Tightening US export restrictions of semiconductor technology toward China has become a key realm of tension between the two countries. What made this “chip war” highly disruptive was the considerable US-China interdependence in semiconductors prior to the conflict, made possible by relaxing US export control in the 1990s and 2000s. This talk discusses how US-China relations in semiconductors evolved. Going beyond structural and state-centered accounts, it highlights the role of business interests and contingencies in the turn from interdependence to conflict.

Yan Xu is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute. He studies comparative and international political economy, with focuses on technology, state-business relations, and China. His book project examines the rise of a vibrant tech startup sector in China — now the world’s second largest — and its impact on the country’s advance in high-tech. He has also conducted research on the relations between the state and top business tycoons in China, and U.S. dominance of the global semiconductor industry. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Chicago.

This talk examines the global turn in cinematic technology and infrastructure towards a wider, stretched, horizontal film screen amid the Cold War, as embodied in the fervor over CinemaScope in both socialist China and Western capitalist countries. I argue that the simultaneous rise of CinemaScope in the 1950s and ’60s on both sides of the Iron Curtain, on the one hand, registered shared structures of feeling in socialist and capitalist countries alike, wherein filmgoers sought visceral escape from the horrific and apocalyptic realities of the Cold War through the enhanced immersive realism; on the other hand, this transnational movement of widescreen technology led to a revival, in both the United States and socialist China, of the frontier western genre, which was retooled as an important vehicle in the domestic governance of the southwestern frontier area and politics of the “discovery of ethnic minorities” in socialist China. I explore the complex connections between cinematic technological development, transnational film genre migrations, and the politics of identifying, representing, and governing ethnic minorities in their native land in the People’s Republic of China. Challenging the narrative of “technological competition” between socialist and capitalist camps that currently dominates scholarship on the technological history of the Cold War, I present a vision of the existence of a cinematic universe in which vibrant transnational movements of film form, technology, and infrastructure penetrated Cold War borders and undermined geopolitical separationism.

Chuanhui Meng is a Watson China Initiative postdoctoral research associate in the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown University. She completed her Ph.D. in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, with a minor in Moving Image Studies. Her areas of specialization include modern and contemporary Chinese film and culture, with a particular interest in transnational migrations and translations of film genres, border-crossing circulations of film and media in the global 1950s and ’60s, as well as ecocritical studies of socialist and post-socialist China. Her current book project examines the formation of a “genre ecology” in socialist Chinese cinema of the 1950s and ’60s. It explores the domestic experiments as well as transnational constellation, circulation, and translation of film genres across Cold War geopolitical borders, tracing film genre as a dynamic process of becoming that mediates between the domestic cultural-political environment, transnational migrations of film forms and theories, and the affective and embodied experiences of audiences.

Answers to questions about the morality of nuclear weapons depend not only upon
the normative principles about the use of force to which one subscribes, but also on empirical judgments about the nature of nuclear weapons and related technologies, the effects of these weapons, and about the expected behavior of the individuals and states that make decisions about nuclear weapons. In this paper I explore four key empirical debates about nuclear weapons – the requirements of deterrence, the physical effects of weapons use, the probability that limited uses of nuclear weapons will escalate or shatter norms of non-use, and the substitutability of conventional weapons for nuclear forces. Unfortunately, many of these empirical questions remain stubbornly unsettled. In this paper, I argue that, surprisingly, this
empirical uncertainty may simplify the application of normative theory to nuclear policy. I argue that, given what we do and don’t know about nuclear weapons, even very different normative theories suggest roughly the same choices for nuclear forces structure and doctrine, at least for the United States. In particular, given the constraints on our empirical knowledge, most theories converge on a very small nuclear arsenal, composed of highly accurate, low-yield weapons, and guided by a doctrine that limits its use to military targets.

Benjamin Valentino is a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Chair of the Department of Government. 

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session.

In this lecture, Col. Jared Koelling will describe leadership lessons gleaned from personal successes and failures throughout the past 20+ years in the Army. These lessons can be applied to become a more self-aware and effective leader and teammate –in any field– as you work to achieve your personal and team goals.

Colonel Jared Koelling is a military fellow and visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. He is an Army officer who most recently served as the Deputy Commander for the 2nd Brigade, 78th Training Division, where he led the planning, development, and execution of Guardian Response exercises, focused on Defense Support of Civil Authorities. He has served in various leadership and staff roles, including an assignment as a Simulation Operations planner on the Joint Staff, providing support to US European Command and US Indo-Pacific Command joint training exercises.

Colonel Koelling holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he also received his commission as an Army Aviation officer in 2003. Jared also holds a Master of Arts degree in Vietnamese Studies, received from Vietnam National University – University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Why did the U.S. radical environmental movement shift away from tactics like arson and sabotage in the mid-2000’s? Given the threat from climate change, why haven’t we seen a return of these more contentious tactics? Drawing on theories of radical social movements and subcultures, I argue that the salience of a threat like climate change is not enough to mobilize radical activists to use tactics like sabotage and property destruction. Rather, repression and recruitment networks
play a bigger role in explaining variation in tactics. To test the theory, I take a mixed methods approach to study the tactical evolution of the U.S. radical environmental movement. I collect a new dataset of 1,329 eco direct actions from 1995-2022 and conduct in-depth interviews with 97 activists and experts. Taken together, I show that repression sharply reduced the pace of eco direct actions, particularly the use of sabotage and arson. It also led to a decline in the punk- and anarchist-inspired wing of the movement, which was replaced by the climate justice movement
that favored civil disobedience and protests over sabotage. Repression thus shifted the tactics of movements in two ways: 1) by targeting activists involved in tactics (directly), and 2) by disrupting recruitment networks and pathways into radical activism (indirectly). I conclude with a discussion on how climate change and shifting threats around repression may drive the future of the radical environmental movement.

Thomas Zeitzoff is a professor of Justice, Law & Criminology at American University.

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session.

Investigative journalists Nick Turse and Azmat Khan will discuss Turse’s new Costs of War report on risks to war reporters and impoverished understandings of global conflict. Moderated by Stephanie Savell, Director, Costs of War. 

We will be discussing Nick Turse’s forthcoming Costs of War report, which covers how threats to journalists in conflict zones are increasing at a time when journalism is under unprecedented threat and the news industry is mired in a decades-long downward spiral. Since the 2000s, national governments and terrorist groups – from Israel, Syria’s Assad regime and the United States to the Islamic State – have found ways to curtail conflict coverage through myriad means, from repressive policies to armed attack. All have killed journalists and helped to foster a culture of impunity, turning conflict zones like Syria and Gaza into “news graveyards.” 

Most reporters harmed or killed, as is the case in Gaza, are local journalists. This outsourcing of risk not only imperils the lives of local reporters, leaving them to stand alone in the face of extraordinary violence, but impairs news coverage and, as a result, the worldwide information ecosystem. The decreasing number of experienced foreign correspondents in conflict zones has crippled critical knowledge and helped facilitate the creation of news graveyards. 

Nick Turse is an investigative reporter, a fellow at the Type Media Center, the managing editor of TomDispatch.com, a contributing writer at The Intercept, and the co-founder of Dispatch Books. He is the author, most recently, of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan as well as the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, which received a 2014 American Book Award. His previous books include Tomorrow’s Battlefield, The Changing Face of Empire, The Complex, and The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has reported from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa and written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, Vice News, Yahoo News, Teen Vogue, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and BBC.com, among other print and online publications.

Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war. She is an investigative reporter for both the New York Times and New York Times Magazine, a Carnegie Fellow, and the Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she also leads the Li Center for Global Journalism.

Ambassador Jorge Heine will join this week’s China Chat for a discussion of Sino-Latin American Relations under the new Trump administration.

Ambassador Jorge Heine is a lawyer, IR scholar and diplomat with a special interest in the international politics of the Global South. Before joining Boston University, he was Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. (2018-2019). He has served as ambassador of Chile to China (2014-2017), to India (2003-2007) and to South Africa (1994-1999), and as a Cabinet Minister in the Chilean Government. A past Vice-President of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), he was CIGI Professor of Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, from 2007 to 2017, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow; a Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford University; a United Nations Research Fellow at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); a Visiting Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz; and the Pablo Neruda Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Paris.

Scholars argue that peace processes often lead to rebel splintering. However, most rebel groups involved in peace talks never splinter. What explains this absence of splintering? This paper presents a new theory that emphasizes a rebel leader’s role in managing splits. I argue that a rebel group leader has incentives to proactively leverage his organizational resources and influence to minimize splintering. However, these efforts are disrupted when the rebel leader leaves office, and splintering grows more likely during periods of leadership transition. I assess this theory with original quantitative and qualitative evidence from Myanmar. Drawing on field interviews with rebel leaders, I find that leaders employ several tools to manage splintering pressures during Myanmar’s recent peace process. Using original historical data on all rebel groups in Myanmar, I show that groups were more likely to split during years of leader transition. Overall, I find rebel leaders directly influence patterns of splintering.

Kaitlyn Robinson is an assistant professor of Political Science at Rice University.

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session.

Competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China has generated new interest in the Pacific Island region. While broadly welcomed by the Pacific Islands, America’s reengagement in the Pacific Islands lacks the long-term, strategic framework necessary for guiding U.S. engagement and presenting a clear vision of America’s interests throughout the region. If the U.S. does not carefully navigate these relationships, it risks ceding influence and access to China, thereby granting Beijing a potential foothold in the Indo–Pacific that can threaten U.S. national security interests. This presentation will discuss policy issues related to U.S.-Pacific Island affairs. The presentation will also discuss policy recommendations to maximize U.S. interests, build stronger, long-term partnerships with the Pacific Islands and regional allies, and counter Chinese ambitions in the Pacific.

Andrew Harding is a research assistant in The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. He leads the center’s work on the Pacific Islands and conducts research on U.S.-China strategic competition, Indo-Pacific security strategy, and Oceania.

Harding is the author of “The Pacific Pivot: An American Strategy for the Pacific Islands,” The Heritage Foundation’s first publication that articulates a comprehensive, national strategy for U.S. engagement in the Pacific Islands region. He played a role in the renewal of key provisions of the Compact of Free Association (COFA) agreements with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. He regularly hosts and participates in briefings with current and former executive and legislative branch officials on Pacific Island affairs.

Does intelligence reporting provide novel and more useful information to leaders than what is available in mainstream news reports? We assess this question through a same-day comparative analysis of almost 5,000 President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) and almost 370,000 full-text articles on foreign affairs in the New York Times. To assess informational advantages, we analyze relative success in anticipating coups. We find that the PDB is substantially more likely than the New York Times to discuss domestic tension and the names of relevant political actors in countries that ultimately experience an attempted political coup. Intelligence material, we show, is more likely to mention a country at statistically significant levels up to multiple months before an attempted coup; mentions in the Times are more likely only two days before the event. However, the PDB’s informational advantage is not uniform. We find that the PDB provides better early warnings of coups when the attempts are harder to openly observe, as well as when the country is embroiled in a civil war and thus less amenable to local reporting. However, the PDB’s relative advantage falls in countries where the NYT has a foreign bureau. The article contributes a novel methodological approach to measuring private information. It also offers a rare test of whether intelligence pays, i.e. the value-added of massive investments in intelligence bureaucracies made by modern states.

Eric Min is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA. His research focuses on interstate diplomacy, information gathering and sharing during crises, and applications of machine learning and text analysis techniques to declassified documents related to conflict and foreign policy. 

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session. Email WatsonEvents@brown.edu to request a copy of the paper.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reshaped international politics and the field of International Relations. But one question—“How should the atomic bomb be used?”—has been largely overlooked in scholarly debates about this historic decision. A surprise attack on two major cities was one of several options U.S. leaders considered, and by far the most lethal. This article recovers and reinterprets American deliberations on alternative debut options, including the “noncombat demonstration,” targeting military installations, giving advanced warning, and selecting cities other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We develop theoretical insights on the political value of staging violent spectacles and the emotive power of visible destruction. We then draw on a wide range of primary and secondary sources to show that U.S. leaders selected an ostentatiously lethal means of atomic debut due to concerns about conventional military inferiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the desire to instill a widespread view of the atomic bomb’s revolutionary character, and the imperative of shaping the postwar international order. An “untouched” city like Hiroshima represented a “fair background” to showcase the atomic bomb’s revolutionary potency and the power of its possessor in the postwar world. This study advances our understanding of the post-1945 international order, the nuclear revolution, and the performative dimensions of mass violence.

Joshua Byun is an assistant professor in the political science department at Boston College. Byun specializes in international relations, with a focus on questions related to grand strategy and alliance politics. 

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session. Email WatsonEvents@brown.edu to request a copy of the paper.

In the last five years, nuclear tensions between the U.S. and China have accelerated dramatically driven by a series of factors, including the severe deterioration of cross-Strait relations. This presentation will summarize thinking on both sides of the Pacific regarding the current state of this nuclear rivalry and its relationship to the Taiwan issue. Prof. Lyle Goldstein will also answer questions about his Asia trip during the winter holiday that took him to northeast China, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, and also South Korea.

In December 2024, the reign of the Assad regime came to an end in Syria. This discussion with Joshua Landis will address the challenges facing Syrians in the coming years, as they seek to rebuild their country after 13 years of civil war and 53 years of authoritarian rule. Topics to include: the fears of communal violence; the spectres of Al Qaeda and ISIS; Syria’s relationships with Russia, Iran, and the Arab states; and the role of the international community.

About the panel:

Joshua Landis is Sandra Mackey Chair and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and the Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Oklahoma in the Boren College of International Studies. He writes and manages SyriaComment.com, a daily newsletter on Syrian politics and publishes frequently in policy journals such as Foreign Affairs, Middle East Policy and Foreign Policy. His book, “Syria at Independence: Nationalism, Leadership, and Failure of Republicanism”, will be published by the Arab Center for Research and Policy studies this coming year. He is a frequent analyst on TV, radio, and in print and is a regular on NPR and the BBC.

Elias Muhanna is associate professor of comparative literature and history, and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is a scholar of medieval and early modern Islamic history, and also publishes commentary on modern Middle Eastern politics and culture in the mainstream press. He has written for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals.

Nina Tannenwald is senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science. Her research focuses on the role of international institutions, norms and ideas in global security issues, efforts to control weapons of mass destruction, and human rights and the laws of war. Her book, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945” (Cambridge University Press, 2007), won the 2009 Lepgold Prize for best book in international relations.

Cosponsor:

The Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies

Made possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East

Kelly Matush is an Assistant Professor at Florida State University’s Political Science Department. She receivedher PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Dartmouth’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. Her research interests lie at the intersection of public diplomacy, public opinion, and international relations. 

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session. Email WatsonEvents@brown.edu to request a copy of the paper.

What makes the public accept armed groups as partners for peace? We examine legitimacy as an important but under-explored factor in determining when the public supports peace negotiations with an armed group and on what terms. A group’s legitimacy is informed by different characteristics and behaviors, such as its stated goals, whether it exerts governance, its funding model, and who it targets when using violence. We argue that these shape public views through perceptions of motivational (compliance with the social contract), institutional (institutional recognition), and moral (ethical appraisal) legitimacy. We test this argument in a conjoint experiment embedded in a unique online survey of 1,950 respondents in Colombia. We find that groups with higher legitimacy receive more support for negotiations while those with motivational and institutional legitimacy are granted more generous settlement terms.

Laia Balcells is a professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University.

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session.

Richard Clark presents his paper, “Risk and Responsibility: Climate Vulnerability and IMF Conditionality.” 

International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans often require states to implement stringent policy conditions for funds to be disbursed. However, many recipients are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which can limit their ability to implement such conditions. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that many developing countries are especially climate vulnerable. We examine whether and how the IMF accounts for the burden posed by states’ climate vulnerabilities when designing loan programs. We show that the Fund balances moral hazard and climate justice considerations by offering vulnerable countries loans with fewer and less stringent policy conditions. Mechanism tests suggest this effect is driven by bureaucrats learning about the vulnerability-inducing threat of climate change rather than the initiative of management or member states. These findings highlight the subtle responsiveness of international financial institutions to countries’ climate vulnerabilities and illustrate how climate change influences international economic policymaking processes.

Richard Clark is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in international cooperation and political economy. His research and teaching interests include globalization, international finance, and climate change. 

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session.

At this week’s China Chat we will be joined by Robert S. Ross, Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Associate, John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, for a discussion on “Sources and Prospects for U.S.-China Conflict.”

(Lunch provided)

Smuggling is typically thought of as furtive and hidden, taking place under the radar and beyond the reach of the state. But in many cases, governments tacitly permit illicit cross-border commerce, or even devise informal arrangements to regulate it. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the borderlands of Tunisia and Morocco, Max Gallien explains why states have long tolerated illegal trade across their borders and develops new ways to understand the political economy of smuggling. His book, “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” examines the rules and agreements that govern smuggling in North Africa, tracing the involvement of states in these practices and their consequences for borderland communities. It demonstrates that, contrary to common assumptions about the effects of informal economies, smuggling can promote both state and social stability. States not only turn a blind eye to smuggling, they rely on it to secure political acquiescence and maintain order, because it provides income for otherwise neglected border communities. More recently, however, the securitization of borders, wars, political change, and the pandemic have put these arrangements under pressure. Gallien explores the renegotiation of the role of smuggling, showing how stability turns into vulnerability and why some groups have been able to thrive while others have been pushed further to the margins.

Audience Q & A will follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Max Gallien is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of taxation and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa. He is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and a Research Lead and the International Centre for Tax and Development. He is the author of “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” (Columbia University Press, 2024).

In this lecture, Major Ted Powers will demonstrate how U.S. Marine Corps leaders use trust and empowerment to build cohesive, high-performing teams ready to face any challenge. Drawing on his experience serving with Marines in seven countries, along with relevant research, Ted will show how these leadership techniques can be applied to any team, in any environment.

Major Edwin “Ted” Powers is a national defense fellow and visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. He recently served as the second-in-command of the Cornell University Navy and Marine Corps ROTC program. Previously he served with the 22d Marine Expeditionary Unit; the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Center; and 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. He deployed as part of Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force-Crisis Response-Africa (2020), Marine Rotational Force-Darwin (2014), and the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (2012-13). In 2020, he was the First Lieutenant Travis Manion Marine Corps Officer Logistician of the Year. Ted earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Communication from the University of Maryland and a Master of Science in Leadership from Michigan State University. He was a Distinguished Graduate at Expeditionary Warfare School.

Join us for the John Hazen White, Sr. Lecture at the Taubman Center, featuring a critical conversation on election security with Ken Block and John Marion. Ken Block, author of Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections, will share his findings on voter fraud and offer insights into improving election processes. John Marion, Executive Director of Common Cause Rhode Island, will bring his expertise in voting rights and election administration to the discussion. Together, they will explore the pressing issues of election security, the integrity of election administration, and the future of voting rights. Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with two leading voices in the field.

Jonathan Chu, Presidential Young Professor in International Affairs at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, joins the Security Studies Seminar to present his paper “Collective Punishment of the Other: Perceptions of Groupness and Public Responses to Foreign Influence.”

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research.

Chapter 1 introduces the central concepts and empirical context explored in this book. I begin by defining coercive kidnapping: forceful abduction accompanied by third-party demands that condition the victim’s release. Situating kidnapping in the broader history of hostage taking, I highlight two trends since the mid-20th century that motivate my investigation. First, I document a rise in the overall number of hostage-taking incidents. Second, I uncover the dramatic shift away from hijacking and barricade hostage taking and toward clandestine kidnapping. Chapter 1 debunks the conventional wisdom about kidnapping, including the myth that it’s an easy, opportunistic crime. Instead, I lay out the high costs and organizational requirements to kidnap at scale. Drawing on kidnapping manuals from the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Hamas, as well as interviews with hostages and hostage takers from around the world, Chapter 1 explains how armed groups kidnap. This chapter describes the process and conduct of kidnapping, establishing definitions and expectations for the analysis to follow.

Danielle Gilbert is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

The format of the seminar is a brief (5-minute) introduction by the author, some initial comments by a lead discussant (5-10 minutes), and then open comments from attendees (remainder of time). All attendees are expected to read the paper ahead of time, as the author will not present their research. This is a working session.

Join the Watson Institute for a Constitution Day event featuring former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson. 

Larry D. Thompson was the 30th Deputy Attorney General of the United States. He served as the Department’s second-ranking official from May 2001 to August 2003.

As Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Thompson chaired the President’s National Security Coordination Council, which was charged with assessing vulnerabilities in the nation’s governmental and private sectors in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In July 2002, following a series of high-profile corporate scandals that unsettled the U.S. economy, President George W. Bush appointed Deputy Attorney General Thompson as head of the Corporate Fraud Task Force, which would go on to bring over 350 charges and obtain more than 250 convictions against executives and other business professionals.

Thompson currently serves as Counsel to the Atlanta law firm of Finch McCranie, LLP. Mr. Thompson retired in December 2014 as Executive Vice President, Government Affairs, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for PepsiCo, Inc. Mr. Thompson assumed this position with PepsiCo in July 2012, with responsibility for the company’s worldwide legal function, as well as its government affairs and public policy organizations. He also oversaw the company’s global compliance function and served as President of the PepsiCo Foundation.

Join China Initiative director Lyle Goldstein for a series of discussions on China’s evolving culture, politics, and society. Lunch will be provided.

Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Commencement Forum

In partnership with the Class of 1969

Threats to Democracy and Rights

Join the Watson Institute for a discussion on current threats and challenges to democracy, election security, and rights around the world, featuring supreme court analyst Kate Shaw ’01 and a panel of distinguished Watson faculty.

Speakers will include:

Kate Shaw ’01 , Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Corey Brettschneider, Professor of Political Science

Wendy Schiller , Director of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, Alison S. Ressler Professor of Political Science

Moderated by: Edward Steinfeld, Howard R. Swearer Director of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Dean’s Professor of China Studies, Professor of Political Science

Registration is now closed.

Join Watson Senior Fellow Jim Langevin, former Congressman for Rhode Island’s 2nd District, for a fireside chat with Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence. This wide-ranging discussion will include an overview of the function of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and an examination of the most pressing threats facing the country today. They’ll cover the cyber threat landscape, and they’ll discuss AI and how it will make the work of the intelligence community easier and more effective, but also create more difficulties in dealing with adversaries.

Avril Haines was sworn in as the Director of National Intelligence on January 21, 2021. She is the seventh Senate-confirmed DNI in our nation’s history and the first woman to lead the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Director Haines has deep national security experience. During the Obama administration, she served as Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor from 2015-2017, during which time she led the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee. From 2013-2015, Haines was the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was the first woman to hold both of these positions. She initially joined the federal government as a civil servant and over the last two decades has worked in all three branches of government, in and outside of the intelligence community, and in academia as a research scholar at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Haines most recently led the Transition’s National Security and Foreign Policy Team and served as a member of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service.

Haines received her bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center

Join us for a Watson Distinguished Lecture with Benjamin Wittes, Editor in Chief of Lawfare, and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. Wittes will be discussing the Israel-Gaza war and the implications for U.S. foreign and domestic policy. He’ll cover political implications on the U.S. presidential elections, the impact on diplomatic/national security alliances, the long-term impact on the U.S./Israel relationship, and new and changing alliances across political parties in the U.S.

Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. He co-founded and is the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, which is devoted to sober and serious discussion of “Hard National Security Choices.” He is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and a law analyst at NBC News and MSNBC. 

Join the Watson Institute for a discussion of Ieva Jusionyte’s new book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border. She will be joined by panelists Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies and Political Science, Brown University; Ana Villarreal, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Boston University; and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, Professor of Anthropology, CIESAS Mexico City. Moderated by Neil Safier, Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown University.

Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. Dr. Jusionyte’s scholarship explores the conceptual and material relationship between the state and various forms of violence. She uses ethnography as a method and a form of storytelling to examine the narratives, aesthetics, and practices that underlie security. 

About the Book
American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico.

An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax US gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves together the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. Based on years of fieldwork, Exit Wounds expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with US complicity in violence on both sides of the border.

Moderated by: Dr. Jeff Colgan, Director of Climate Solutions Lab, Director of the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance, Richard Holbrooke Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs

Please join us for a conversation with Dr. Kate White, the Department of Defense Climate Resilience Program Director as she discusses how the U.S. Department of Defense is tackling the climate crisis.

Earth Day provides an opportunity for all of us to reflect on the challenges facing our Earth and consider the steps we can take to reduce the risks of these challenges. Climate change is reshaping the 21st century strategic landscape and elevating risk to U.S., Allied, and partner interests. The Defense Department aims to be prepared for and adapt to climate change while enhancing operational capability. This talk focuses on installation climate resilience to withstand increasingly challenging conditions.

Dr. Kate White is the Climate Resilience Program Director for the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy Resilience and Optimization within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations & Environment. She serves as the principal advisor on policies, programs and initiatives to enhance the climate resilience of Department of Defense military facilities, installations and bases. A registered Professional Engineer since 1989, she holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Civil Engineering, and has over 36 years of government service, including a focus on changing climate for almost 20 years.

Reception to follow.