Events

Speaker: Julie George, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

Under which conditions do dual-use emerging technologies proliferate in the international system? The speaker investigates the likelihood of proliferation of three emerging technologies: artificial intelligence, robotics, and cyber. She selects these three emerging innovations based on their date of discovery in the 1950s and analyze the paths taken by states and the private sector. The outcome variable, proliferation, includes two stages, specifically possession and the operationality of the emerging technology. It is evaluated based on two hypotheses: 1) whether foreign acquisition or indigenous formation is the modal form of technology acquisition and 2) the degree to which there are international institutions governing these technologies. By analyzing neglected patterns that characterize the proliferation of technologies by states and how they have changed from the 1950s to the present, scholars and policymakers gain a greater sense of the liabilities of the innovations to the international system. Overall, scholarly attention to emerging technologies is increasingly important as these innovations continue to take shape and impact the nature of national and international security.

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: Jung Jae Kwon, Stanton Nuclear Security Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

How do non-nuclear allies of the U.S. try to generate deterrence without their own nuclear arsenal? How do the allies seek to employ their non-nuclear military capabilities even as they ultimately have to rely on the U.S. "nuclear umbrella" for security? While these questions have grown more important in an era of "integrated deterrence," existing scholarship on nuclear strategy or extended deterrence has largely overlooked the agency of allies. This project seeks to fill the gap. The speaker identifies three ways in which the allies have used their military capabilities to generate deterrent effects and develop a theory to explain and predict their behavior. He conducts case studies of U.S. allies, such as South Korea and Japan, to examine the causes of the variation in their behavior and draws on extensive fieldwork, elite interviews, and primary sources for empirical analysis.

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: Matthew Borawski, Research Fellow, International Security Program

The U.S. defense industrial base proved ill-equipped to adequately surge ammunition production for Ukraine's fight against Russia, with the Department of Defense reporting it will take nearly three years to replenish the two million 155mm artillery rounds provided to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the United States assumes increased conventional risk to its own warfighting capabilities. How did U.S. munitions manufacturing erode, was it avoidable, and what is needed to reach sufficient capacity in the future? The answer to these questions should inform the larger, more critical question: How can the United States ensure a munitions shortage does not occur if U.S. military forces are committed to large scale combat operations in the future? Answering the research question could help the United States maintain its conventional superiority in a future conflict and minimize readiness impacts when providing lethal assistance to our Allies and Partners, including Ukraine and Taiwan. These effects would also improve our integrated deterrence strategy since robust production capacity remains a deterrent. Instead, the United States appears to be in a continuous spin-up/ramp-down cycle for ammunition production, which creates the cyclical crisis and preparedness paradox.

Invitation Only. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: DJ Kim, Research Fellow, International Security Program

U.S. security clients have frequently encountered pressures from Washington to adopt strategic measures with which they did not agree. For these allies, although the reliance on U.S. security support creates a de facto security hierarchy and incentivizes them to take the U.S. request seriously, they often find the U.S. policy overreaching, poorly designed, or unsustainable. Accordingly, U.S. allies would want to avoid offering neither a positive nor negative answer to the patron, which, respectively, can undermine their own interests or the relationship with the patron. Put simply, U.S. allies have good reason to avoid making a decision over the patron's demand as long as possible, hoping that changes occur in the patron's position or the costs for making a decision become more bearable. This project attempts to theorize nondecision as a distinct option that might be pursued by a security client facing strategic demands from its patron. 

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: Sanne Verschuren, Assistant Professor of International Security, The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University

Despite nearly seventy years of research and development in the United States, missile defense continues to face high, if not insurmountable, technological challenges, is financially burdensome, and has resulted in negative outcomes for strategic stability. Hence, the speaker asks: What explains the continued and widespread support for missile defense among U.S. policymakers? Contrary to arguments about American cultural features, public appeal, and organizational politics, she examines two conditions that can explain the persistence of missile defense: technological malleability and patterns of ignorance.

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: David Kearn, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom

The book project seeks to explain the divergence of views of within the strategic community after the signing of the SALT I Accords and the subsequent shift in U.S. strategic nuclear policy away from "assured destruction" to "nuclear warfighting" throughout the 1970s and culminating in the Reagan administrations "prevailing strategy."

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: Sumin Lee, ACES Assistant Professor, Department of International Affairs, The Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University

What are the long-term effects of wartime sexual violence on trust? Rape is an old feature of warfare, but the intergenerational transmission of such trauma in communities remains poorly understood. Scholars theorize how wartime sexual violence has disparate effects on social and political trust. While sexual violence sours public opinion of the state for its security failures, it forces affected communities to turn to private kinship and social bonds as a coping mechanism, increasing social trust in the long run.

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: Michael Weintraub, Associate Professor, Universidad de los Andes 

Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations (UN) has increased its involvement in countries emerging from conflict. Most work on UN peacekeeping focuses on how it decreases the odds of conflict relapse by reassuring elite and mid-level commanders. Yet understanding the attitudes of former rank-and-file fighters—low-ranking recruits who primarily do the soldiering—is a pressing task. The speaker and his co-authors conducted an original phone-based survey of 4,435 former combatants of the FARC-EP, Colombia’s largest rebel group, which demobilized following a 2016 peace agreement.

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: Eleanor Freund, Research Fellow, International Security Program

What factors explain variation in China's security cooperation with other states? Why has China formed alliances or deployed troops to fight alongside partners in some cases, while in others it has limited itself to the transfer of weapons or the signature of neutrality agreements? More generally, how can scholars measure and explain the range of security cooperation behaviors that states exhibit in both peacetime and war?

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.

Speaker: Antonia Juelich, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program

What happens when civilians in conflict zones from Somalia to Syria find themselves in rebel strongholds? It is often assumed that they either cooperate or resist insurgents in such contexts. The messy reality, however, is that people rarely fall in just one category. . Narratives from former Boko Haram associates, collected during extensive fieldwork in Nigeria, reveal that they executed and refused orders, provided labor from domestic chores to high-risk military support, were enslaved and empowered in the group's forest camps. This seminar describes a broad spectrum of civilian engagement, from collusion to compliance to resistance, and explains what gives rise to such unexpected turbulence in highly controlled settings. The offered framework introduces the concept of militarized rebel governance and demonstrates how noncombatants adapt by engaging in power struggles to survive or even thrive in the system.

Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee & Tea Provided.