A powerful combination of circumstances is transforming the fundamental problems of international security, requiring a substantial redesign of policy. Threats of concern are smaller in scale than the massive deterrent operations and conventional force contingencies that dominated the Cold War, and they are also more diffuse, more embedded in socioeconomic conditions, and more difficult to identify. Effective protection against them will depend less on military firepower than on the adroit management of information. This program explores the conceptual issues that must be resolved and the operational techniques that must be developed to subordinate traditional practices of active confrontation to refined collaboration. In particular, the program focuses on contexts where the need for adjustment is clear and the logic compelling: biological pathogens, space operations, nuclear programs, and civil conflict.
No country, company, or private individual can fully utilize the benefits of information technology while protecting all of their own data, communications, or computer networks from every potential cyber threat, regardless of how much time and money they invest in protective systems. Each entity must set priorities, balance tradeoffs, and make choices about cyber protection, knowing that their choices will affect others and that others’ choices will affect them, too. Minimizing the most serious forms of cyber attack, espionage, and crime without hindering beneficial uses of information technology requires skillful multi-stakeholder governance. This project includes a set of research, education, and outreach activities to facilitate that process.
The lengthy process of negotiating, approving, and implementing a nuclear agreement with Iran has underscored how Iranian relations with the rest of the world can have major effects on international security—for both good and bad. This project seeks to improve U.S. and European security policy making towards Iran by increasing public and official understanding of the concerns and perspectives of Iran’s leaders and citizens.
Recent technological and geopolitical developments underscore again the need to balance a desire to preserve complete freedom of action and widely accepted governing rules as the basis for space operations. This project explores what has changed, and what has not, since George W. Bush’s quest for U.S. military space dominance first prompted CISSM to consider whether the United States could use its huge military advantages in space to achieve reliable security for itself and its allies, or if the stability, security, and safety of space operations required more equitable cooperation among all stakeholders.
In recent decades, civil conflict has become the principal source of global violence and is the arena where U.S. concerns about terrorism intersect most directly with the broader international security agenda. Yet the sources of civil conflict are not well understood. This project works to develop more sophisticated tools for analyzing the microdynamics of civil conflicts and to stimulate new thinking for policymakers on how to address their root causes, when to initiate crisis response measures, and what to do in their aftermath to assure reconstruction.
CISSM is extending the principles and ideas developed as part of the Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security program—for example, how information management practices can help to subordinate traditional practices of active confrontation with collaboration—to a range of emerging security policy issues. Among the issues CISSM has so far addressed are cybersecurity and responses to global climate change.
The Program for Public Consultation (PPC) seeks to improve the quality of governance by consulting the citizenry on the key public policy issues their government faces. It conducts surveys of public attitudes in the United States and in other countries, using innovative methods such as policymaking simulations.
This project began with the intention of exploring the role of missile defense in extended deterrence and nonproliferation worldwide. However, era-changing events in Europe, notably the Russian aggression in Crimea and Ukraine, mandated a core shift in the project’s focus. As a result, the project became more oriented toward Europe. As U.S.-Russia tensions continued to escalate and NATO allies searching for greater reassurance, missile defense—relegated to the back burner since the end of the Cold War—again took center stage. Familiar debates about the technical efficacy of missile defense, its role in assuring allies, and the potential for undermining strategic stability reemerged in today’s more complex security environment with a sense of greater urgency than at any time in the last 25 years.