Global Security & International Affairs
The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of a broad range of policymakers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and promote innovative and evidence-based policies to address crucial issues affecting the international community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice at all levels of society.
Committee on International Security Studies
CHAIRS
Scott D. Sagan
Stanford University
Jennifer M. Welsh
McGill University
MEMBERS
Tanja M. Börzel
Freie Universität Berlin
Neta C. Crawford
University of Oxford
Matthew Anthony Evangelista
Cornell University
Tanisha M. Fazal
University of Minnesota
Martha Finnemore
George Washington University
M. Taylor Fravel
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lawrence D. Freedman
King’s College London
Oona A. Hathaway
Yale University
Susan Landau
Tufts University
Rose M. McDermott
Brown University
Steven E. Miller
Harvard Kennedy School
Anne Woods Patterson
Georgetown University
Barry R. Posen
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paul H. Wise
Stanford University
Project
Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict
The Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict project aims to understand and address current trends in humanitarian contexts that pose new or evolving challenges for humanitarian health responders. Among the most pressing challenges are the increasingly protracted nature of civil and non-international armed conflict; the fact that many of the world’s most violent places are facing criminal or political violence rather than conflict as conventionally understood; shortfalls in funding; and changing geopolitical relations. This project brought together political scientists, legal and security experts, health professionals, and humanitarians to examine current challenges to effective humanitarian action and to develop, where necessary, new strategies for preventing civilian harm and delivering critical health services in areas plagued by violent conflict.
The project included a focus on responding to some of the urgent challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on humanitarian health needs in conflict areas and other violent settings. Building on its efforts to address the political and security dimensions of pandemic response in areas of weak governance and violent conflict, the initiative published two research papers as part of a workstream on global cooperation and pandemic control.
Another area of work, exploring Regional Humanitarian Responses to Pandemics, Criminal and Political Violence, and Forced Migration, published a series of peer-reviewed journal articles that present the findings of field research conducted in partnership with the University of California, San Diego, and El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. This work focuses on understanding the impacts of COVID-19 on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A Dædalus volume, published in May 2023, synthesizes these findings from across all components of the project, with tailored resources prepared for select audiences, including policymakers and practitioners. The Academy organized a series of launch events in 2023 to discuss key findings in the volume. These events engaged experts in London, New York City, and Mexico City.
PROJECT CHAIRS
Jaime Sepúlveda
University of California, San Francisco
Jennifer M. Welsh
McGill University
Paul H. Wise
Stanford University
ADVISORY GROUP
Sergio Aguayo
El Colegio de México
Donald M. Berwick
Institute of Healthcare Improvement
Louise Henry Bryson
Public Media Group of Southern California
Rita Dayoub
Chatham House
Elisabeth Decrey Warner
Geneva Call
David P. Fidler
Council on Foreign Relations
Fouad M. Fouad
American University of Beirut
Marion Jacobs
University of Cape Town
Arthur Kleinman
Harvard University
Joanne Liu
McGill University
Li Lu
Himalaya Capital Management LLC
Jane Olson
Human Rights Watch
Deborah F. Rutter
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Tamara Taraciuk Broner
Human Rights Watch
PROJECT STAFF
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator for Global Security and International Affairs
Michelle Poulin
Program Associate for Global Security and International Affairs
Peter Robinson
Chief Program Officer
Jumaina Siddiqui
Program Director for Global Security and International Affairs
FUNDERS
Louise Henry Bryson and John E. Bryson
Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
Project Publications
“Delivering Humanitarian Health Services in Violent Conflicts,” Dædalus, edited by Jaime Sepúlveda, Jennifer M. Welsh & Paul H. Wise (Spring 2023)
Peace Operations at the Intersection of Health Emergencies and Violent Conflict: Lessons from the 2018–2020 DRC Ebola Crisis, Dirk Druet (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022)
International Cooperation Failures in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Learning from Past Efforts to Address Common Threats, Jennifer M. Welsh (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022)
Ietza Bojorquez-Chapela, Steffanie A. Strathdee, Richard S. Garfein, et al., “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Migrants in Shelters in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico,” BMJ Global Health (2022)
Ietza Bojorquez, Jaime Sepúlveda, Deandra Lee, and Steffanie Strathdee, “Interrupted Transit and Common Mental Disorders Among Migrants in Tijuana, Mexico,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry (2022).
Antoine Chaillon, Ietza Bojorquez, Jaime Sepúlveda, et al., “Cocirculation and Replacement of SARS-CoV-2 Variants in Crowded Settings and Marginalized Populations along the US-Mexico Border,” Salud publica de Mexico (2022).
Project Meetings
21st Century Challenges and Opportunities for Humanitarian Health Responses
July 20, 2023
New York, NY
Organized in partnership with the International Peace Institute, this event served as the U.S. launch for the project’s Dædalus volume. The speakers focused on several themes highlighted in the volume: the current landscape for humanitarian action, high level and local level health service delivery, on the ground perspectives, and the health-development nexus.
SPEAKERS
Dirk Druet
International Peace Institute; McGill University
Fouad M. Fouad
American University of Beirut; Global Health Institute
David Miliband
International Rescue Committee
David W. Oxtoby
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Jenna Russo
International Peace Institute
Jennifer M. Welsh
McGill University
Paul H. Wise
Stanford University
A World in Humanitarian Crisis: Forced Mobility and Organized Crime in Latin America
September 12, 2023
Mexico City, Mexico
In partnership with El Colegio de México, the Academy organized a policy forum that explored the challenges to delivering humanitarian health services to migrants in areas affected by political and criminal violence in Latin America. The discussions focused on the ambiguity of humanitarian health service delivery in situations other than war and on unpacking the drivers of forced migration due to urban violence and climate change within the region.
SPEAKERS
Sergio Aguayo
El Colegio de México
Ietza Bojórquez
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico
Julia Carabias
National Autonomous University of Mexico
Silvia Giorguli Saucedo
El Colegio de México
Emilio González
UNHCR Protection Unit, Mexico
David W. Oxtoby
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Jaime Sepúlveda
University of California, San Francisco
Tamara Taraciuk Broner
Inter-American Dialogue
Karine Tinat
El Colegio de México
Miguel Ángel Valverde Loya
Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Challenges to Delivering Humanitarian Health Care in Today’s Conflicts
November 6, 2023
London, United Kingdom
In collaboration with Chatham House, the Academy held an event that focused on the obstacles to effective implementation of humanitarian health services in today’s conflicts, including in Ukraine and Gaza. These obstacles include state-sanctioned use of indiscriminate biological, nuclear, and cluster incendiary weapons and the ongoing blockade and forced displacement in Gaza. The participants also discussed the geopolitical implications of such challenges to humanitarian efforts.
Project
Promoting Dialogue on Arms Control and Disarmament
Unlike the Cold War, the current nuclear age is characterized by a simultaneous collapse of arms control agreements and the absence of any strategic dialogue among the three main nuclear players. One strand of work in the Promoting Dialogue on Arms Control and Disarmament project consists of a series of Track II dialogues between experts and former policymakers from the United States, Russia, and China, which is designed to identify critical short-term goals in arms control that would serve to minimize and reduce the potential risks of nuclear arms-racing and escalation. The meetings identify areas for cooperation and promote conceptual thinking about measures that might strengthen strategic stability and help to reduce the significant dangers of nuclear weapons being used in the future.
A second strand of work builds on the Academy’s prior experience in organizing educational sessions for the U.S. Congress on a range of topics. Through a series of engagements with members of Congress and their staffs, the project helps foster and strengthen knowledge on key issues and challenges facing the United States in arms control and international security, with particular attention to careful management of the strategic competition posed by China and Russia.
A third strand of work weaves the project’s expert discussions and policy recommendations together to produce publications on critical debates within nuclear arms control.
PROJECT CHAIR
Steven E. Miller
Harvard University
PROJECT STAFF
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator for Global Security and International Affairs
Michelle Poulin
Program Associate for Global Security and International Affairs
Peter Robinson
Chief Program Officer
Ottawa Sanders
Raymond Frankel Nuclear Security Policy Fellow
Jumaina Siddiqui
Program Director for Global Security and International Affairs
FUNDER
The Raymond Frankel Foundation
Project Publications
The Future of Nuclear Arms Control and the Impact of the Russia-Ukraine War, Nadezhda Arbatova, George Perkovich, and Paul van Hooft (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2024)
The Altered Nuclear Order in the Wake of the Russia-Ukraine War, Rebecca Davis Gibbons, Stephen Herzog, Wilfred Wan, and Doreen Horschig (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2023)
Missile Defense and the Strategic Relationship among the United States, Russia, and China, Tong Zhao and Dmitry Stefanovich (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2023)
Minimizing the Negative Effects of Advances in Military-Relevant Space Capabilities on Strategic Stability, Nancy W. Gallagher and Jaganath Sankaran (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2023)
Nuclear Perils in a New Era: Bringing Perspective to the Nuclear Choices Facing Russia and the United States, Steven E. Miller and Alexey Arbatov (American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences, 2021)
Project Meetings
Space and Strategic Stability
November 27, 2023
Washington, D.C.
The Academy partnered with the Atlantic Council for a roundtable discussion on topics featured in Minimizing the Negative Effects of Advances in Military-Relevant Space Capabilities on Strategic Stability. Participants from academia, government, and think tanks discussed advances in Russian and Chinese space capabilities with the publication’s authors: Nancy W. Gallagher, Director of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland and Research Professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, and Jaganath Sankaran, Assistant Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin.
The Implications of Missile Defense on the U.S.-China Strategic Relationship
January 23, 2024
Washington, D.C.
In collaboration with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Academy organized a round-table discussion with policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to explore ideas from Missile Defense and the Strategic Relationship among the United States, Russia, and China. Tong Zhao, Senior Fellow at Carnegie, provided an overview of his essay in the publication. Steven E. Miller (Harvard University), chair of the project, served as a discussant. James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at Carnegie, provided closing remarks. The discussion focused on Chinese concerns over U.S. missile defense, misperceptions that exacerbate strained relations between the United States and China, and ways in which the bilateral strategic relations between the two countries can be strengthened.
Project
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age, Phase II: Deterrence & New Nuclear States
The world has entered a new nuclear era. No longer dominated by two nuclear superpowers, the evolving multipolar nuclear order presents fundamental challenges to the conceptual and practical means of avoiding nuclear war. Moreover, the new era has slowly dismantled the bilateral arms control framework, with no clear prospect that it will be revived and extended. The possibility that a framework or frameworks encompassing other, let alone all, nuclear powers can be achieved seems even more remote. In addition, advances in weapons technology and the opening of new frontiers, such as cyber capabilities and artificial intelligence, make a shifting environment still more complex. The pathways to inadvertent nuclear war have multiplied across more regions and relationships.
The Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age project has worked to identify the major dangers generated by the dynamics of a multipolar nuclear world that pose the greatest threat of inadvertent nuclear war; offer alternative approaches to addressing each of these dangers; facilitate discussions with relevant communities in the United States and abroad; and encourage and assist policymakers, Congress, the analytical community, and the media to think systematically about our increasingly multipolar world.
The project is rooted in the critically important work on arms control that the Academy conducted from 1958 to 1960 to prevent a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. During that time, Academy Fellows gathered monthly to build a cooperative framework between the United States and the Soviet Union based on the limitations of the nuclear stockpile and the establishment of mutual vulnerability between the two rivals. The group included Donald Brennan, Edward Teller, Henry Kissinger, and Thomas Schelling, among others. Today, more than ever, an effort that brings together scholars and policymakers to examine the wide range of challenges posed by the changing nuclear order is urgently needed.
With the emergence of three new nuclear powers (India, Pakistan, and North Korea) and several rising nuclear powers (including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey), the world is on the verge of a new nuclear age. This will demand new thinking about the security implications of nuclear powers that may be in highly hostile environments, suffer from domestic instability, have fewer resources, or be led by personalist dictators. The second phase of the project investigates the deterrence and defense implications facing small nuclear force countries and potential proliferators.
The project produced an edited volume of essays, The Fragile Balance of Terror: Deterrence in the New Nuclear Age, published by Cornell University Press. Outreach activities are being directed to nuclear and arms control policymakers (primarily in the United States) and academic centers and think tanks with a focus on nuclear studies.
PROJECT CHAIRS, PHASE II
Vipin Narang
U.S. Department of Defense; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Scott D. Sagan
Stanford University
ADVISORY COMMITTEE, PHASE II
Victor Cha
Georgetown University
Lawrence Freedman
King’s College London
Robert Jervis †
Columbia University
Jeffrey Lewis
Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey
Rose McDermott
Brown University
Barry Posen
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Gary Samore
Brandeis University
Caitlin Talmadge
Georgetown University
PROJECT STAFF
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator for Global Security and International Affairs
Michelle Poulin
Program Associate for Global Security and International Affairs
Peter Robinson
Chief Program Officer
Ottawa Sanders
Raymond Frankel Nuclear Security Policy Fellow
Jumaina Siddiqui
Program Director for Global Security and International Affairs
FUNDERS
Louise Henry Bryson and John E. Bryson
John F. Cogan, Jr. †
Lester Crown
Alan M. Dachs
Bob and Kristine Higgins
Richard Rosenberg †
Kenneth L. and Susan S. Wallach
† Deceased
Project Publications
The Fragile Balance of Terror: Deterrence in the New Nuclear Age, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan (Cornell University Press, 2023)
“Meeting the Challenges of a New Nuclear Age,” Dædalus, edited by Robert Legvold & Christopher Chyba (2020)
Contemplating Strategic Stability in a New Multipolar Nuclear World, Robert Legvold (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2019)
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: Nuclear Weapons in a Changing Global Order, Steven E. Miller, Robert Legvold, and Lawrence Freedman (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2019)
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: Emerging Risks and Declining Norms in the Age of Technological Innovation and Changing Nuclear Doctrines, Nina Tannenwald and James M. Acton, with an Introduction by Jane Vaynman (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018)
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: U.S. and Russian Nuclear Concepts, Past and Present, Linton Brooks, Alexei Arbatov, and Francis J. Gavin (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018)
Project Meetings
The Fragile Balance of Terror: Can Nuclear Deterrence Hold for the Next Decade?
American Political Science Association Annual Conference
August 31, 2023
Los Angeles, CA
The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision-making that encourages rash choices. The Russian war in Ukraine and veiled nuclear threats have thrust the dangers posed by nuclear weapons back into public consciousness. This is on top of the simmering tensions on the Korean Peninsula and between India and Pakistan, the failure to resolve the Iranian nuclear program, and the specter of Chinese military action over Taiwan. At this roundtable meeting, the participants discussed the robustness of nuclear deterrence in an era rife with new risks, drawing themes from the Academy’s edited volume, The Fragile Balance of Terror: Deterrence in the New Nuclear Age.
PANELISTS
Doreen Horschig, Chair
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Mark Bell
University of Minnesota
Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer
Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies
James Fearon
Stanford University
Jeffrey Lewis
Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
Scott D. Sagan
Stanford University
Exploratory Meeting
Climate Conundrum: Bridging the Gap between Science and Security
May 14–15, 2024
House of the Academy, Cambridge, MA
The Academy convened an off-the-record workshop, led by Neta Crawford (University of Oxford) and Tanisha Fazal (University of Minnesota), that brought together scholars of international relations and climate change experts. The discussions focused on military emissions, the securitization of climate, and solar geoengineering. Questions around global governance were threaded throughout each conversation.
MEETING CHAIRS
Neta Crawford
University of Oxford
Tanisha Fazal
University of Minnesota
PROJECT STAFF
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator for Global Security and International Affairs
Michelle Poulin
Program Associate for Global Security and International Affairs
Peter Robinson
Chief Program Officer
Jumaina Siddiqui
Program Director for Global Security and International Affairs
FUNDER
American Academy Exploratory Fund