjar Mountain in August of 2014, academics and policymakers have sought to understand these controversial, intertwined, and severely understudied organizations.  To better understand what underpinned the PYD, the YPG, and the SDF’s success during this period, the speaker will present a history of the Syrian Kurds, their place within the Syrian civil war, as well as discuss his doctoral research’s other key findings.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtf-GrqD8vGtVBS8UgEHr3gthdixHaZNAv 

Speaker: Averell Schmidt, Research Fellow, International Security Program

The past few years have witnessed a wave of states withdrawing from multilateral agreements as wide-ranging as the European Union, International Criminal Court, Paris Climate Agreement, and Open Skies Treaty. These developments have prompted fears of new arms races, the unraveling of other treaties, and the broader decline of the so-called liberal international order. This seminar will explain how treaty withdrawal shapes cooperation among states by exploring patterns of treaty ratification and withdrawal during the 1945–2010 time period.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUudu6hrzsiHtBv-Wj-TswEJ9aRcVqQOytW 

Speaker: Jayita Sarkar, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

How do the exports of U.S. power reactors relate to nonproliferation, global capitalism, and U.S. empire? And what does that tell us about the dominance by design of U.S. government and businesses in the decolonized world, where they promised development but delivered debt? This seminar pursues this inquiry through investigating the role of the light water reactor as an instrument of U.S. nonproliferation policy from the mid-1950s until the end of the 1980s.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMscOyspz0uHdDEEReU3VaamAmpD7qRPMrO

Speaker: Gbemisola Abiola, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Boko Haram's violent campaign for an Islamic state in northeastern Nigeria has led to the displacement of a staggering number of people from their homes. Emerging from this are swaths of internally displaced persons (IDPs) who live in conditions of precarity and on the margins of established communities. This seminar will focus on how IDPs who resettle in disparate displacement sites: camps, settlements, and host-communities, aspire to constitute themselves as emplaced subjects.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYud-6sqz8sH9EmVRhNdKLVh8nSn16xoQoi

Speaker: Andrew Porwancher, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

During Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, Jews in the Russian Empire were subjected to brutal pogroms that claimed thousands of lives. Americans rallied behind the embattled Jewish community and pressed Roosevelt to take action on the global stage. Russia, in turn, fed lies to the press in the United States in a bid to manipulate the public and the president. This seminar explores this little-known episode in U.S. history and considers its implications for Russian-American relations today.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMkceigqzkqG9A2-Hs9abdZvs09WSov1leh C

Speaker: Evan Perkoski, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do insurgents recruit experienced fighters at some times and untrained novices at others? Research suggests that insurgent organizations place a premium on committed members who demonstrate political devotion. But research also suggests that groups are willing to compromise on commitment when compelled by other priorities. The speaker will introduce and evaluate a theory with a case study of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its successor, the Islamic State.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here: 
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlduGqrjkoHNfmZBpGFmPUnDxyc_drOxen

Speaker: Anina Schwarzenbach, Non-Resident Fellow, Cyber Project

Cyber power is commonly understood to be the ability of an actor to conduct cyber operations to disable adversaries' infrastructure and defend against threats. However, drawing conclusions about the level of a state's cyber power based solely on these operations is a misrepresentation of the full scope of states' capabilities and objectives in cyberspace.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here: 
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwqfuyspjsiGNW6rnoR3yIAi-lVGu4U7l-X

Speaker: Sara Plana, Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar examines how states control proxy non-state armed groups they sponsor in foreign civil wars. It outlines the tools available to state sponsors to shape the behavior of proxy groups, why states choose some tools over others, and why some of those tools do not work as intended. The speaker adapts insights from coercion and alliance management scholarship to show how the goals state sponsors pursue through their proxies can affect their willingness to punish their proxies or abandon them altogether. This seminar will draw on original evidence from the United States' relationship to the Syrian Democratic Forces from 2014 to the present.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqc-utqz8rHdEWriZ9rVCwQ_eYLWEB7trR

Speakers: Rebecca Davis Gibbons, Associate, Project on Managing the Atom; Ariel Petrovics, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

This seminar seeks to examine the causes and consequences of public involvement in nuclear programs in two parts: first, exploring why some leaders involve the public in nuclear discussions, and then assessing shifts in public opinion in response to such cueing. Together, these  parts can help better understand when and how domestic publics can affect the trajectory of their states' nuclear programs.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here: 
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpceGprj0qHtYbTdT-_mgWIZVU_VNPqtZa

Speaker: William d'Ambruoso, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

What explains the United States' repeated turn to torture as an interrogation method in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns? Using illustrations from the Philippine-American War through the post-2001 war on terror, this seminar shows that actors seek methods that are simultaneously nasty enough to be effective and sufficiently mild-sounding to evade condemnation.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register before the seminar here: 
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0odu2hqjMrHNQRt9FUJHlhDsvTDEgtzl3W

Speaker: Graeme Thompson, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

Liberal ideas of foreign policy and international order helped to shape the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. From 1846, the Pax Britannica rested on an integrated world system characterized by naval supremacy, free trade, and increasing globalization. Yet after 1870, the geopolitical context shifted rapidly as Britain's "liberal empire" faced rising economic and military competitors, notably imperial Germany. How did liberal politicians and intellectuals grapple with the challenge to British global power? Could the catastrophe of the First World War have been avoided? Focusing on Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), this seminar outlines liberal attempts to articulate and implement a grand strategy of restraint. 

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvduqpqTwiHNSoXA6xfGs_yZYtCrfN_H9H

Speaker: David Allen, Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Fellow, International Security Program

Who made the foreign policy community in the United States, and why does the answer matter? Scholars have traditionally looked to the men clustered around the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropies, and the Ivy League faculties to find the roots of the foreign policy "elite" or "establishment" in the years after World War I.  But this seminar will show that this focus has obscured the absolute centrality of progressive white women in the making of the U.S. foreign policy community, particularly those former suffragists, trained scholars, and expert activists who helped to build what was then the most prominent internationalist institution in the country, the Foreign Policy Association. 

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrf-2grDMtGdRFmZ5NQobCBYkvAqyvjzcJ

Speaker: Christopher Wiley Shay,  Research Fellow, International Security Program

What stops human rights abuse? Christopher Shay explores this question in the context of conflict terminations, moments when leaders can plausibly turn away from repressive tactics. Many leaders fail to seize this opportunity, however, even in cases of democratization. Drawing on cross-national quantitative findings and qualitative research conducted in Nepal, Shay argues that these leaders' options are often constrained by powerful security institutions—and that civil-military relations are critical to understanding human rights outcomes.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYocuiqrjopGNTxGJiOOsiUiylmF52NRnC5

Speakers: Michael Weintraub, Associate Professor, Universidad de los Andes Bogotá, Colombia; Robert A. Blair, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

Governments across the developing world rely on the armed forces for domestic policing operations. Advocates of these "mano dura" (iron fist) policies view them as a necessary measure to control violent crime, while detractors claim they undermine human rights without reducing crime. The speakers experimentally evaluate a militarized policing intervention in Cali, Colombia, the country's third largest city and among its most violent.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwoduyrrzksHtcUaM2Dj9vKMhnSG3pxDPBq

Speaker: Augusta Dell'Omo, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This seminar examines how the institutional failure of the Reagan White House to invigorate a sterile sanctions debate created a window of opportunity for pro–South Africa conservatives. Led by White House Director of the Office of Communications Patrick Buchanan, a cadre of pro–South Africa Congressmen, and South Africa's surrogates, the pro-apartheid movement injected a white supremacist dialogue into the White House's discussions on sanctions policy that fundamentally undercut the efforts of the White House to rally a successful veto defense

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYpfuGsqT4jGtfNZ081oEvhhMGJSOugoCMh

Speaker: Julius Weitzdörfer, Junior Professor of East Asian Law, Hagen University, Germany

Risks stemming from CBRN-terrorism (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) are characterized by relatively low frequency, yet extraordinary potential impact. To help reduce the enormous potential costs associated with radiological and nuclear terrorism, drawing on cases from Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this seminar seeks to derive and improve recovery policies towards a well-rounded, holistic approach to mitigating the risks of nuclear and radiological terrorism.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAoc-yhrjwrEtEXOUTdHqGhMvLscB5VO38u

Speaker: Sanne Verschuren, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Rather than assuming convergence in countries' military capabilities, this seminar examines why and how countries decide to develop different weapon capabilities within similar domains of warfare. To answer these questions, this seminar will explore the role of ideas and institutional bargaining in shaping decisions about military technology. This talk will subsequently apply the theory to the development of missile defense in the post–Cold War period.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrcOmtqD0jE9R3_UZriEHVVRxUjR8q8HZs

Speaker: Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Associate, International Security Program

This seminar presents a theoretical mechanism explaining the hierarchy of interests the counterinsurgent government considers and the options available to it when a great power intervener insists on reforms. It demonstrates this mechanism in a paired set of cases, South Vietnam under President Ngo Dinh Diem, when the United States was supporting the government in an advisory role, and under President Nguyen Van Thieu, when the United States was withdrawing from the war as quickly as possible.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJApceCpqD8oHdCDM-o59vdrub4glAuUoFqc

Speaker: Thomas Cavanna, Assistant Research Professor, Center for Strategic Studies, Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University

After decades of engagement, European leaders have recently adopted an increasingly defensive stance vis-à-vis China. Experts are thoroughly debating the implications of this pushback for the United States. But less attention has been given to the deeper historical and geopolitical dimensions of the matter: What does China's rise in Europe mean for U.S. grand strategy?

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting:  https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrcOGqqzsiHdOyZkV41u_yqYbdbXbuDWiN

Speaker: Samuel Ramani, D.Phil. Candidate in International Relations, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford

This seminar will examine this contradiction in the Russia-China relationship and assess whether lessons from the Cold War–era Sino-Soviet Split can help predict the partnership's future direction. It will also examine how these contradictory trends in Russia-China relations could impact U.S. foreign policy and assess whether Russia and China chiefly pose a combined threat or two disparate challenges to U.S. hegemony in the post-pandemic era.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Register in advance for this meeting: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtduCrqTkvGNfXBx_5jgfRvTV0s5aAFKgP

Speaker: Michael Beckley, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Tufts University

Most discussion on U.S.-China policy focuses on the implications of a rising China. This presentation, by contrast, considers some of the challenges that could be posed by an economically stagnating China. How would a severe and sustained economic growth slowdown affect China's foreign policy and military modernization? Would military conflict between China and the United States become more or less likely? This presentation addresses these questions by comparing China to past rising great powers that experienced major economic slowdowns.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/96550562494?pwd=REx3b1RWaVYxZWdhVW5Hbk9Ra3JEQT09

Speakers: Rebecca Davis Gibbons, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom; Ariel Petrovics, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Though only nine states in the world today are believed to possess their own nuclear weapons, many more states have the capability to pursue a nuclear bomb if they choose. This capability – or nuclear latency – has recently drawn attention in international relations scholarship, which largely focuses on the effects of latency on international deterrence, compellence, and bargaining. While this research helps explain the security benefits and motives that may drive states to pursue nuclear capabilities short of the bomb, it has yet to determine how domestic politics play into these considerations. This project explores how public opinion factors into state decisions to pursue or forgo latent nuclear capabilities. In doing so, it seeks to offer new insight into when and why latency can become a salient topic to domestic audiences, and the implications of these domestic drivers for the future of nonproliferation.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwuc-qrqj4pG90vSX2_VoG35zaE6L6mkPQt

Speaker: Lt. Col. William C. Smith, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

How do leaders motivate Airmen to give their best to perform this unsung duty, day after day, for years at a time? A recent study found clarity of purpose to be the basis of verifiable mission success, purposeful leadership, and esprit de corps, which suggests that clearly communicating the higher purpose of their work to Airmen would help them find meaning in their tasks. A sense that their work is meaningful, the result of internalizing a higher purpose, underpins the safety and security cultures critical to a successful nuclear enterprise. The speaker will build on their findings by introducing five leadership concepts, identifying the particular importance each plays in providing a credible nuclear deterrent, and offering an effective method for implementation. These principles have broad application to organizational leadership as a whole, and if collectively and effectively implemented, would provide the bedrock for safe, secure, and effective nuclear operations.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEvdO-sqT4oH9VljkvSrgNBBGATIdqGjGBY

Speaker: Stephen Herzog, Stanton Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Arms control has languished as a field of academic inquiry, despite a renaissance in nuclear security studies and significant advances in understanding proliferation. Few studies have attempted to emulate past academic shaping of arms control agreements and outcomes, with particularly limited emphasis on multilateral efforts. This is a problematic situation as the world looks beyond bilateral U.S.–Russian arms control toward the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT), Middle East Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (MENWFZ), and even the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The speaker attempts to fill this gap by offering a theory of state entry into multilateral nuclear arms control agreements.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtc-mrqz8jH9coGNTF7bloNM75UeKB3bJW

Speakers: Giles David Arceneaux, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Kyungwon Suh, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Political Science, Syracuse University

The deterrent capacity of a state's nuclear forces is dependent upon the platforms and delivery systems that constitute the arsenal. The mere possession of nuclear weapons does not provide a robust deterrent and nuclear states cannot credibly deter potential adversaries with nuclear threats in the absence of adequate delivery capabilities. The project presents a new dataset that measures the possession of seven nuclear delivery platforms across all nuclear powers from 1945–2019, including: submarine-launched missiles, strategic land-mobile missiles, strategic solid-fuel missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, long-range ballistic missiles, and tactical nuclear weapons.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcsf-6uqTwoHdZZJ3qqoP1Ohy78rsXBc5en

Speaker: Paul Behringer, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

Massacres are a common occurrence during times of war. Although the reasons vary as to why and the context within which this type of killing transpires, massacres also share certain characteristics across space and time. The greatest atrocity of the Russian Civil War in the Far East occurred in 1920 at Nikolaevsk, a town of 15,000 residents located near the mouth of the Amur River. By examining those who perpetrated the massacre, the types of violence they deployed, the victims who died, and how observers chose to document it, scholars and policymakers can understand what often seems at first glance to be senseless violence.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuce2uqjssGtQlipRsIG2OTS0adywtkgT-

Speaker: Anina Schwarzenbach, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

Nowadays, the availability of large databases on terrorist events allows researchers to shed light on patterns of terrorist activities and provides for new insights on how and where terrorism proliferates. Still, scholars and policymakers know little as to why in some countries, and periods in time, terrorist activities are much more frequent than in others. As for now, popular explanations on the root causes of terrorism, such as poverty, have resulted in inconsistent empirical evidence. Other concepts widely applied in political science and criminology, such as approaches drawn from political legitimacy, have been neglected in the study of terrorism.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUqcuGsrTwrH9fnixp6gfngWf4DMq5itcO4

Speaker: William James, Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Fellow, International Security Program

Why did Britain withdraw from its military bases in the Persian Gulf, Malaysia, and Singapore? The current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, believes that the drawdown was a mistake, taken rashly in January 1968 as pro-European Cabinet members seized on a financial crisis to end the "East of Suez" role. This interpretation — that retrenchment was the result of Britain's weak economic position and domestic politics — aligns with most of the historiography. In this seminar, that view will be questioned. Based on extensive archival research, the speaker offers an alternative explanation on the timing and motives for the withdrawal. The talk will conclude with policy recommendations for current practitioners in London, who are charting a return "East of Suez" under the post-Brexit banner of "Global Britain."

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Speaker: Ariel Petrovics, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Economic sanctions are one of the most common coercive tools of foreign policy, used regularly in an effort to change target state behavior. Yet despite their versatility and prevalence in international relations, sanctions are at best an unreliable tool of foreign policy. Indeed, many of the most important and publicized sanction attempts have failed to produce any desired change in the target. Existing literature on the effectiveness of sanctions has largely focused on whether or not sanctions eventually succeed, but this overlooks the arguable more policy relevant questions of when and under what conditions sanctions are effective tools of statecraft. The speaker's research  finds that sanctions with the greatest implications for international security — such as those that combat nuclear proliferation or foreign military aggression — fail even more catastrophically than their less salient counterparts.

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Click here. Meeting ID number: 810311271

Speaker: John Holland-McCowan, Research Fellow, International Security Program

In the U.S.-led coalition's campaign against ISIS in Syria, the controversial and understudied Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have served as the tip of the spear. This seminar will present what underpinned the Syrian Kurds' remarkable success from mid 2014 to mid 2017 before discussing the broader implications for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East

Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom!  Click here. Meeting ID number: 596848662

Speaker: Nathaniel L. Moir, Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This seminar investigates how Vietnam War scholar and Indochina expert, Bernard Fall (1926–1967), developed his conception of Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare and how he applied this knowledge to his analysis of the First and Second Indochina Wars.

Please join us online via Zoom!  Click here.  Meeting name: International Security Program - March 26 2020

Speaker:  Lt. Col. Patrick Kolesiak, Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar will be online. Please join us remotely via Zoom!  Click here to join.

As America pursues a negotiated peace deal with the Taliban and Afghan government, it is critical to return to analyze how a war that was supposed to last mere months turned into "America's Longest War." The failure of U.S. policy in Afghanistan was catastrophic misalignment between a rapidly emerging strategy in Afghanistan and the triad of "ends, ways, and means." This talk seeks to specifically explore how a divergence between a "Washington Way of War" and a "U.S. Military Way of Battle" led to failed assumptions, mismatched objectives, and missed opportunities. The speaker will explore six key mistakes made during the waning days of combat operations and the movement into post-conflict stability operations.

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Speaker: Lindsay Hundley, Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar will be online. Please join us remotely via Zoom!  Instructions below.

In recent years, the world has increasingly witnessed international conflict along ideological fault lines. Western policymakers warn that authoritarian countries like Russia and China are seeking to exploit divisions within democratic societies to promote autocratic tendencies, while for decades, authoritarian countries have accused the West of doing the same—of manufacturing domestic uprisings as a way to force liberalism upon them. While history is filled with examples of conflicts along these types of ideological lines, there is little consensus among scholars about whether ideology has any effect on relations between states. This presentation will focus in on British and U.S. reactions to the Haitian Revolution to advance scholars' and policymakers' understanding of the relationship between ideology and international conflict.

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Speaker: Jonah Stuart Brundage, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do certain states, at certain points in time, establish leadership and governance over regional or global systems of states? This seminar contributes to explaining this process of hegemony by emphasizing cases in which it failed to occur despite the presence of the necessary military and economic conditions. In particular, the speaker will present a historical case study of British diplomacy in eighteenth-century Europe, showing that Britain failed to become a regional hegemon at this time despite its unrivalled military and economic capabilities.

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Speaker: Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies, Brown University; Author, Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs

There is growing alarm over how drugs empower terrorists, insurgents, militias, and gangs. But by looking back not just years and decades but centuries, Peter Andreas reveals that the drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful states have been its biggest beneficiaries.

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Emily Whalen, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This presentation examines a period of direct U.S. participation in Lebanon's war, the eighteen months during which U.S. Marines were deployed in Beirut as part of a Multinational Peacekeeping Force (MNF).  Existing scholarship on the MNF intervention in Lebanon tends to focus on the infamous barracks bombing of October 1983, overlooking how the securitization and militarization of U.S. policy in Lebanon changed both the Lebanese state and the U.S. foreign policy process. Juxtaposing discussions in Washington with events on the ground in Beirut during the months preceding the barracks bombing, this presentation uses the intervention in Lebanon to cast light on the relationship between intentions and outcomes in U.S. foreign policy.

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Speaker: Thomas Cavanna, Visiting Assistant Professor, Center for Strategic Studies, Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University

Is the United States losing Europe to China? What could that mean from a grand strategic perspective? Those questions may appear far-fetched given the huge influence that America has exerted over Europe since 1945, the benefits that it has provided to its allies, and the latter's recent push back against Beijing and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Yet the China challenge is real and emerges in a time of major uncertainty over Washington's intentions and capabilities.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Jill Goldenziel,  Associate Professor, Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia

This presentation will argue that the United States needs to develop a Lawfare strategy to combat its adversaries. It will first define the concept of Lawfare and discuss how its use has evolved and escalated in recent years. It will illustrate this phenomenon by examining three different types of Lawfare between China and the United States or its allies: international arbitration over China's claims to the Spratly Islands, China's non-uniformed maritime militias, and litigation involving the United States and Huawei.

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Speaker: Aroop Mukharji, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

Admirers of Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy tend to point to his realist sensibilities, his acute awareness of the global balance of power, his reluctance to use force, and his velvet glove (and iron fist). Critics cast him as a reckless blowhard who misread the world around him, issued excessive threats, and kicked off a slew of heavy-handed interventions in Latin America, souring the United States' relationship with its hemisphere for decades to come. Both camps, however, seem to agree that he was his own man: a fiercely independent leader with a well-defined mission. In this seminar, that belief is questioned.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Carl Forsberg, Ernest May Fellowship in History & Policy, International Security Program

Two developments have defined Middle Eastern international politics in the 2010s: first, the Arab spring and its failures, and second, polarization between Iran and a coalition of Arab states allied with the United States. This seminar locates the historical logics behind these developments in the regional transformations of the 1970s. During that decade, the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and imperial Iran collaboratively forged a diplomatic counterrevolution with U.S. support. Animated by a fear of alliances between the Soviet Union, revolutionary regimes, and the domestic left, these states advanced a new regional order designed to reinforce the security of authoritarian rule. The counterrevolutionary coalitions and strategies developed in the 1970s persisted after the Iranian Revolution, as U.S. allies pivoted to countering Iran and, more recently, the 2011 Arab spring.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Annette Idler, Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

Annette Idler will discuss the findings of her timely new book, Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War (Oxford University Press, 2019). The post–cold war era has seen an unmistakable trend toward the proliferation of violent non-state groups-variously labeled terrorists, rebels, paramilitaries, gangs, and criminals-near borders in unstable regions especially. Applying a "borderland lens" to security dynamics, in Borderland Battles, the speaker examines the micro-dynamics among violent non-state groups and finds striking patterns: borderland spaces consistently intensify the security impacts of how these groups compete for territorial control, cooperate in illicit cross-border activities, and replace the state in exerting governance functions. 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Rachel Esplin Odell, Research Fellow, International Security Program

In the growing peacetime naval competition between the United States and China, the divergence in the two countries' interpretations of maritime law has become a locus of contention. Both states maintain that they prioritize "freedom of navigation" (hangxing ziyou) and have done nothing to obstruct it, and each side insists that its position is firmly grounded in international law. The broader context often missing in discussions of this dynamic is that states' interpretations of key provisions in the international law of the sea related to coastal state jurisdiction vary widely. This seminar will present findings from a new global dataset of state's maritime jurisdictional claims as a window into understanding the range of this variation. The seminar will then present a theory to explain patterns of change and stasis in state's interpretations of the law of the sea over time, accompanied by empirical evidence from field research conducted in four country case studies: the United States, Japan, China, and India.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Alex Yu-Ting Lin, Research Fellow, International Security Program

When do rising powers become dissatisfied with their status, and how does such dissatisfaction motivate conflict? Conventional wisdom suggests that the rising powers' status grievances are mostly triggered by the actions of the existing great powers. Moving beyond this conventional wisdom, the speaker examines how perceived insubordination from smaller states makes a rising power become insecure about its status, thereby generating the pressure for conflict between the rising power and the existing great powers. Furthermore, the speaker shows that conflicts which arise because of perceived insubordination from smaller states have different escalatory logics than the conventional explanations focusing on status competition between great powers. The talk has broader implications for U.S.-China relations, the return of great power politics, and U.S. grand strategy.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Kacie Miura, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do some local leaders in China respond to foreign provocations by protecting foreign commerce from diplomatic tensions, while others engage in economic retaliation? Understanding this variation is important because whether local leaders are willing to serve as agents of state punishment has implications for China's use of economic coercion. Given China's strong central government, this variation in local leader behavior is surprising, especially during foreign policy crises, when national interests are at stake. To explain local leader participation in economic retaliation, the speaker proposes a theory that draws on the economic incentives and political concerns of local leaders in China. She provides evidence from a recent foreign policy crisis between China and South Korea over the latter's deployment of the THAAD missile defense system.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Sirianne Dahlum, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

A long-standing debate revolves around business elites and their role in states' war behavior. Some arguments imply that when business elites have a large influence on policymaking, states turn more belligerent, as business elites encourage military expeditions to open up or protect markets. Contrasting perspectives in the liberal tradition, such as "capitalist-peace" arguments, emphasize that business elites have strong economic incentives to avoid war and thus will have a pacifying effect when they hold political power. Comprehensive tests of these arguments are scarce, and those that exist do not account for the degree to which business elites hold sway over policymaking.  Drawing on new global data on the social composition of regime-support coalitions covering more than 200 years from 1789–the present, the speaker presents evidence on the war behavior of regimes supported by business elites. 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Vanes Ibric, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do countries with formal alliances engage in armed hostilities against one another? What motivates states to attack their allies? As evidenced by Italy's betrayal of the Central Powers in World War I or the border conflict between Soviet Union and China in 1969, countries with formal alliances have engaged in wars and militarized disputes. The speaker provides a new theoretical framework that distinguishes between alliances in which one state entered the alliance with a strong predisposition to attack its ally (i.e., premeditated fighting) and alliances in which fighting happens as a result of situational changes following the formation of the alliance (i.e., situational fighting).

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Peter Slezkine, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

By the end of the Second World War, most American policymakers assumed that their country had become inescapably and durably entangled in the affairs of the globe. Half a decade later, they settled on an objective that would determine the direction of their country's international efforts going forward. Throughout the 1950s, as the United States established itself as a permanent player on the global stage, American policymakers pursued the overarching aim of "free world leadership." This seminar will trace the emergence and evolution of the concept of the "free world" in American history, demonstrate its impact on policymakers' understanding of the Cold War and the United States' global role, and investigate the shift to alternative perspectives (including one centered on the "third world") by the end of the 1960s. Finally, the seminar will address how the current U.S. global order has been durably shaped by its original focus on the "free world."

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Audrye Wong, Grand Strategy, Security, & Statecraft Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

Economic statecraft — the use of economic tools to pursue political goals — is an important foreign policy strategy for many major powers and has been an increasingly important tool for China. The speaker will provide a theoretical framework to explain the effectiveness of economic statecraft, focusing on positive inducements, which have been relatively understudied. She will argue that effectiveness is influenced by the interaction between two variables: (a) the type of inducement strategy; and (b) the level of public accountability in the target country. 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Hyun-Binn Cho, Postdoctoral  Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

During international crises, states often take costly actions to signal resolve. Such coercive actions, however, can put greater political and psychological pressure on the opponent to counter-escalate. When costly signals are more "provocative," do they make unwanted crisis escalation more likely, or do they make the signal-sender look tough and help induce the opponent to back down? Indeed, why do states sometimes appear to deliberately engage in provocative actions to demonstrate resolve? This seminar addresses these puzzles using game-theoretic analysis and two case studies of crises involving China and the United States.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Daniel Sobelman, Assistant Professor of International Relations, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Drawing on the conflict between Israel and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip since the mid-2000s, this seminar will analyze the dynamics and the strategic implications of intra-war coercion in an asymmetric conflict between an established state and an emerging violent non-state actor. The speaker will examine Hamas's adoption of Hezbollah’s military doctrine and strategic vocabulary and explain the manner in which the Hamas movement has been able to harness its military capabilities to impose and threaten heavier costs on Israel while reducing Israel's freedom of action vis-a-vis the Gaza Strip.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Melissa Willard-Foster, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Vermont

Contrary to the dominant view that instability makes targets of coercive pressure more likely to concede, the speaker will argue that instability prolongs their resistance. Leaders' policies reflect their domestic political interests, thus, conceding to policy change invites political costs. The more powerful a leader's domestic opposition, the more likely it can benefit when the leader is forced to make a costly concession. Although resistance may be costly too, targets can more easily mitigate these costs than they can convince the challenger to change its demands. As a result, instability is more likely to encourage a target's resistance. The speaker tests her argument on Libya's rapprochement with the West, showing that Qaddafi refused to surrender the Pan Am flight 103 bombing suspects due to domestic political costs. It was only after Qaddafi recovered his power and the United States softened its terms that he complied, which paved the way for the 2003 deal.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Assistant Professor, Department of Strategy and Policy, U.S. Naval War College

A now little-known British adventurer named James Brooke ruled absolutely over a substantial territory in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo in what is now Malaysia, in the 19th century. He bequeathed his country to his descendants, who ruled until the last "White Rajah" sold Brooke's Sarawak to the British Crown after World War II. The story of the Brookes of Sarawak is full of tropes from Romantic-era novels, from the prodigal son returning to England unrecognizable from smallpox scars, to battles with pirates and headhunters, to the suicide of a faithful man of business who helps his master perpetrate a fraud and then kills himself out of remorse. Behind the drama are serious questions about how the three "White Rajahs" controlled their multi-ethnic, multi-faith, mountainous, unruly territory for a century. the speaker will argue that the Brooke rajahs used a combination of political accommodation of local political elites and a balancing strategy to build fighting alliances against troublesome challengers to their rule.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Sébastien Philippe, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Most successful nuclear weapons programs have benefited from significant foreign assistance for the acquisition of nuclear materials, sensitive equipment, and know-how. Such assistance is often kept secret, even after states decide to put an end to their nuclear weapons programs or ambitions. This seminar will discuss the policy and verification implications of this source of opacity on the reconstruction of past nuclear military activities as part of non-proliferation or denuclearization agreements.  It will build upon an historical and technical analysis of nuclear assistance between France, Israel, and South Africa and conclude by discussing the impact of discovering previously hidden information on existing policies and ongoing diplomatic processes.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker:  Cameron Tracy, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

States often spend vast sums on weapon production, yet have trouble mustering the resources necessary to eliminate stockpiled weapons for arms control and disarmament purposes. Stockpile reductions have proven particularly challenging with respect to weapons of mass destruction, for which weaponizability is embedded in materials rather than assembled devices. Their elimination commonly requires expensive, technologically demanding processes. U.S. chemical weapon and weapons plutonium stockpile reduction efforts provide useful case studies for investigation of the factors governing the success of reductions programs, as they faced similar challenges yet yielded divergent outcomes. This project involves comparative analysis of both reductions programs, focusing on the technical, organizational, and sociopolitical contexts that aided or hindered elimination.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Payam Ghalehdar, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

Under what conditions does the United States promote democracy abroad? From Western-style liberal democracy to outright authoritarianism, the historical record of U.S. regime promotion reveals a wide-ranging variation in promoted regime types. According to the standard narrative, this variation stems from a clash between the pursuit of hard-nosed self-interest and democratic values and ideals. This presentation challenges the misleading distinction between interests and ideals, arguing that both democracy promotion and democracy prevention can stem from national security considerations. To shed light on the variation in U.S. regime promotion, the presentation instead focuses on competing beliefs among U.S. foreign policy elites about the link between regime type and regime efficacy.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Tory Kindrick, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Policymakers and theorists have long debated the utility of nuclear deterrence as policy, while philosophers have debated its morality. In 2017, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, declared the use of nuclear deterrence to be immoral, signing the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in his role as head of state of Vatican City. No nuclear weapons states have as yet signed the treaty. This discussion explores how moral views may facilitate and complicate policy discussion and considers questions for moral authorities, policymakers, and practitioners when contemplating the morality of deterrence.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Co-Sponsored by Project on Managing the Atom

Speaker: Chuck Freilich, Senior Fellow, International Security Program

The speaker,  a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, author of Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for an Era of Change (2018), will discuss the ramifications of Israel's elections for Israel itself, the United States, and the Middle East. Among the issues addressed: the future of the peace process, the Iran nuclear issue and Iranian challenge generally, the potential for conflict with Hezbollah and Hamas, U.S.-Israeli relations, and the elections' domestic ramifications.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speakers: Mathias Ormestad Frendem, Henry Chauncey Jr. '57 Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Studies and the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, Yale University; A. Bradley Potter, Research Fellow, International Security Program

What effect do emerging communications technologies have on U.S. civil-military relations? How might the history of such technological disruption help us prepare for future disruptions? Most scholarship suggests that such developments should empower civilian leaders to better monitor and oversee military leaders, bringing in line military efforts with civilian preferences. However, the speakers argue that these technologies also bring with them challenging consequences for civil-military relations. Namely, they may encourage tendencies in both parties that undermine decision-making and long-term healthy interaction. The speakers illustrate this with a case study of relations between President George W. Bush and George W. Casey prior to launching the "surge" in Iraq.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Frank O'Donnell, Postdoctoral Fellow, U.S. Naval War College

The speaker will detail the arguments of his recent book, India and Nuclear Asia: Forces, Doctrine and Dangers. The book explores the post-1998 evolution of Indian nuclear thought, its arsenal, the triangular rivalry with Pakistan and China, and New Delhi's nonproliferation policy approaches. The speaker argues that emerging trends in all three states are elevating risks of regional inadvertent and accidental escalation. These include the forthcoming launch of naval nuclear forces within an environment of contested maritime boundaries; the growing employment of dual-use delivery vehicles; and the emerging preferences of all three states to employ missiles early in a conflict. These dangers are amplified by the near-absence of substantive nuclear dialogue between these states, and the growing ambiguity of regional strategic intentions. To mitigate these trends, the speaker recommends that the three states initiate a trilateral strategic dialogue, and that India institute a strategic defense review to resolve the growing ambiguities around its conventional and nuclear deterrence and improve public confidence in them.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Co-Sponsored by Project on Managing the Atom

Speaker: Elena Chachko, Research Fellow, International Security Program

A growing number of U.S. foreign and security measures in the past two decades has directly targeted individuals—natural or legal persons. These individualized measures have largely been designed and implemented by administrative agencies. Widespread application of individual economic sanctions, ranging from terrorism sanctions to sanctions against Russian individuals for election meddling; security watchlists; detentions; targeted killings; and individualized cyber countermeasures have all become significant currencies of modern foreign and security policies since the early 2000s. The constant development of technology for precision targeting and algorithmic decision-making will likely continue driving this trend. While the application of many of these measures in discrete contexts has been studied, they have yet to attract a holistic analysis.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Nadiya Kostyuk, Predoctoral Fellow, Cyber Security Project

This seminar examines conditions under which publicly observable "institutional change," which broadcast a state's rising or extensive cyber capabilities, can deter a country's adversaries from attacking it. The "use-and-lose" nature of cyber operations and difficulty of cyber attribution make such operations more effective in achieving tactical surprise than in deterring opponents. However, merely establishing a cyber unit and disclosing its estimated budget and personnel may increase the credibility of a state's threat and signal to multiple audiences, including its adversaries, that a country has, or is in the process of developing, its "power to hurt." 

The speaker's research demonstrates that even though the cases in which institutional change will influence a strong adversary's choice to attack are limited, states tend to sub-optimally overinvest resources in publicly observable institutional changes. Weak states overinvest to make adversaries believe they are strong whereas strong states overinvest because they do not want adversaries to believe that they are weak states, pretending to be strong. The speaker's focus on the strategic logic of institutional change as a deterrent represents a departure from existing literature, which largely examines deterrence using cyber operations and other statecraft tools.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: WU Riqiang, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

It is generally believed that in peacetime current Sino-U.S. nuclear relations are stable and deliberate nuclear exchanges between these two countries are unimaginable. However, conventional conflict might escalate to nuclear level, even if both sides wish to avoid it at the beginning of the war. This seminar will provide a causal mechanism of Sino-U.S. inadvertent escalation. Three driving factors are identified: the vulnerability of Chinese nuclear forces, the not-by-design co-mingling of China's conventional and nuclear weapons, and the fog of war. The security dilemma will worsen the situation and increase the escalatory risk. The mechanism is then tested via two hypothetical scenarios: a missile campaign and submarine warfare. In order to reduce the risk of inadvertent escalation, the United States should build confidence with China by declaring mutual vulnerability vis-à-vis China and constraining its strategic capabilities. China could also demarcate its nuclear and conventional missiles and clarify its no-first-use policy that conventional attacks on nuclear weapons would be regarded as nuclear attacks.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Mariya Grinberg, Research Fellow, International Security Program

In times of war, why do belligerents continue to trade with each other? The speaker shows that states set product level commercial policies to balance two potentially conflicting goals — maximizing state revenue from continued trade during the war and minimizing the ability of the opponent to benefit from security externalities of the trade. States are more likely to trade with the enemy in (1) products that their opponents take a long time to convert into military capability and (2) products that are essential to the domestic economy. The amount of time it takes the opponent to convert gains from trade into military capabilities determines which products are too dangerous to be traded during a war. The mitigating factor is the amount of revenue the state can extract from trade. The more essential the product is to the domestic economy, the less a state can afford to lose trade in it.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Aroop Mukharji, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

President William McKinley's foreign policy ranks among the most consequential of all U.S. presidents. At the start of his first term, the United States was primarily hemispheric in its foreign policy orientation. By the start of his second term, the United States had brought down a European colonial power, had begun governing seven new overseas territories, and had fought two additional wars in Asia.

This presentation focuses specifically on the Spanish-American War and why McKinley decided to intervene. Three myths about his motivations continue to persist: (1) that the United States waged an economically imperialist war to open up trade opportunities, (2) that the rhetoric of manliness pressured McKinley into taking a more aggressive stance, and (3) that the yellow press whipped up a public frenzy that led to the declaration of war. These influences are greatly overstated. Instead, this presentation will argue that the Spanish-American War was partly a humanitarian war, but also a "precautionary war" (author's term) that was based on a general fear of disorder, uncertainty, and instability and waged to ensure conditions that better facilitated regional stability and peace.

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Speaker: Christopher Anzalone, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

The advent of Islamist rebel governing projects in different regions of the world from Africa to the Middle East and West and South Asia provides an opportunity to link the empirical study of these groups with the broader academic literature on rebel governance, political Islam, and religion and violence. Despite in recent years making up a larger number of empirical cases of insurgent organizations seeking to implement governance projects, Islamist organizations have to date received limited focus in studies on the structures, ideologies, and dynamics of rebel governance. This interdisciplinary project examines the strategies and experiences of Islamist insurgent organizations that have actively attempted to set up civil governing systems through which to interact with local civilian populations. It situates the study of Islamist insurgent groups with governance ambitions within the growing literature on rebel governance.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Christopher Lawrence, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

The history of U.S. engagement with North Korea offers important lessons that could help reframe the diplomatic impasse today. In the 1994 Agreed Framework (AF), the regime agreed to dismantle its plutonium-production complex in exchange for western light water reactors (LWR) and the promise of political normalization with the United States. As construction of the LWRs fell behind, however, North Korea embarked on a secret uranium enrichment program. Today, scholars and policymakers look back at the LWRs of the AF as a "carrot" — "we offered the carrot, and they cheated anyway." But when scholars and policymakers consider the unique technical attributes of LWRs and how their construction was planned to be situated within a diplomatic track to normalization, they appear to function more as a way to signal commitment than as a carrot to bribe the regime. In this light, chronic construction delays and the offset of LWR costs to U.S. allies can be interpreted as signals about America's lack of commitment to normalization with North Korea. This conceptual shift — from carrots and sticks to signaling and credibility — offers important insights into past diplomatic failures and could help reconcile the competing visions of engagement with North Korea today.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Stephanie Freeman, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

During most of the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet officials built a broad consensus among their publics that nuclear weapons provided essential security by deterring the actions of hostile states. In the 1980s, however, the radical goal of nuclear abolition enjoyed staunch support from both grassroots movements across the globe and the leaders of the two superpowers, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. This presentation will examine nuclear abolitionists' influence on the trajectory of the Cold War's last decade, from 1979 to 1989. It will assess anti-nuclear activists' impact on elite decision-makers and consider how their shared interest in nuclear disarmament transformed U.S. and Soviet foreign policy in the 1980s. This talk will demonstrate that nuclear abolitionists played a decisive yet unappreciated role in ending the Cold War.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Ayako Kobayashi, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do some rebel groups restrict international humanitarian access to areas under their control, while others allow it? Some scholars posit that rebels strategically comply with international humanitarian law to legitimize their status in the international arena. Others underline the importance of exploring interactions between non-state armed groups and local populations from which protection norms may emerge. This interdisciplinary project will fill the gap between the internationalism and localism by proposing a new typology of rebel groups, addressing conditions under which rebels are more likely to allow humanitarian access, and through case studies illustrating the theory.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Daniel Z. Jacobs, Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Fellow, International Security Program

What are the sources of grand strategy, the relationship of national power to national interest? Answers to this question tend to emphasize domestic interests, cultural and ideational impulses, state capacity, or the distribution of military power. The speaker, however, argues that it is a state's ability to harness the wealth of others that shapes both what the state wants (i.e., national interest) and how the state goes about getting it (i.e., national power).

The core component of this argument is financial power; that is, the costs a state pays to facilitate public spending through borrowing. When these costs are relatively high, the state is likely to define its national interest narrowly and rely for its security on the self-correcting nature of the balance of power. By contrast, when the costs of borrowing are relatively low, the state will take a broader view of its national interest. As a result, the state is likely to reshape the balance of power in its favor and attempt to preserve this newfound distribution. Overall, scholars and policymakers can say that as a state's financial power rises, its grand strategy becomes increasingly ambitious.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Paul Behringer, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

In 1917–1918, the Russian state collapsed and its empire disintegrated. The Bolsheviks, having seized power in November 1917, managed to hold onto authority amid repeated challenges from domestic and foreign opponents in all directions. In October 1922, Lenin's party emerged victorious from the rubble of one of the most destructive civil wars in history. Historians have put forward several convincing arguments for why the Bolsheviks were able to win the overall struggle. But the fact that the new regime was also able to reconstitute much of the Russian Empire, extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean, is as astounding today as it was unlikely in 1918. This presentation attempts to explain this accomplishment by framing the civil war in the Russian Far East as a contest between geopolitical, social, ideological, and international forces of centralization and decentralization. Building on the most recent historiographic trends in the study of the Russian Civil War, it also speaks to political science research on the broader issues of intrastate conflict, foreign intervention, and violence.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Ben Rhode, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

In 1898, France's military attaché in London recommended that his superiors make a secret agreement with his anonymous Irish nationalist informant in order to undermine the British Empire and counterbalance supposedly hostile British behavior. Most historical assessments have either overlooked or discounted this attaché's recommendation, considering him untrustworthy or unsober. Such an interpretation is initially appealing, especially given the bizarre and conspiratorial material in the informant's unpublished reports. This seminar will challenge prevailing scholarship that ignores or deprecates this recommendation or the attaché's credibility. It will locate the episode within the context of French concerns over Britain's exploitation of the Spanish-American War, the Dreyfus Affair, and Fashoda; a preoccupation with supposed national subversion; and alarm over the phenomenon of "fake news." Using this episode as a case study, it will argue for taking alarming or peculiar observations in the diplomatic record seriously: neither downplaying their strangeness nor overlooking how, within their context, they could be sincerely believed and hold deep appeal.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Philip Andrew Martin, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do some winning armed movements build states with robust control over military forces after civil war, while others do not? Why, for example, did the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) succeed in building powerful and obedient post-war armies, while winning coalitions in Côte d'Ivoire (2011—), Libya (2011—), and Afghanistan (2001—) experienced military fragmentation and the growth of private armed networks controlled by ex-rebel commanders? While existing scholarship points to the role of ideology and external intervention, this book project argues that two wartime factors — threats to the survival of armed movements, and the social linkages between militant group commanders and insurgent-ruled communities — shape the bargaining power and behavior of ex-rebel commanders during transitions to postwar politics.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Dina Esfandiary, Research Fellow, International Security Program

For over a decade now, thinking on regional relations in the Persian Gulf has focused largely on the competition for regional hegemony between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the different layers of this rivalry. But recent events, in particular, the Arab Spring and Iran’s response, the announced U.S. pivot to Asia, and the landmark nuclear deal with Iran, served as catalysts for changes in the security dynamics of the Persian Gulf. Smaller Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, led by the UAE, previously content to align with the Saudi position, appear to be developing a growing self-awareness that represents a significant challenge to the existing order. The speaker will explore how these three events have affected regional developments and what these changes will mean for the region.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Anina Schwarzenbach, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

In the face of the increased number of individuals adhering to extremist ideologies in modern democratic states, governments have augmented the amount of public money spent on counter violent extremism strategies and programs. Despite this fact, systematic analyses of currently implemented strategies and programs are surprisingly sparse.

This seminar will discuss — by focusing on Germany, France, and the United States — which governmental approaches are most appropriate to counter violent extremism and what ought to be expected from the strategies and programs in terms of legitimacy and effectiveness.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Nicholas D. Anderson, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Most existing theories of expansion and territorial conquest tend to focus on key actors at the center of great states and empires, and on their will and ability to engage in expansion. However, a number of important instances of territorial expansion in the history of great power politics do not align well with these theories, showing territorial expansion to be far more peripherally-driven and far less intentional than they would expect. Drawing on research on the British and Japanese Empires, as well as on America's westward expansion, this presentation will outline a theory of inadvertent expansion that helps account for these puzzling and counter-intuitive cases.

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Speaker: Barak Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of Political Science, Haverford College

The seminar focuses on three factors — material, ideational, and intra-movement — that limit the ability of transnational jihadi groups to attain their objectives. These limitations should inform a less interventionist and more cost-effective strategy of containment.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Tyler Jost, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program/Cyber Security Project

Why do interstate crises occur? Existing scholarship posits that states use crises to reveal information about capabilities, resolve, and preferences. This book project instead argues that interstate crisis propensity is in part a function of the design of national security institutions, defined as the rules and procedures for deciding and executing national security strategy.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Lt. Col. Wes Adams, Research Fellow, International Security Program

In his research, Lt. Col. Adams investigates the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the future of military decision making. Since the dawn of recorded warfare, battlefield commanders sought greater speed and insight over their enemy, trying to reduce what Clausewitz would famously declare the "fog and friction" of war. Over time, myriad technologies offered promises of battlefield omniscience but failed. Will AI be the final technology to deliver on the promise, or the next failed attempt at clearing the fog?

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Jacob N. Shapiro, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University; Co-author, Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict

How a new understanding of warfare can help manage today's conflicts more effectively. Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Rebecca Davis Gibbons, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Project on Managing the Atom/International Security Program

The Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is widely credited with contributing to international security through its promotion of nuclear restraint. Whereas almost all states in the international system are members of the NPT, many of these states have not signed on to additional treaties and agreements designed to strengthen the regime. Having already committed to foreswear the possession of nuclear weapons, why would some NPT members avoid taking steps to further the treaty's proclaimed goals? States' affinity to U.S. global leadership explains such variation.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Thomas Cavanna, Visiting Assistant Professor of Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Since its launch by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative has become the symbol of China's rising foreign policy ambitions. Yet most studies on the subject remain descriptive in nature or limited in scope, exploring specific themes, regions, or projects. This seminar aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of the Belt and Road Initiative, its multiple dimensions, its prospects of success, and its potential implications for U.S. grand strategy.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Benjamin Zala, Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

For some time now, in both the scholarly literature and the statements of practitioners, it has been possible to identify competing perceptions of how many major centers of power exist in the world. Therefore whether the distribution of power should be characterized as unipolar, bipolar, multipolar, or perhaps even "nonpolar," has been a central theme of much analysis leading to a general sense of ambiguity in the way scholars and policymakers describe the inter-state order. This seminar will outline a way of making sense of this phenomenon without abandoning polarity analysis altogether. It will answer two central questions; how can scholars and policymakers account for the occurrence of competing perceptions of polarity theoretically? And how should they characterize its importance historically?

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Frank O'Donnell, Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

This seminar will first discuss how the requirements of Indian deterrence, as perceived by New Delhi's strategic elite, have evolved since 1998. It will next detail the characteristics of two "minimalist-political" and "maximalist-operational" schools of thought within Indian nongovernmental strategic elite discourse, and how their comparative influence has changed over time. The seminar will reconstruct the policy options developed by this strategic elite as it faced each nuclear policy juncture and demonstrate how a numerically dominant option in each discourse provides a reliable proxy indicator for the subsequent official strategic decision. It will conclude with an exploration of how this approach can inform scholarly understanding of current and potential future Indian nuclear policies.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Katlyn M. Turner, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

The state of long-term management of nuclear waste in the United States is at an impasse. While technical options exist for long-term radiological waste isolation, these are irrelevant in the face of the socio-political complications of siting and operating a nuclear waste repository. This lecture will outline and detail 1) the history of nuclear waste management options considered by the United States leading to its decision to pursue a long-term geologic repository for ultimate waste disposal, 2) the process—technical and political—of attempting to site Yucca Mountain as the United States' repository for civilian nuclear waste, and 3) the outlook moving forward for any attempts to site and operate a long-term geologic repositor—Yucca Mountain or otherwise—for nuclear waste in the United States. This lecture will attempt to situate the struggle to effectively manage nuclear waste within the realm of nuclear energy issues, nuclear security, and nuclear non-proliferation issues.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Maria Koinova, Reader in International Relations, University of Warwick; Senior Research Fellow, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

This presentation introduces findings from the large-scale European Research Council Starting Grant "Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty," directed by Dr. Maria Koinova as a Principal Investigator at the University of Warwick (2012–2017). Why do conflict-generated diasporas in liberal states mobilize transnationally in moderate or contentious ways for their homelands experiencing contested sovereignty? How contexts shape diaspora mobilizations is crucial. Koinova’s work evolving from this project challenges statist theories analyzing the role of diasporas in conflict processes through interactions between diasporas, host-states, and home-states.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Brian Filler, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

The leaders responsible for securing U.S. nuclear weapons, materials and infrastructure must receive the best training possible. This seminar will discuss how the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE) currently train their tactical and senior nuclear security leaders and where that training should be improved and augmented. The seminar will then present the recommendation that is being forwarded to the departments, calling for the establishment of Tiered DOD-DOE Nuclear Security Leaders Training. The proposed training is designed to provide breadth and depth of knowledge for all of the departments' tactical and senior nuclear security leaders. Finally, the presentation will discuss how the proposed training could improve the security of nuclear assets around the world.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Co-sponsored by Project on Managing the Atom

Speaker: Torrey Taussig, Research Fellow, International Security Program

In a renewed era of great power competition, leading authoritarian regimes have progressed from consolidating power within their borders to projecting power beyond them. Nowhere is this trend more evident, or important, than in Russia and China. This seminar will first discuss how Russian and Chinese foreign policy strategies have evolved over the course of the twenty-first century, as both nations have become revisionist powers in their respective regions. The seminar will also discuss how scholars and policymakers can gain greater insight into Russian and Chinese foreign policy decision making by assessing dynamics within their authoritarian political orders — including leaders, the institutions in which they operate, and their requirements for domestic legitimacy. As Presidents Putin and Xi continue to develop personalist systems at home, these internal factors will have increasing importance for U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

NOTE: CHANGED DATE

Speaker: Reid Pauly, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

In making demands, coercers must communicate the credibility of their threats to punish. They must also, however, communicate the credibility of corresponding assurances not to punish if the target complies. This presentation will explain the paradox at the heart of coercion and explore how states overcome it by signaling the contingency of their actions.

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Speaker: Alexander K. Bollfrass, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Fears of a West German bomb sharpened Cold War tensions, making the country's nuclear program an intelligence priority for all concerned states. Based on original archival and newly declassified files, this presentation evaluates the accuracy of U.S., UK, and East German intelligence assessments of the Federal Republic's proliferation risk. Despite spectacular collection successes, the Stasi's analysts were required to view the world through thick ideological lenses. The result was a distorted picture of West German ambition to arm itself with nuclear weapons.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Mahsa Rouhi, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Theories of grand strategy tend to focus on major powers. This seminar sheds light on the grand strategy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regional power. It explores the principles of Iranian grand strategy, whether explicitly stated or implicit in its national policies. The speaker will provide an analysis that lays out the grand strategy, its elements, and how it provides a framework to guide all Iranian foreign policy. 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Co-sponsored by Project on Managing the Atom

Speaker: Irina A. Chindea, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar explores the — at times — conflicting relationship between the external goal of rising and existing hegemons to maximize power and influence in the international system, and the domestic responsibility to provide for the security and well-being of their citizens. In the attempt to make a successful hegemonic bid or consolidate primacy, these powers often end up engaged in expensive international wars, shifting away resources from internal development. This seminar presentation unpacks the key drivers behind this trade-off and assesses its implications.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Ayako Kobayashi, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do some rebel groups restrict humanitarian access to their territory, while others allow it? Under what conditions does one rebel group change its attitude toward humanitarian access? This presentation introduces a typology of rebel groups — four types identified as quasi-state, extrovert, introvert, and isolationist rebels, depending on their strategic appeals to international and/or domestic audiences.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Ketian Zhang, Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar will zoom in on the temporal trends of Chinese coercion in the South China Sea as well as on one case, the 2012 Scarborough incident between China and the Philippines.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Alexandra Tejblum Evans, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This presentation will evaluate U.S. policy toward Lebanon from 1981–1985, tracing the gradual expansion and rapid contraction of American efforts to stabilize a complex civil and regional conflict. By situating the United States' diplomatic and military interventions within a broader effort to strengthen American influence in the Middle East, it will demonstrate how the experience shaped the Reagan administration's perception of threat—and opportunity—in a moment of structural change. It will identify persistent barriers to U.S. interests in a vital region and shed light on how American leaders learn through crisis.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speakers: Peter Krause, Co-Editor, Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics; Phil M. Haun, Dean of Academics, U.S. Naval War College; Tristan Volpe, Assistant Professor, Defense Analysis Department, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School

A discussion of the new edited volume, Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics, by a co-editor and two of the contributing authors.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Nina Silove, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar addresses the questions of the existence and effects of comprehensive, long term "grand plans" in international politics and their effects on state behavior by examining a least-likely case for finding the existence of operative plans: the responses of the United States to the rise of China.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Andrew D. Taffer, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar will explore China's contemporary strategy in its offshore territorial conflict with Japan. It will present evidence to suggest that Beijing has adopted a "wedging" strategy in the disputes aimed principally at weakening Japan's with the United States. Along with a close empirical analysis, it is highlighted that much of Beijing's conduct has corresponded with principles of coalition wedging established in Chinese writings and which the Chinese Communist Party has historically employed. The research is then situated in terms of—and used to critically analyze—the international relations literature on "wedging."

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Kate Cronin-Furman, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

Why do state perpetrators of mass atrocities stubbornly deny their crimes long after the evidence of guilt is clear? This talk will present an argument that such denials, even when totally unconvincing, can successfully affect members of the international community’s incentives to intervene. Evidence from Burma and Sri Lanka illustrates the specifics of this strategy and the conditions under which it is likely to succeed.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Paul Fraioli, Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar will present Chinese and Russian ideas about global order and international law that emerged during the Cold War, trace their historical antecedents, and present contemporaneous reactions to these views from policymakers in the U.S. government. It will also discuss how these ideas illuminate current topics, including “new form of great power relations” between the United States and China, and debates over several maritime and landed territorial disputes.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Payam Ghalehdar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar presents a novel argument about U.S. regime change that centers on the emotional state of U.S. presidents. It develops the concept of "emotional frustration," an unpleasant emotional state marked by the perception that the behavior of a target state is driven by anti-American hatred. Emotional frustration produces aggressive tendencies, which impulsively spur the turn to military force and make regime change an attractive tool to strike the target state and relieve frustration.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Chad Ellsworth, Research Fellow, International Security Program

The United States Air Force must mature its ability to act quickly, operationally, and logically, in response to dynamic adversaries within an ever-changing geopolitical environment. The Air Force logistics enterprise must take steps now to ensure it meets the demands of the future. What steps should be taken by senior leaders now to drive needed change? This seminar will look at the Air Force initiative to transform its logistics support enterprise.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker:  David Allen, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

In the middle of the twentieth century, foreign policy elites led a national movement to create democratic, foreign policy publics in communities across America, building what we now know as World Affairs Councils. This seminar will take Cleveland as its case study, explaining the rise and fall of the movement for "citizen education in world affairs" through the city where had seemed to have most success, in the 1930s and 1940s, and yet went through the steepest decline even before the Vietnam War. Americans, in other words, tried to build a democratic foreign policy, but they failed. This seminar demonstrates how and why.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Burak Kadercan, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

All analysts agree that the self-proclaimed Islamic State is a "territorial" organization, but there exists little systematic analysis over two questions: how can scholars and policymakers make sense of ISIS' territorial vision, and how does the group's territoriality affect its strategy? Drawing on insights from political geography and the history of past Islamic states, this seminar identifies ISIS as a "hybrid" spatial form that brings together elements from both historical Islamic states and the nation-state ideal. ISIS' hybrid territorial practices are associated with its global and regional objectives, which follow a simple logic: degrading and destroying what the group refers to as "grayzones," or zones of religious and sectarian reconciliation. 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Ariane Tabatabai, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

Ariane Tabatabai will discuss the role of strategic culture in shaping Iran's national security policies. She will map the Iranian national security decision-making process and the drivers framing the country's security thinking and policies.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker:  A. Bradley Potter, Research Fellow, International Security Program

This seminar will examine the United States' experience ending wars from Vietnam to Iraq. In particular, it will consider the role senior political and military leaders played in crafting American approaches to bringing wars to a close. The importance of historically informed ideas about the utility of force and the nature of war termination feature prominently in exploring just how leaders might matter in ending wars.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Michael Beckley, Research Fellow, International Security Program

The United States has been the world's dominant power for more than a century. Now many analysts believe other countries are rising. Is the United States doomed to decline? Is the unipolar era over? In this seminar, Michael Beckley argues that the United States has unique advantages over other nations that, if used wisely, will allow it to remain the world's sole superpower throughout this century.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Ben Rhode, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program

This seminar will examine British diplomatic perceptions of Spain's defeat in 1898. It will explore British reactions to Spain's bitterness over being considered a "dying nation" and the supposedly close U.S.-UK relationship. It will discuss British concerns that Spain might fall under the influence of hostile states and that Spanish retaliatory actions could pose a strategic threat to the British Empire. In doing so, it will investigate understandings of national power, influence, and diplomacy at the fin de siècle.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Jeffrey G. Karam, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

Under what conditions do intelligence officials and diplomats make accurate assessments of domestic developments, such as revolutions or military coups, in foreign states? "Agents of Empire" is the first interdisciplinary study that examines U.S. intelligence failures and successes in the Middle East during the Cold War.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Mathias Frendem, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

How do great powers compete in the contemporary world? With great power wars and territorial acquisitions being rare since 1945, competition instead primarily takes place for influence over minor powers. Influence can be very beneficial, but this is not always the case. Minor powers have considerable agency and often seek to use the great powers to pursue their own aims. The speaker outlines why great powers compete for influence, the main challenges they face, and the best strategies for overcoming these.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Aila M. Matanock, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

Settlements to civil conflict, which are notably difficult to secure, sometimes contain clauses enabling the combatant sides to participate as political parties in post-conflict elections. In this seminar, the speaker will discuss some of her research suggesting that electoral participation provisions allowing rebel parties helps secure peace between combatants. 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speakers: Mark S. Bell,  Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; 

Julia Macdonald, Assistant Professor in International Relations, Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

How dangerous are nuclear crises, and how should scholars and policymakers think about them? What dynamics govern how they unfold? The speakers argue that correctly interpreting nuclear crises—and how one thinks about the effects of nuclear weapons during these times—hinges on crisis participants' theories about processes of escalation to the nuclear level. 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Co-sponsored by Project on Managing the Atom

Speaker: Andrea Gilli, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program

What are the consequences for international politics of the emergence of robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence: the so-called second machine age? Are these new technologies going to promote instability and conflict, as many warn, or are they going to reinforce U.S. military primacy. How are they going to affect warfare, use of force, and even world politics? The literature in international relations theory has generally neglected technology and its dynamics and thus does not offer clear guidance.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Ivan Arreguin-Toft, Senior Research Fellow, Cyber Security Project

In the past two decades, an increasing number of social scientists, military historians, and practitioners have weighed in on an important question relevant to the conduct of war and wartime occupation: what actually happens when a given political actor deliberately or systematically harms noncombatants as a strategy? 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Assistant Professor, Department of Strategy and Policy, U.S. Naval War College

What beliefs influence liberal great power policymakers to back a government threatened by an insurgency? Why do great powers continue seeking insurgent defeat when costs rise? This seminar identifies a core belief about national and international security in the literature on pacification from the post–World War II era to the current period of liberal interventionism. It analyzes how this belief distorts analyses of past interventions and shapes policymakers' intervention choices.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Speaker: Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Middle East Initiative

This seminar has been cancelled.

Speaker: Vera Mironova, Research Fellow, International Security Program

The speaker will discuss the labor market of non-state armed groups on the ground and at the leadership level, focusing on recruitment, retention, and turnover. 

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

This seminar will present a comparative assessment of Chinese and Russian approaches to the international legal and security architecture stood up by the United States after World War II, beginning with a historical overview of the emergence of the concept of "international law."

The speaker will demonstrate the importance of military training by drawing on archival documents and a rich historiography to comparatively trace the development of three separate elements of the Communist fighting force in Vietnam during the Second Indochina War (1961–1975): the forces of the North Vietnamese Regime, or the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), as well as two groups within the southern resistance of the People's Liberation Armed Front (PLAF, also known as the Việt Cộng or VC): Main Force units and Guerrilla Force units.

Speaker: Christopher Anzalone, Research Fellow, International Security Program

Drawing on collected jihadi-insurgent primary source materials and group histories, this seminar examines the organizational and local dynamics at play within regional Sunni jihadi-insurgent organizations to explain why and when there have been defections and shifts in loyalty from Al-Qa'ida and its regional affiliates to Islamic State.

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Speaker: Stig Jarle Hansen, Research Fellow, International Security Program

It is now over 16 years since the September 11th attack and the initiation of the so-called "war on terror," yet in Africa, none of the allies of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State have been defeated. This seminar bases itself on a comparative study of sub-Saharan jihadist organizations. The main argument is that the resilience of the organizations partly emerges because of lack of understanding of the relationship between the organizations and the territories in which they operate. Countering Violent Extremism and counter strategies have to be adjusted to the type of control these organizations wield in their area of operations.

Speaker: Barry Little, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

The speaker will discuss U.S. and Chinese perspectives on strategic stability, sticking points in the nuclear relationship, and recommendations on how to bolster stability.

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Drawing on historical materials collected from research at eight archives, this seminar will offer a theory of presidential decision-making in response to mass killing, illuminating the historical factors that typically lead to changes in policy and uncovering dramatic stories of internal government infighting, secret deliberations, and cover-ups, as various administrations have struggled to define their policy response.

The United States has been remarkably successful at using the security guarantee as a non-proliferation tool, but during the Cold War, three countries — Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — were in danger of slipping out from under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Why did these states feel the need to start down the nuclear path, despite being under the protective wing of its nuclear-armed superpower ally? Relying on declassified national security archival documents, this seminar sheds light on the interplay between alliance dynamics and nuclear weapons decision making.

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This seminar will explore the paradoxical phenomenon of commercial ties between Mao's China and international capitalism during the founding years of the People's Republic of China.

Examining the case of India’s nuclear policy toward nuclear experimentation in 1974, this seminar presents how scientists attempted to stylize India’s nuclear policy in light of the changing dynamics of science and politics.

This seminar examines the varying strategies of insurgent diplomacy, and more specifically, asks when and why rebel groups focus their diplomatic attention on certain outside actors over others.

Speaker: Nicholas L. Miller, Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

Much conventional wisdom suggests that states with nuclear energy programs are more likely to seek or acquire nuclear weapons. In this seminar, the speaker will argue that the link between nuclear energy programs and proliferation is overstated. While energy programs increase the technical capacity of a state to build nuclear weapons, they also (1) increase the costliness of nonproliferation sanctions, (2) increase the odds that a parallel nuclear weapons program is detected, and (3) reduce the incentives to weaponize by providing a hedging alternative. Collectively, these three mechanisms help explain why states with nuclear energy programs have not been significantly more likely to seek or acquire nuclear weapons historically. 

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Speaker: Calder Walton, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy, International Security Program

Stretching from the Second World War to the early Cold War, this seminar will examine the origins, evolution, stresses, and strains of British and U.S. intelligence relations—the closest intelligence relationship between two powers in history. Using a series of case studies, from signals intelligence-sharing agreements to atomic espionage and covert action during Britain's end of empire, it will explore the impact that British and U.S. intelligence had on post-war international relations. While collaborating together in unprecedented ways, it will be shown that, in some instances in the post-war years, British and U.S. intelligence worked at cross-purposes—and were also disastrously penetrated by their opponents, Soviet intelligence. This seminar will also offer some (arguably much-needed) policy-relevant historical lessons for governments and intelligence communities today.

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In this seminar, the speaker will discuss the context of the current Air Force budget position relative to the other military services, historic budget positions, and potential military spending. Furthermore, the speaker will identify the players, process, and struggle within the Air Force and Department of Defense highlighting the complicated nature of creating a consistent budget narrative. Finally the speaker will introduce two specific policy recommendations provided to Air Force Senior Leadership to enable to Air Force to more effectively posture our corporate Air Force to better support our most senior leaders as they ultimately decide resource allocation to align with our strategy.

Many realists have argued that the United States and China had a common power interest in countering the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They argue, however, that the United States and China had had a hostile relationship mainly due to American domestic politics until the Nixon administration finally succeeded in overcoming domestic obstacles to make an alliance with China in 1972. Countering conventional domestic explanations, the speaker presents a structural explanation that U.S.-China relations before and after 1972 are explained by the power structures.  

In this seminar, the speaker will discuss how the concept of nuclear transparency in safeguards and nonproliferation has evolved, how to frame it appropriately for better practice in the non-nuclear-weapon states, fairer assessment by the nuclear-weapon states, more effective safeguards by the IAEA, and how to measure it, qualitatively and quantitatively with the help of a nuclear transparency dataset.

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The rise of great powers is one of the key factors in international relations. Yet, scholars and policymakers know little about what strategies great powers use to ensure their rise. The speaker argues that the choice between aggressive and passive strategies is explained by the great powers' relative capabilities.

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There is a lingering disagreement among scholars on how the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) affects nonproliferation and disarmament outcomes, in particular the political motivations of states to acquire or renounce nuclear weapons. Drawing on constructivist scholarship, this research project conceptualizes a range of normative mechanisms through which international norms and regimes could affect domestic political deliberations and proceeds to examine them in the cases of nuclear disarmament of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.

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Over the past seven decades, the U.S. government has consciously and consistently spent disproportionate resources to pursue, establish, and maintain military superiority relative to all other states within the international system. Given an ostensibly benign security situation, such preponderance of power appears puzzling. The speaker proposes that U.S. leaders desire to acquire military primacy because they believe it to be necessary for enhancing their country's long-term wealth.

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Why do some states have more status than others? Practitioners and scholars often refer to the existence of an international pecking order. Yet, though status is used to explain important phenomena in international politics—such as hegemonic wars and the foreign policy of emerging powers—little is known about what status is, how it works, or where it comes from.

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In 2011 and 2012, as part of its effort to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel engaged in coercive diplomacy to convince the United States to cast Iran into economic isolation and take certain measures in order to dissuade Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. This seminar will take a closer look at Israel's coercive campaign and draw insights on the origins of threat credibility in international relations.

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In recent years, jihadist groups across the Muslim world have engaged in new and more intense types of violence than they have in previous years, including uniquely sadistic forms of violence against women. In order to explain this evolution in jihadist violence, the speaker examines key trigger points that initiated this change in their behavior by looking at the cases of Pakistan, Iraq, and Nigeria.

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Alliance formation and termination among criminal groups entail costs, not only benefits. Why, then, do criminal organizations enter such costly commitments instead of engaging in sporadic, one-off cooperation, and how do they choose their alliance partners among other criminal groups?

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This seminar will present an argument that states who are reluctant to comply with their human rights obligations employ "half-measures" as a coalition-blocking strategy to prevent the mobilization of cohesive international pressure and censure. A case study of response to international demand for post-conflict justice in Sri Lanka illustrates these dynamics and demonstrates that pursuing half-measures can successfully disrupt international pressure by targeting the set of less engaged states that act as veto points on multilateral action.

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Why do some armed nonstate actors turn to foreign fighters while others avoid them? Examining the case of the Islamic State, this seminar presents a theoretical framework to help understand the considerations that shape actors' decisions regarding foreign fighters.

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Territorial conquest once went hand in hand with warfare, but no longer. In aggregate, conquest has declined dramatically. Yet, as Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea evinces, a particular form of conquest—land grabs seizing only a limited part of another state's territory—continues to occur. These land grabs often provoke crises but only rarely lead to war.

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Many analysts argue that China will soon dominate East Asia militarily. In reality, however, China is far from achieving this goal and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Homeland security missions drain China's military resources; China's neighbors have acquired capabilities that preclude Chinese sea and air control throughout most of the East and South China Seas; and China's economy has stagnated and wracked up liabilities that will limit the growth of China's military budget.  This seminar describes these developments and discusses their implications for U.S. foreign policy.

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Drawing from, and building on, his new book, United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice: Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics (Oxford University Press, 2016), Zachary D. Kaufman explores the U.S. government's support for, or opposition to, certain transitional justice institutions.

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How can international law better protect both international security and the human rights of people fleeing violence? This presentation will argue that the refugee and migration crisis has resulted not only from intractable violence, but from the world's failure to manage it. It will then propose and sketch new international law to address this crucial human rights problem.

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This seminar will examine the connection between intra-alliance rivalries and the spread of nuclear weapons by looking at South Korean–Japanese relations during the Cold War.

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This seminar will examine the use of persuasion as a form of bilateral influence and discuss the aspects of both successful and failed cases of persuasive diplomacy. The speaker will focus specifically on U.S. leaders' attempts to employ persuasion to shape Beijing's behavior and conclude with a discussion on the implications of her findings for U.S. policy towards China.

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The Mexican transnational criminal networks (TCNs) continue to thrive, despite efforts of the U.S. and Mexican governments to degrade them. This seminar will describe some of the strategies that have not been successful, such as interdicting firearms and arresting senior organization members, as well as propose solutions focused on blocking the free flow of profits derived from illegal activities. The ability to launder money keeps the TCNs operating and preventing this would be a significant hindrance to them.

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When uncertainty is high, and verifiable facts are inconvenient or few, how do individuals learn about what to fear and how to respond to the threats they have identified? In this seminar, Professor Greenhill will demonstrate that across time and space, during the Internet era as well as long before it, some distinct and oft replicated patterns are discernable, whereby invented, embellished or simply unverified sources of security-related information materially inform and influence real world foreign and defense policy formulation and implementation.

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This seminar examines variation among militant splinter groups, and the speaker argues that how and why they break away is key to explaining their ultimate behavior. This research not only demonstrates that how militants form strongly shapes their long-term trajectory, but it also calls into question key assumptions that are central to U.S. counterinsurgency policy.

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When and under what conditions is U.S. nonproliferation policy successful towards allies that supply controversial nuclear assistance to third party states? This seminar, through focused comparison of cases of nuclear assistance since the 1970s, investigates the challenges posed by allied suppliers and the nuclear industry to U.S. nonproliferation policy.

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The speaker will discuss the U.S. Nuclear ICBM mission and its contribution to nuclear deterrence.  The presentation is focused on day-to-day operations of a U.S. Air Force Missile Wing and the lives of the men and women who operate the world's most powerful weapons.

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Following the money, disrupting financial flows, and undermining terrorist groups' financial bases are all key elements of current global counter-terrorism efforts. Counter-terrorism financing (CTF) initiatives are part of a complex international regime, comprising UN instruments, UN counter-terrorism bodies, and ad hoc global and regional non-governmental institutions, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Does this system work? How and why? This seminar will examine the state of the regime, its specific compliance-inducing mechanisms, and states' responses to its provisions.

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Emile Simpson argues that international law is both an expression and a foundation of international order understood as an inter-state system: neither international order nor international law can exist without the other. This argument will be developed through a brief history of the international law of war and peace from the seventeenth century to the present day.

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The central thesis of this seminar is that the nature of Israel's external environment, of the military threats it faces, and of its society have all changed significantly and that a commensurate change is required in its national security strategy. The speaker will present a proposal for a comprehensive new national security strategy.

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This seminar will examine the causes and consequences of Pakistan's nuclear decision-making in terms of bureaucratic politics and how it impacted the choices made in the acquisition of nuclear capability and shaped the country's nuclear policies, posture, and strategic beliefs.

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This seminar will examine French diplomatic perceptions of America's growing power in the context of the Spanish-American War and some steps taken by French diplomats to make a possible Anglo-American alliance less likely.

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How does the IAEA reach the conclusion that a state is in "non-compliance" with safeguards and thereby alert the international community to the possibility that the state is (or was) seeking to acquire nuclear weapons? This seminar will examine how the IAEA has drawn safeguards conclusions in past cases. It will recommend modifications to the IAEA's reporting procedures to enhance the credibility of its safeguards conclusions and improve opportunities for the timely resolution of compliance issues.

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Why is it that some threats are believed credible by states during crises, while others are not? How do target states interpret coercive signals intended to establish threat credibility during these periods?

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This seminar will analyze the variation in deterrence dynamics in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and explore the manner in which the two actors have applied deterrence in the wake of the 2006 war.

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The United States is the leader in foreign arms sales, dominating a multibillion dollar global market.  Advocates of U.S. arms sales argue these deals secure U.S. allies and influence abroad, while critics charge U.S. military transfers contribute to destructive and destabilizing regional arms races.  This seminar will analyze the different approaches of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations to arms sales to wealthy petrodollar states during the 1970s, a transformational period in the global foreign arms trade.

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The rise of social media as a means of communication has been celebrated as a new way for citizens to voice dissatisfaction with their government and to coordinate dissent. But governments remain in de facto control over Internet accessibility, which means that new digital technology also provides abusive rulers with new repressive tools. In this seminar, the speaker argues that states' Internet control policies go hand in hand with their use of repressive strategies.

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This seminar offers a framework for assessing the effectiveness of airpower supply operations and examines scenarios where airpower both succeeded—and failed—in order for practitioners and policymakers alike to gain insight into the limits of air mobility forces in strategy development and execution. 

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China has been one of the pioneers of using limited alignments in its diplomacy particularly towards Southeast Asia. However, most of the prevailing literature tends to focus on evaluating bilateral relations rather than assessing why and how Beijing deploys its partnership strategy. This seminar presentation aims to fill this gap by exploring the dynamics of Chinese strategic partnerships in Southeast Asia.

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Why do some efforts by the international community to manage and mitigate nuclear risks succeed while others fail? This seminar develops an analytical framework that moves beyond extant explanations focused on self-interest and explores how cognitive beliefs, implementation practices, and their interplay inform interests, thereby shaping institutional effectiveness. Evidence is drawn from three cases of multilateral cooperative engagement in nuclear security and counterterrorism.

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Every day news is littered with stories about the implications of profound demographic shifts faced by the world's states and regions. By researching the political dimensions of demographic dynamics in key states during critical historical periods, this seminar will facilitate a better understanding of demographic politics; and one that is both theoretically and practically informative.

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What explains variation in the U.S. response to mass killings abroad? ISP Research Fellow Amanda J. Rothschild explores this question through the detailed examination of U.S. policy throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on materials from eight archives across the United States as well as oral history interviews, Rothschild proposes a theory explaining how, when, and why the United States pursues a range of policy options.

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Why have U.S. wartime nation-building efforts so consistently failed? At a time when U.S.-constructed militaries and state institutions are collapsing in Iraq and Afghanistan, this seminar looks back further for an answer — to the U.S. nation-building effort in South Vietnam.

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Why do states sometimes balance against the potential hegemon, while at other times they bandwagon with it? This question is a the center of the balance of power literature, yet current theories provide few concrete predictions of how different states behave. This seminar will examine how the choice is a function of the relative threat each state faces from its neighbors and the potential hegemon. The argument is tested by looking at how Austria responded to France from 1683 to 1797.

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Some civil wars are marked by a surprising confluence of decisions on the part of the participants: the belligerents continue to fight but at low levels of intensity, while foreign states continue to support them in this dead-end endeavor.  What distinguishes these quagmires from other civil wars?

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Co-sponsored by the Middle East Initiative

National power is the most important variable in international relations, yet scholars still lack a reliable method for measuring it. This seminar addresses this problem by developing and testing two schools of thought about how to measure national power.

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Drawing on extensive field research in Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, and Canada, this seminar presents a theoretical framework at the intersection of international relations theory and comparative politics, linking inter-criminal organization alliance formation and termination to the outbreak and persistence of high-intensity criminal violence.

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Why do leaders rely on covert action to overthrow or prop up foreign regimes in some cases but not in others? This seminar proposes a theory that explains how leaders' attitudes toward risk determine whether they will undertake regime change or rescue in public or in secret. Evidence is drawn from four prominent cases of U.S. intervention during the Cold War.

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This seminar examines the main stages of the development of Islamist groups though the prism of the labor market: how groups start and attract prospective fighters (recruitment), their personnel management policies (retention), and when fighters leave and groups disband (turnover)—relying on the primary field data that the speaker collected on the frontlines of the Syrian civil war.

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This seminar will examine these political effects of nuclear acquisition in the cases of France, China, Israel, and South Africa and reflect on the likely political consequences of eventual Iranian nuclear acquisition.

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How should students of international politics understand the global resurgence of religion and religious actors? This seminar introduces the concept of religious nationalism and argues that it poses unique and dangerous threats for stability both within states' borders and across them.

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When and why do states assist refugees? Throughout history, states have always crafted international legal agreements to assist refugees that serve both their own interests and the refugees they purport to protect. Even as states provide humanitarian assistance to refugees, they may also use the existence of refugee flows as a political pawn. This seminar will examine this phenomenon with particular reference to the case of Vietnamese refugees following U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

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How was South Korea able to pursue its nuclear weapons program in the 1970s? Was U.S. coercive diplomacy the primary driver leading to South Korea's decision to abandon the weapons program? This seminar examines South Korea's nuclear weapons program and U.S. non-proliferation efforts from the Nixon to the Carter Administrations in the broader context of international nuclear history.

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While there is international consensus that the country producing the nuclear waste is responsible for its disposal, policymakers are increasingly turning to the possibility of multinational repositories. Multinational repositories and other arrangements to jointly store or dispose of nuclear waste have evident safety, security, and non-proliferation benefits, but they also bring a number of ethical concerns.

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Do chemical weapons have an inflated influence on U.S. foreign policy? This seminar examines the rationale behind recent military-centric responses to chemical weapons proliferation and proposes that this rationale is based on generalized perceptions that belie historical scrutiny.

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Does greater certainty about an opponent's military and political characteristics cause conflict or peace? This seminar offers a theory of (1) when presidents and advisors are most likely to make estimation errors that result in misplaced certainty and (2) how such errors are a cause of conflict. Evidence is drawn from prominent cases in U.S. foreign policy.

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How has the advent of nuclear weapons affected the politics of decision-making and control in military alliances? This presentation seeks to develop a new basis for analyzing contemporary military alliances and predicting their cohesion, durability, and structure.

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The U.S.-Singapore naval relationship is arguably the most overlooked yet consequential security relationship in Southeast Asia. Through a correlation of interests, events, and political pragmatism, both states have fashioned a new model of security cooperation and bilateral relations in a region referred to by some as "Asia's Cauldron."

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This seminar offers a theory of behavior based on a group's position of power in its movement hierarchy, which will be analyzed using national movements and insurgencies in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe.

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This seminar will examine key negotiations between China and the United States, from the opening of relations in 1972 to the present day. It will discuss China's core principles and interests that serve as the foundation for its positions in negotiations, and the different strategies that the United States has used with varying levels of success to encourage China to compromise and cooperate. The discussion will also address the broader literatures on diplomacy and foreign policy decision-making.

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How do nuclear weapons change the foreign policies of the states that acquire them? This seminar offers a theory explaining the origins of six foreign policy behaviors that nuclear acquisition may facilitate. The theory describes which of these behaviors states are likely to find attractive and thus which behaviors states are likely to use nuclear acquisition to facilitate.

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Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a vigorous public and academic debate on which grand strategy the United States should pursue. It has also narrowed to essentially three positions. First, deep engagement proponents define U.S. interests broadly and advocate an expansive role for the U.S. military in the world. Second, restraint proponents define U.S. interests narrowly and advocate a moderately reduced U.S. military role. Third, neo-isolationists also define U.S. interests narrowly but advocate a drastically reduced U.S. military role.

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This seminar will present a historical account of how and why evolving concepts of the enemy in international law have influenced the boundaries between war and peace, specifically in terms of encouraging either clearly delimited or open-ended conflicts.

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Even though the concept of rising powers is central to international relations and considered crucial for answering questions about war and peace, the theoretical literature on rising powers is surprisingly scanty. One of the most prominent deficits is that theorists frame rising powers in terms of their "material capabilities" or their military and economic power. There is little attention paid to the domestic beliefs of rising powers and no acknowledgement among either academics or policy analysts that rising powers could have a commonality of beliefs. Using both historical and contemporary cases of rising powers, the project shows this lack has resulted in the ignoring of some rising powers, the mis-identification of others, and has dangerous consequences. 

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The February 2014 capture of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa organization, appeared to be a victory against the Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). It was not, in part because of inherent problems with decapitation as a tactic, and in part because of the particular goals and structures of the DTOs. Decapitation remains an attractive approach, however, because of the audiences it reaches and not because it degrades the targeted organizations.

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This seminar will focus on how states pursue nuclear weapons, disaggregating the different strategic choices states face when they think about acquiring nuclear weapons.

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Co-sponsored by Project on Managing the Atom

This seminar will examine Chinese nationalism and foreign relations on three levels: first, when protest will arise in response to an international incident; second, what explains Chinese official response to nationalism based on signaling and concerns of domestic stability; and, finally, why outside states will change their behavior or policies in response to nationalistic protest in China.

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This seminar explores how security sector reform, a core element of the statebuilding paradigm, affects the production of public order and ultimately violence in fragile states.

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How much do individual leaders matter? This seminar looks at the decision to forgo the pursuit of nuclear weapons and finds that new leaders are likely to abandon proliferation efforts begun by their predecessors.

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What can scholars and policymakers learn from U.S. nonproliferation policy toward hard cases like India? Can the United States prevent proliferation when the state already has the indigenous capability to produce fissile materials and has high regional threat perception?

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From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. In fact, recent research suggests that nonviolent movements are more than twice as effective in achieving their goals than violent ones. So why do some political movements nevertheless believe it necessary to take up arms? Can they be convinced otherwise?

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In this seminar, Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Parker will provide an overview of U.S. Air Force nuclear operations to include the bomber and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) missions. He will also discuss the Air Force's ongoing Force Improvement Program implemented in early 2014 to strengthen the organizational culture of the nuclear forces. As a previous commander of a nuclear-capable bomber unit, Brandon Parker will share his unique insight about the nuclear mission, its challenges, and the likelihood of the improvement program's success.

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How can scholars and policymakers effectively explain security decisions in revolutionary states or states where religion or ideology influences security policies? The lack of an adequate approach has led to misunderstandings and occasionally claims that the decision-making process in these states is inexplicable. The presentation explores the security decisions of the Islamic Republic of Iran by proposing a new model for analyzing decisions in revolutionary states.

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Academic scholarship has been largely successful in understanding and identifying the primary motivations behind nuclear weapons exploration and acquisition and has made significant strides in analyzing the substantial impact that nuclear weapons have had on various other issue areas—suggesting that nuclear weapons have important political effects for their possessors in conflict and broader bargaining interactions. A less-studied phenomenon, though equally interesting and policy-relevant, is that of deproliferation, the process by which states decide to abandon their nuclear weapons ambitions or nascent programs. Since 1945, three times as many states have started and stopped nuclear weapons programs than have successfully proliferated.

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The end of the Cold War left the United States in a remarkable position: It was far and away the world's most powerful country, and it was on good terms with most of the world's major powers. Despite these advantages, its foreign policy record since then is mostly one of disappointments and sometimes costly failures. These recurring follies are due in part to America's structural position in the international system, but they also reveal some recurring weaknesses in America's foreign policy establishment and its overall approach to foreign affairs.

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States commonly employ a divide and conquer strategy against violent nonstate actors, aiming to fragment terrorist groups, shatter their organizational networks, and compel existing members to renounce violence. Surprisingly, there has been little systematic analysis of precisely how internal splintering affects the trajectories of terrorist organizations and why the subsequent splinter groups develop in particular ways. This presentation highlights a new theory of organizational fragmentation that ultimately connects the different causes of group splintering with particular outcomes, and it presents preliminary evidence on the development of terrorist splinter organizations over time.

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In his seminar, Dr. Sobelman will outline the dynamics that have shaped the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah since the early 1990s and explore the manner in which the latter has in recent years accompanied its vast military procurement with a calculated public deterrence campaign vis-à-vis Israel.

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This seminar explores the politics of state-building to examine the effects of intervention on the governance of security forces. Viewing the security sector as a central component of state authority reveals how the nature of internal political threats shapes the way security forces are governed and the opportunities for external actors to influence them. The seminar will explore the implications of these findings for the study of violence and intervention in weak states and for the design and conduct of peacekeeping, stabilization, and security assistance programs.

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The presentation will analyze the conditions under which states use energy trade to promote foreign policy goals, focusing on natural gas trade. It will discuss use of energy trade as a foreign policy tool by natural gas supplier, consumer, and transit states. The speaker will discuss the  interaction between natural gas trade and political relations between trading states.

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This presentation seeks to problematize al-Qaeda's franchising strategy. Why did al-Qaeda choose to branch out and what accounts for its decision to enter some arenas and not others? Rather than viewing it as an inevitable expansion strategy, this presentation underscores franchising as just one of several ways transnational terrorist organizations can formally expand. It also analyzes models for formal expansion by examining their political aspects in addition to the operational ones.

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Why does a reigning power not supplement military balancing against a challenging power by reducing bilateral trade ties? This seminar explores how these two factors together constrain the reigning state's decision over bilateral commerce when balancing militarily against the challenging state. The seminar will also examine whether the United States would be able to contain China both economically and militarily if Beijing were to grow more assertive and openly challenge the U.S.-led international order.

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This seminar assesses the relationship between the West and Russia as the sum of great power reactions to the Ukrainian crisis and, specifically, the annexation of Crimea.

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Despite the existence of international law designed to protect people fleeing persecution, the international community's response to population displacement varies greatly, with some people given access to resettlement in the West while others are summarily returned to their countries of origin. What explains variation in the international community's response to cases of population displacement? In this seminar, Dr. Goldenziel will explain how the political and security interests of the United States determines if, when, and how the United Nations will call mass population displacement a refugee crisis and provide those displaced with humanitarian assistance.

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This presentation seeks to address the question of whether operational-level engagement between the United States and China increases China's trust towards the United States in their nuclear relationship. And if so, why is this the case and how does it take place?

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This seminar will examine how Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has analyzed the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) in its publications on the conflict. It will explain the pervasive and persistent significance of the Iran-Iraq War for the IRGC and will reveal how scholarly oversight of the IRGC's representations of the war has produced inaccurate and oversimplified generalizations about the organization.

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The speaker will provide an Air Force 101 briefing that covers why we need an Air Force, who they are, what they do, and how they do it. In addition, he will also provide an update on the Air Force Nuclear Enterprise and an informative B-52 Capabilities Brief. Finally, he will briefly discuss his research on the history of bilateral nuclear disarmament agreements, lessons learned, and the future of multilateral agreements.

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Recent years have seen an increase in the number of "arms denial" attempts, where the acquisition of new capabilities by a given country or non-state actor has been obstructed using a variety of non-cooperative tools that are short of war. Examples include shipment interdictions on the high seas, limited military strikes, and cyber attacks. What are the root causes of this increase? What can be expected in the future?

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The speaker will explore the implications of Pakistan's tactical nuclear weapon development for international security and any potential cooperation between India and Pakistan.

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Why do rising powers practice coercive diplomacy towards geographically proximate states during certain crises but not others? Focusing on rising China's behavior towards Japan and Korea, the seminar will suggest policy implications for the United States on managing its bilateral relations with states that border rising China.

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This seminar will consider the strategic communications that connected political, military, and diplomatic officials during the Cold War.

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Under what conditions do states use preventive military force to forestall or destroy an adversary's nuclear weapons program? If nuclear weapons are so dangerous, why do leaders disagree about the magnitude of the threat posed by specific nuclear programs?

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Based on her fieldwork in Jordan this winter, including her interviews at Zaatari refugee camp and with refugees and rebel fighters in urban areas near the border, Porges will provide an on-the-ground perspective of how the Syrian refugee crisis is affecting Jordan. Her seminar will provide an overview of the political and security implications, a review of how local actors, NGOs, and the international community have responded to date, and a discussion of what the future might hold — for Syrians, Jordanians, and the region as a whole.

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How does strategic decision-making occur in Iran? And how does this translate into the domestic policymaking process of the state? This seminar will shed light on the opaque institutional architecture of the Islamic Republic and its impact on strategic governance. It will also examine the broader factional and ideological dynamics at play within the ruling elite in forging state policy.

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The radicalization of domestic Islamist groups in weak or failed states is one of the most serious international security concerns in the world today. What causes some of these groups to adopt transnational political agendas and identities, while others maintain a nationalist focus? Why do some insurgent groups seek affiliations with transnational extremists, while others abjure such ties? To examine these questions, this seminar will track the ideological evolution of the Islamist insurgency in Somalia from 2006–2013.

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This seminar will provide a historical overview of U.S. efforts to convince its Cold War–era allies (Taiwan, South Korea, Pakistan, and Israel) from going nuclear. It will then discuss what lessons policymakers can draw as the United States confronts the possibility of contemporary allies, such as Riyadh, considering acquiring nuclear capabilities.

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Scholars have studied the sources of military innovation extensively. However, innovation's actual battlefield effects are under-examined. More often than not, an innovation's effect on the battlefield depends on how well the adversary adapts to it. As part of his ongoing research on the effects of military innovation on war outcomes, Matthew Tattar will discuss the efforts of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) to lead the U.S. adaptation against insurgents' innovative use of the IED in Afghanistan.

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Note new location!

What is the effect of alliances on nuclear proliferation? On the one hand, theories of assurance contend that states with a powerful ally can forego indigenous nuclear capabilities. On the other hand, critics argue that external reliance violates the "self-help" principle in world politics and cite evidence of nuclear ambitions among numerous U.S. allies. To resolve this debate, the speaker proposes a theory of alliance coercion and tests its predictions against evidence from the West German case.

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This seminar will discuss a plausibility probe of two proliferation models by applying them to India's nuclear testing policy, a country equally concerned about its lack of power and social esteem.

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Senior Fellow Charles Freilich will discuss his recent book, Zion's Dilemmas: How Israel Makes National Security Policy (Cornell University Press, 2012), a first of its kind portrayal of Israel's national security decision-making processes.

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Many accounts describe how — but not why — the United States faltered in Afghanistan after 2001. In this seminar, the speaker, who spent five years based in Kabul, identifies the underlying causes of U.S. policymaking errors in Afghanistan.

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Iran and Pakistan have generated much debate with their respective nuclear dossier and nuclear weapons program. Both countries are Muslim-majority states, where religion and nationalism have shaped nuclear narrative. Ariane Tabatabai will examine the complex relationship between religious and national identities in both countries and their influence in fashioning nuclear narrative.

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What are the sources of interest group influence in the politics of U.S. security policy? What causes some groups to thrive and others falter? This seminar offers a theory that influence derives from the distribution of relevant information, the preferences of White House occupants, and public beliefs about the credibility of political actors.

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An equally likely candidate for starting a conflict between North and South Korea is a disputed maritime boundary called the Northern Limit Line (NLL) drawn in the Yellow Sea (West Sea). This seminar examines the roots of the dispute, the economic, international law, and security dimensions of the issue and explores possible solutions to the problem.

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Do the executives of great powers formulate and work to implement grand strategic plans? Or are great powers' grand strategies the products of Congressional/legislative, bureaucratic, and/or interest group politics? The latter explanations are overwhelmingly emphasized in the existing literature on explaining grand strategy. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the logically prior question of the extent to which great powers' grand strategies are the products of the deliberate strategic planning of their executives.

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The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations are undertaking an unprecedented operation in Syria: disarming a country of a particular type of weaponry in the midst of a civil war. Professor Findlay will discuss the issue in the context of the overlapping legal, institutional, technical, and political demands being made of Syria and the prospects for success of the operation.

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This seminar is postponed until further notice.

Is it more difficult to reassure or deter a rising state?  Many argue that rising states are greedy and expansionist, making them difficult to deter but not particularly fearful.  In contrast, this seminar argues that even expansionist rising states are, first and foremost, weak states that are more easily threatened than emboldened.  Evidence from America's rise to regional power will be presented.

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Why do some leaders project power to compete over resources while others handle their disputes via legal norms and international institutions? This seminar develops a theory that utilizes domestic institutions and economic interests to explain why leaders project power to compete over resources.

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Libya's decision to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions has been interpreted by most observers as support for the idea that mixed strategies are good policy. Although they disagree over which particular tools of influence were most important, most agree that some mixture of coercion and inducements explains Gaddafi's decision to disarm. This is not, however, supported by the evidence.

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Author Erik Dahl will discuss his new book, Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond (Georgetown University Press, 2013), which examines the puzzle of why surprise attacks so often succeed, even though in most cases warnings had been available beforehand.

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When and how can the international community build democratic police forces in war-torn countries? Police reform efforts are often premised on the theory that international authority and resources can defeat domestic obstruction. However, by analyzing police reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, where international leverage was greatest, the speaker finds that nationalism and informal economic networks motivate and enable domestic actors to block reform in predictable ways. The presentation offers implications for police reform and state building in diverse war-torn societies, including urging the international community to avoid reform goals that threaten the core interests of domestic actors.

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To illustrate the potential effects of symbolic strategies, the seminar considers the application of symbolic reparations to the "historical" case of the 1948 Palestinian refugees in the context of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The empirical analysis draws on previous rounds of official negotiations, on track-two workshops and initiatives, and on civil-society projects.

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This seminar will discuss an episode in Palestinian history, which has never before been written about, and use it as a prism through which to explore how the fact of statelessness, which is generally thought of as political condition, directly affects the economic and monetary lives of ordinary people.

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What factors shape the military trajectories of rapidly industrializing rising powers in the modern era? This seminar will explore the role of two generally overlooked non-material variables—the normative influence of the contemporaneous hegemon and national identity—in shaping a rising power's military force development and employment decisions during periods of rapid development. It will also discuss some of the implications for contemporary U.S. strategy toward rising China.

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A large literature on U.S. foreign policy takes for granted that America's alliances entangle the United States into military conflicts that it might otherwise avoid.  Yet proponents of this argument have presented very little evidence that this entanglement mechanism has actually played a significant role in U.S. foreign policy. The speaker looks for such evidence in all post-1945 U.S. military conflicts and finds hardly any.

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The presentation will ask why Pakistan's conventional doctrine has undergone such little change after nuclear acquisition and explain that territorial satisfaction is crucial to understanding how states respond to nuclearization.

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This seminar will provide an overview of India-Israel relations and will argue that there is a gap between India's material interests and its ideological positions and that this gap might be detrimental to the future of India-Israel bilateral relations.

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Iran's failure to comply with its non-proliferation obligations is viewed as one of the most urgent threats to the nuclear non-proliferation regime and international peace and security. Given that diplomacy has thus far not been successful in changing that country's conduct, the only available options for dealing with the problem seem to be increasingly crippling sanctions and, possibly, military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. The seminar presentation challenges the above assumptions by drawing attention to the absence of serious diplomatic efforts and lack of understanding of what is at stake for Iran in the dispute.

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NATO by its rise as a political actor since the end of the Cold War has emphasized democratization as an increasingly important soft power objective in its relations with third countries. The seminar explains NATO's democratic agenda focusing on two regions and two operations: (1) the 'halted' enlargement vis-à-vis Georgia and Ukraine; (2) the ongoing enlargement process in the Western Balkans; (3) the state-building effort and drawdown from Afghanistan; (4) the 2011 intervention in Libya in the context of the Arab Spring.

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Is rivalry between uniformed military services harmful or beneficial in achieving healthy civil-military relations in the United States? This seminar will explore early-stage work that is part of an effort to fit the widely-recognized phenomenon of interservice rivalry into a more general theory of U.S. civil-military relations.

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Clausewitz's aphorism that "war is merely the continuation of policy by other means" is widely quoted but often misconceived. The author of a new book, War, Clausewitz and the Trinity, Thomas Waldman will clarify the Prussian theorist's insights into the fundamental relationship between war and politics, highlight pitfalls in interpretation, and underline its critical importance for understanding contemporary war.

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Scholarship on U.S. involvement in the Middle East has traditionally maintained that after the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to participate in the League of Nations mandate system, the United States returned to political isolation and watched events in the Middle East passively from the sidelines. This presentation challenges that narrative by arguing that the United States did have both interests in and a policy concerning Iraq during that time. The open door policy the U.S. government set out in the correspondence with Britain in 1920–1921 represents a full and cogent policy on Iraq that was advanced throughout the interwar period to protect American interests and standing in that country.

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Drawing upon findings from an array of original public opinion surveys, survey-based experiments, and cross-national case studies, Greenhill will illustrate the sometimes surprisingly influential role that such sources of "extra-factual" information (EFI) can play both in the conception of national security threats and in the formulation and implementation of government responses to such threats. Both micro-foundations of belief in these sources of EFI and the macro-level consequences if and when such ideas become widely disseminated and adopted will be explored; cases to be examined range from pre–World War I Britain through Nazi Germany to post-9/11 America.

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The rise of a nuclear-armed China is presenting the United States and its allies in the Asian-Pacific region with a new reality that they must confront. The presentation includes a brief discussion of the ideological and economic drivers behind China's rise, as well as its emergence in Asian-Pacific regional affairs. The presentation also discusses China's nuclear policies and forces, and how they are shaped by external factors such as ballistic missile defense.

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This presentation will trace Iraq's foreign policy production from 2003–2013.

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The appearance of supranational union in the 1950s was the outcome of a contested attempt to remake the states system in Europe following the cataclysm of the Second World War. The project of Six yielded five major efforts at institutionalization in the lead up to the 1957 Rome attainment. Some, like the Coal and Steel Community, resulted in major triumphs of integration; others, such as the Defense Community, were sensational failures. This seminar will assess how and why integration progressed even as it failed so spectacularly, drawing insights for the resolution of today's European crisis.

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Why do some states project military power to secure resources while others do not? The exogenous shock of climate change in the Arctic represents an opportunity to test theories of why leaders project power. Climate change is rapidly altering the Arctic environment; receding ice has heightened the appeal of extracting Arctic energy resources. To test competing theories, the speaker examines how governments reacted to this exogenous change by observing how leaders shifted their Arctic foreign policy, military force structure, and force deployments. His results inform both the geopolitics of energy and the political implications of climate change.

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The burning of Palestinian mosques, intimidating graffiti on the homes of political activists, and the destruction of equipment at Israeli military bases: this is "price-tag"(tag mehir). But who are the perpetrators and what are their objectives? This presentation will explore the causes, effects, and implications of "price-tag."

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Throughout the Cold War, many officials and analysts feared that nuclear warfare could not be controlled. Nuclear forces were so complex, and their leadership so vulnerable to attack, that a major confrontation might quickly collapse into random violence against civilian populations. Despite more than $1 trillion in funding, the search for satisfaction outlasted the Cold War itself. This seminar explores the historical origins of U.S. nuclear command and control in the five years after Sputnik, when the issue first attracted high-level attention.

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Why and how do regional security-orientated institutions change over time? Examining the case of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the periods 1968–1976 and 1988–1997, this seminar will explain the causes and processes of ASEAN's transformation, with implications for today's strategic landscape in East Asia in the context of China's rise.

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This seminar will explain why some Muslim clerics adopt the ideology of militant Jihad while others do not. 

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Is it possible to deradicalize a terrorist? If so, how? Do these programs impact other national security initiatives, including efforts to combat terrorist recruitment? Even as attempts to rehabilitate terrorists spring up around the world, scholars and policymakers struggle to understand their effects and determine whether they help mitigate the threat of captured terrorists or counter radicalization in other populations. This seminar addresses these questions by evaluating the impact of terrorist deradicalization in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and beyond, exploring how these programs may shape future global counterterrorism efforts.

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To what extent, if at all, do ideas contribute to the occurrence of war and peace? This seminar examines the roots of George W. Bush's Middle East policy, with a particular focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It will identify the ways in which ideas shape policy—and policy the practice of international affairs. A special emphasis will be placed on the role of presidential decision-making.

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Is the settlement project harmful for Israel? What does a U.S. push for a two-state solution mean? What exactly is up for negotiation, and why is the peace process not moving forward? If one asks four different people, one may get four fundamentally different answers.

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Will a rising China challenge the interests and security of a declining United States? If so, when and under what circumstances? This project offers a theory to explain when and why rising states challenge declining great powers rather than pursue strategies of accommodation and restraint.Please join us! Coffee and tea provided.

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Since 2006, drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have contributed to over 60,000 deaths in Mexico. Key civic institutions such as the police and the army have been compromised by the DTOs' activities. Yet U.S. opinion leaders and foreign policy officials have virtually ignored this profound challenge, despite the two countries' extensive geographic, economic, and cultural ties. Speaker Evelyn Krache Morris (Ph.D., MBA) will explore possible reasons why the DTOs receive so little attention and the potential ramifications of this neglect.

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