Cooperation and Conflict in Response to Emerging Threats

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The development of emerging threats highlights the needs for new forms of international coordination and cooperation to improve human welfare. This panel consists of a series of papers modelling responses to these threats. R. Daniel Bressler presents work showing how the offense-defense balance affects state welfare in an endogenous model of arming. He finds that state welfare is u-shaped under increasing offensive advantage, suggesting that either highly offense-biased or defense-biased technology will reduce the costs of conflict. He is a Ph.D. student researching global risks and cooperation as they related to climate change, nuclear proliferation, and war; a Global Priorities Fellow at the Forethought Foundation; and 2020 Nuclear Scholar at CSIS. Ellen Quigley's research analyzes the emergence of systemic global threats such as COVID-19 through the lens of universal ownership theory, identifying the risks that the pandemic has exposed in the international system. She presents a series of five experiments for asset owners to test whether universal ownership theory becomes self-fulfilling. She is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, where she focuses on global catastrophic risks and global justice. Jenny Xiao presents a formal model of international cooperation drawing on theories of moral psychology, in which unitary state actors have preferences over both national interest and the greater good. The model shows that traditional national-interest-based theories may underestimate the real potential for international cooperation and that the expansion of decision-makers' moral circles is conducive to greater international cooperation. She is a Ph.D. student in international relations focusing on Chinese foreign relations, emerging technologies, and political psychology. She was a summer research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute and Tianxia fellow at the Tianxia Academy. Nicholas Emery presents a model of international competition for a technology with negative externalities in which two actors start from an open state of sharing research and ideas and have the option to close off research for security purposes. He finds that closing off increases the chances of a dangerous race. Total welfare to each actor displays an inverse-U relationship, with early closing reducing the economic benefits of cooperation and late closing reducing the chances of winning the competition. He is a Ph.D. student researching the global impacts of emerging technologies and political economy of postcommunism. He was a summer research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute and former intern at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• COVID-19, Fiscal Stimulus, and Emerging Social Norms in a Time of Crisis - Ellen Quigley, University of Cambridge

• Dual Moral Obligations and International Cooperation - Jenny Wenquan Xiao, Columbia University

• The Offense-Defense Balance and The Costs of Anarchy - Raymond Daniel Bressler, Columbia University; Allan Dafoe, University of Oxford; Robert F. Trager, UCLA

• Strategic Closing Off in International Technology Races - Nicholas Emery

Chair

• Robert F. Trager UCLA

Discussant

• Mahendra Prasad University of California, Berkeley