Upcoming Events

Brady-Johnson Book Series: Fiona Cunningham

Thursday, March 27, 2025 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
46 Hillhouse Ave, Room 104

The Grand Strategy Program continues its spring book series with political scientist Fiona Cunningham’s new book, Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton University Press). Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries. Under the Nuclear Shadow examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.”

Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at Yale University. She studies the effects of technology on international security with an empirical focus on China, examining nuclear strategy, escalation dynamics, and other novel sources of leverage in international politics in East Asia. Cunningham will be in conversation with Alex Debs, Associate Professor in Yale’s Department of Political Science.

This event is co-sponsored by the MacMillan Center’s Nuclear Security Program.

The Colloquium in International Security Studies: Anatoly Levshin

Tuesday, April 15, 2025 11:45 AM - 1:00 PM
46 Hillhouse Ave, Room 104

The Colloquium in International Security Studies continues its spring programming with a presentation by Anatoly Levshin. A political scientist, his research explores fundamental international security issues from the standpoint of world order. He will present his book proposal: “Bounding War: Rules of Neutralization, Demilitarization, and Non-Aggression and the Institutional Logic of Multilateral Prohibitions on Militarized Bargaining.” The book compiles an original dataset of such rules; investigates why states enact them; and explores the implications of this important practice for our understanding of the ability states, especially the great powers, to regulate the scope and intensity of strategic competition under anarchy.

Levshin is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Security Program and in Technology and Geopolitics at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. He is also a Director’s Fellow with the Reimagining World Order research community at Princeton University, which he formerly co-curated with its director, G. John Ikenberry.

This event is co-sponsored by the MacMillan Center’s Nuclear Security Program. It is open to the Yale community; lunch will be provided. Please email kaete.oconnell@yale.edu to receive the reading materials for this colloquium.