I am the Betty Freyhof Johnson ‘44 Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost for
Wellesley in the World. My research and teaching focuses on questions of great power competition
and international order. My latest book, When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order was
published by Cornell University Press in 2018. Here I examine how a rising power’s legitimation
strategy affects whether a great power confronts or accommodates a potential challenger. If a rising
power can portray its ambitions as legitimate, it can make the case that, far from being a
revolutionary power, its advances will only preserve, and perhaps even protect, the prevailing status
quo, then great power accommodation is likely. In contrast, if a rising power’s claims are
illegitimate—if they are inconsistent with prevailing rules and norms—then great powers will see its
actions as threatening, making containment and confrontation likely.

At Wellesley, I teach a number of courses rooted in this research, including a seminar on great power
competition, a course on “dangerous ideas” and international order, and a course on nuclear politics.
I also enjoy writing for public outlets, and my work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York
Times and the Washington Post.

Outside of Wellesley, I’m an avid fan of hiking, choral singing, all things golden retriever, and
“adventuring” with my family.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

In 1958, the Office of Naval Research unveiled the Perceptron, the first neural network for artificial intelligence, created by Cornell psychologist Frank Rosenblatt. The Navy expected it to read and write within a year. Nearly seventy years later, the Pentagon is again betting on AI to revolutionize war, while industry leaders promise that recursive self-improvement and superintelligence are just around the corner. Why does the military accept exceptional expectations about AI despite repeated disappointment? Part of the answer is rethinking technology hype. Because we cannot fact-check the future, hype is better understood as performative discourse than as exaggeration. This expectant, dramatic, and imminent discourse can be studied in real time, regardless of whether it proves true. Part of the answer is remembering forgetfulness. Learning supposedly tempers expectations, but forgetting can reset them. I trace AI hype from Dartmouth and DARPA through the Lighthill Report, Strategic Computing, and the Third Offset. I show that hype runs on both hope and fear, and that the exceptional expectations it evokes cycle as technical performance and forgetting interact.

About the speaker

Frank L. Smith III is the director of the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute (CIPI), part of the Strategic and Operational Research Department in the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. Smith was previously a senior lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His interdisciplinary research examines the relationship between emerging technology and national security, particularly in cyberspace. He has a Ph.D. in political science and a B.S. in biological chemistry, both from the University of Chicago.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

How can political actors generate geopolitical power, deterrence, and resilience without concentrating authority in a sovereign hierarchy? Dominant approaches in international relations tend to locate strategic capacity in actors and their material resources, treating relations primarily as channels for cooperation, competition, or influence. This lecture advances a theory of relational geopolitics in which strategic capacity is generated through relationships themselves. In the process, relations reshape actors’ interests, identities, resources, and ability to act. The theory proposes four mechanisms connecting relational configurations to geopolitical outcomes: resource aggregation, institutional conversion, reciprocal commitments, and relational redundancy. These mechanisms can also operate in reverse when collective action fails. I develop the argument through the European Union’s emerging strategy of total defence. Across military preparedness, economic security, infrastructure, enlargement, societal resilience, and external partnerships, the EU is designing strategic effects through a system of institutions, collective identities and relationships rather than through centralized command. The lecture concludes by outlining a comparative research agenda for studying relational power, deterrence, resilience, and breakdown across alliances, regional organizations, non-Western regional formations, and contested international orders.

About the speaker

Dr. Veronica Anghel works at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. As an assistant professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies she co-directs the European Governance and Politics Programme and leads the ‘Global Risks to the EU’ project. Her current research focuses on the European Union’s geopolitical role in the global order, and European integration and enlargement. She is also a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and an Associate Editor for the Journal of European Public Policy. She has been awarded the Inaugural ‘Rising Star’ Award of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in 2021.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Around 2019 signs first emerged that China had embarked on its most significant nuclear modernization program since it became a nuclear power in 1964, but Western scholars disagree on China’s motivations for doing so. This paper offers a framework to explain major changes in China’s nuclear policy that highlights the role of domestic politics in those choices. I argue that China’s recent nuclear modernization required the formation of a consensus among domestic actors who influenced nuclear decision making. Each of these actors supported the modernization for different reasons. Relying on the first interviews with experts in China since the COVID-19 pandemic as well as original Chinese-language documents, the paper identifies four motivations for the modernization: China’s arsenal survivability, the political leverage that a larger arsenal can provide, avoiding perceived mistakes of Soviet nuclear policy, and influencing conventional war outcomes. It identifies proponents for each of these arguments among key groups involved in China’s nuclear decision-making: nuclear laboratories and experts, national security generalists who lack specialist nuclear expertise, the top leader, and the missile force. This domestic political lens also helps to explain the lack of change in China’s nuclear policy in the past.

About the speaker

Fiona Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology and international security, with a focus on China. Fiona’s first book, Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton University Press, 2025) won the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize and Edgar S. Furniss Book Award. The book examines China’s distinctive approach to the dilemma of coercing an adversary under the shadow of nuclear war, which relies on information-age weapons (offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities and precision conventional missiles) as substitutes for nuclear threats. Her articles on nuclear strategy, cybersecurity, escalation dynamics, international law, and U.S.-China relations have appeared in International Security, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, and Texas National Security Review. Fiona has held fellowships at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, Harvard University, Stanford University, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Yale University. She has nonresident affiliations with the MIT Security Studies Program, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the ANU National Security College. She received her PhD in political science from MIT.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Colonialism is often imagined as an imperial project organized by officials at the highest levels of the state. For the earliest English and French colonies in the Caribbean, nothing could be further from the truth. Between 1570 and 1670, a multinational assortment of privately funded ship captains, sailors, merchants, and adventurers engaged in widespread practices of captive-taking and human trafficking throughout the Caribbean. Raids against coastal communities and regional shipping in the region ensnared multitudes, including free and previously enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent, who found themselves trafficked into slavery away from their communities of belonging. Beginning in the 1570s, their captors established maritime bases on small, strategically located islands throughout the region. Those anchorages served as temporary settlements for northern European traffickers decades before their respective monarchs sanctioned official colonies. Colonization thus started with practices of captive-taking and human trafficking, which remained central to the development of the first English and French colonies in the Caribbean.

Through extensive research in Spanish, French, and English archives in Europe and the Caribbean, The Predatory Sea offers a fresh perspective on how captivity and maritime violence shaped early English, French, and Dutch settlement. Drawn from sources across imperial archives, the book reveals the experiences of those ensnared in this trade. Many captives escaped to Spanish population centers, where they testified to officials about what they witnessed in early English, French, and Dutch colonies. Those testimonies informed a series of Spanish attacks on foreign settlements in the Caribbean over the decades leading up to the 1650s. Captives were cause and consequence of inter-imperial competition and warfare during this violent century of Caribbean history. This captive economy, as explicated in The Predatory Sea, shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors.

About the speaker
Casey Schmitt is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University where she researches and teaches on early modern colonization, mobility, empires, and slavery. Her work has appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Early American Studies, and the William & Mary Quarterly and she has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences among others.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

In the late 1990s, a new private military company (PMC) from South Africa, Executive Outcomes, intervened in Angola and Sierra Leone, where the company's operations ushered in a ceasefire. Still, when Executive Outcome's CEO, Eeben Barlow, declared his PMC capable of doing "what blue helmets could not," few in the peacekeeping and NGO world took him seriously. Twenty years later, after the rise of the Russian PMC Wagner Group, peacekeeping and mercenaries are direct competitors. Countries who traditionally contributed soldiers to the UN, such as Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi, now market their troops to Exxon and the Gaza Board of Peace. Whether UN peacekeeping can survive this latest round in the privatization of warfare remains to be seen.

About the speaker

John Lechner graduated from the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. At Georgetown, John focused on security issues in Central Africa and the Sahel; Turkey; Russia, and the former Soviet Union. He is an expert on Russia’s growing influence in Africa. He speaks fluent Russian; advanced French, Turkish, and Georgian; and conversational Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), Chechen, German, and Sango (the lingua franca of the Central African Republic).

After working in finance for several years, John decided to leverage his language skills and significant experience living abroad—especially in Russia and Europe—for a career in international affairs. After arriving in Washington DC, he took an internship with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), analyzing and publishing articles on Turkish domestic politics, security, and foreign relations.

While attending Georgetown he has continued to work as a freelance journalist, covering issues related to language, history, culture, and politics in eastern Ukraine, Moldova, Turkey, the Sahel, and the Central African Republic. He is an expert on the history, languages, and politics of Central Africa, Turkey, and the former Soviet Union. You can find his articles published in Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, Kyiv Post, The Diplomat, Africa is a Country, African Arguments, The National Interest, and Defense One, among others.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsor
Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

This event is part of the “Something Going Wrong with the Bomb”: Rethinking Nuclear Weapons and Global Security conference, taking place on September 17, 2026.

Eighty years after the devastating atomic bombings that ushered in the nuclear age, BOMBSHELL explores how the U.S. government manipulated the narrative about the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Through propaganda, censorship and the co-opting of the press, the government presented a benevolent picture of atomic power, minimizing the horrific human toll of the bombings.

Written and directed by Ben Loeterman, produced by Loeterman and Gaia De Simoni, executive produced by Cameo George, and narrated by Ann Curry, BOMBSHELL sheds light on the efforts of a group of intrepid reporters to let the world know the truth.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-host
Cornell Cinema

Co-sponsor
Department of Government