Calendar - Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)

Oct 6, 2026: Enemies in Agreement: Political Volatility and the Design of Arms Control at Encina Hall

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0700

About the event: Why do adversaries sometimes cooperate to restrain their military competition? Why do they design arms control agreements with intrusive verification in some cases but rely on minimal transparency in others? Amidst ongoing international competition, arms control remains rare despite potential mutual benefits, and agreements vary dramatically in their approaches to monitoring. This book reveals how uncertainty from domestic political changes - such as leadership transitions or social unrest - can enable arms control. It identifies two paths to agreement: during periods of uncertainty, states that previously relied on informal understandings hedge by establishing lightly-monitored agreements, while those that anticipated deception take calculated risks through agreements with intensive verification. Through comprehensive data analysis and rich case studies, Jane Vaynman challenges conventional wisdom about uncertainty in international relations while offering insights for policymakers. As states confront challenges from nuclear competition to emerging technologies, understanding when arms control becomes viable is more vital than ever.

About the speaker: Dr. Jane Vaynman is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Vaynman’s work focuses on security cooperation between adversarial states, the design of arms control agreements, and the effects of technology on patterns of international cooperation and competition. From 2022-2024, she served as a senior advisor in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability at the U.S. Department of State. Her prior academic appointments include the Department of Political Science at Temple University and the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. She was also previously a Lightning Scholar at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Dr. Vaynman received her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University and B.A. in international relations from Stanford University.

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Oct 20, 2026: Strategic Stability during the Cold War and Beyond at Encina Hall

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0700

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Oct 27, 2026: After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age at Encina Hall

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0700

About the event: Nuclear status is typically treated as a stable feature of a state's capacity to possess, use, or build nuclear weapons. Challenging this view, After Fission reveals how states contest their nuclear status in the atomic age. By examining the legal structure of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, technical ambiguities surrounding nuclear testing, and debates over rights and responsibilities in the global nuclear regime, Sidra Hamidi argues that a state's nuclear status is not simply a function of technical capability. Instead, states actively contest the way they want their nuclear status to be presented to the world, and powerful states like the US, either recognize or reject these formulations. By analyzing key diplomatic junctures in Indian, Israeli, Iranian, and North Korean nuclear history, this book presents a theory of when and how states contest their nuclear status which has key policy implications for negotiating with ostensible “rogues” such as Iran and North Korea.

About the speaker: Sidra Hamidi is an Assistant Professor at Trinity College in Hartford, CT with research and teaching interests in international law, global governance, and nuclear politics. She was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and has previously taught at Eckerd College and Stetson University in Florida. Her book, After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age was published with Cambridge University Press in January 2026 and her research has appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, and The Nonproliferation Review.

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Oct 29, 2026: Worse than War: The Global Costs of Violence at Encina Hall

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:30:00 -0700

About the event: Civil wars, interstate wars, and terrorism receive a great deal of media and policy attention, for good reasons. By contrast, the major forms of interpersonal violence—homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical punishment of children—generally have a much lower profile. In Worse than War, Anke Hoeffler and James Fearon assemble and analyze the data on the global prevalence and costs of collective and interpersonal violence. They show that interpersonal violence is vastly more widespread and imposes far greater societal costs than collective violence. Wars tend to be concentrated in a small number of countries, and often relatively small areas within them. By contrast, almost all countries have rates of homicide and nonfatal assault, particularly of women and children, that far exceed the global average rates of death and injury in wars and terrorism. Further, high rates of interpersonal violence are not simply fixed by culture or other structural factors. Evidence from a host of program evaluations, natural experiments, and longer-term social movements make it clear that rates of homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical punishment of children can be reduced if they are effectively targeted. Interventions that promote peace in civil war–torn countries are also possible, but the opportunities are few and increasingly far between.

About the speaker: James D. Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research has focused on civil and interstate war, with a current focus on risks of conflict in the Western Pacific. Fearon is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Nov 10, 2026: Biosecurity in an Age of AI: Frontier Safety, Anticipatory Governance, and Defensive Innovation at Encina Hall

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 12:00:00 -0800

About the event: This talk will discuss recent advancements in AI for biology, and relevant security and oversight considerations. It will also discuss how policy can be used to incentivize and shape technology development for defensive purposes, clarifying how the colloquial "defensive acceleration" or d/acc concept in AI circles relates to formal offense-defense balance concepts.

About the speaker: Dr. Pannu is an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Senior Scholar at the Center for Health Security. She is currently Director of Frontier Safety at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a philanthropic research organization focused on AI for biology. Dr. Pannu’s primary areas of research include biosecurity, pandemic preparedness, and emerging technology security and governance. Dr. Pannu previously worked on AI-enabled diagnostics at Google and has served as a subject-matter expert for the National Academies of Sciences, the EU AI Office, and the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, among others. She serves on the board of Blueprint Biosecurity, a nonprofit dedicated to achieving breakthroughs in humanity's ability to prevent pandemics. Dr. Pannu regularly briefs government officials and policymakers on emerging technologies with security implications, including artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.

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Nov 17, 2026: How New is the New Nuclear Age? at Encina Hall

Tue, 17 Nov 2026 12:00:00 -0800

About the event: Since the mid-2010s, scholars and analysts have declared the emergence of a dangerous ‘new’ or ‘third’ nuclear age. Beyond academia, the concept of the new nuclear age is proving influential with policymakers in a range of countries. The new nuclear age is understood to be characterized by technological change, nuclear multipolarity, eroding constraints on the behavior and competition of nuclear-armed states, and the likely emergence of new nuclear powers. That said, it remains unclear how we should understand the new nuclear age in broader terms: how new is it and does it require new theoretical frameworks to understand? Bell subjects the concept of the new nuclear age to scrutiny. He connects the discussion of the new nuclear age to ongoing but mostly separate debates about nuclear history and the ‘Theory of the Nuclear Revolution’ (TNR). The increasing body of literature challenging TNR reveals a more competitive, complex, and dangerous nuclear past than our prior understandings, but in doing so, it draws attention to continuities between the past and the emerging nuclear age. Bell then examines the empirical features thought to define the new nuclear age and show that many have historical precedent and do not require novel theoretical frameworks to understand. The new nuclear age may, therefore, be somewhat less new, though perhaps no less dangerous, than it appears.

About the speaker: Mark Bell is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His book, Nuclear Reactions: How Nuclear-Armed States Behave, won the ISA Foreign Policy Analysis Section's best book award. Other work has been published in International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Strategic Studies, and Texas National Security Review. Policy-oriented work has been published in Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, and The Washington Quarterly. He holds a Ph.D from MIT, a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.A. from St Anne’s College, Oxford University.

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Dec 3, 2026: When a “Salami Slice” Becomes a Maritime Blockade: China’s Maritime Disruptions in the Indo-Pacific and Consequences for Human Populations at Encina Hall

Thu, 03 Dec 2026 15:30:00 -0800

About the event: China is practicing gray-zone coercion in the Indo-Pacific, deploying military vessels for drills in the waters between Taiwan and the Philippines. This “salami-slicing” strategy, advanced under Xi Jinping, incrementally escalates pressure on neighboring states while remaining below the threshold of open conflict. Disruption of critical sea lanes—through which fuel and food supplies transit—would have catastrophic implications for human populations dependent on uninterrupted maritime traffic. This talk presents research from the Stanford Geopolitical Coercion and Global Health Impact Initiative on maritime disruptions in the Indo-Pacific and what they would mean for human populations if maritime traffic were interrupted in a manner comparable to a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with particular attention to effects on food security, energy access, and maternal and child health.

About the speaker: Dr. Ruth Gibson is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Innovation in Global Health, Affiliated Scholar at CISAC and the Founding Executive Director of the Stanford Geopolitical Human Impact Research Lab—the first research initiative at Stanford University dedicated to examining how geopolitical decisions shape human lives, with particular attention to children. Based in the Department of Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, the Initiative brings together health modeling, open-source intelligence, and international humanitarian law to produce rigorous, policy-relevant scholarship. She co-leads The Lancet Series on Foreign Engagement and Health in an Era of Geopolitical Crisis with Professor Gary Darmstadt. Dr. Gibson earned her PhD in geopolitical coercion and global health from the University of British Columbia and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation from 2022 to 2025. Drawing on more than a decade of international global health experience across five continents, her research focuses on the health consequences of sanctions, blockades, and armed conflict, especially their effects on maternal and child health.

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