International Security

A Project on Managing the Atom seminar with Anton Khlopkov, Director of the Center for Energy and Security Studies (CENESS) in Moscow.

Speaker: Joana Cook,  Senior Research Fellow, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation,  Department of War Studies, King's College London; Author, A Woman's Place: US Counterterrorism Since 9/11

The 9/11 attacks fundamentally transformed how the United States approached terrorism and led to the unprecedented expansion of counterterrorism strategies, policies, and practices. While the analysis of these developments is rich and vast, there remains a significant void. The diverse actors contributing to counterterrorism increasingly consider, engage, and impact women as agents, partners, and targets of their work. Yet, flawed assumptions and stereotypes remain prevalent, and it remains undocumented and unclear how and why counterterrorism efforts have evolved as they did in relation to women.

Please join us! Coffee, tea, and light refreshments 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

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: Richard J. Samuels, Ford International Professor, Department of Political Science; Director, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Moderator: Susan Pharr, Director, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations; Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics, Department of Government, Harvard University.

Professor Samuels will discuss his recently published book, Special Duty, which analyzes the prewar and postwar development of the Japanese intelligence community. He will detail the impact of shifts in the strategic environment, technological change, and past failures, using examples of excessive hubris and debilitating bureaucratic competition before the Asia-Pacific War, the unavoidable dependence on U.S. assets and popular sensitivity to security issues after World War II, and the tardy adoption of image-processing and cyber technologies.

Co-sponsored by the International Security Program

The Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) invites you to a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s classic dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, immediately followed by a discussion and Q&A session with “NUKEMAP” creator and historian Prof. Alex Wellerstein, moderated by MTA Senior Research Associate Nickolas Roth.

Pizza and other refreshments will be served! RSVP required.

Location: T-G50 (bottom floor of Taubman Building)

15 Eliot Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

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.