China and the World Program's Podcast: Recent Episodes
China and the World Program
The Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program, was founded in 2004 and and seeks to integrate an advanced study of China's foreign relations into international affairs, politics, economics, regional studies, IPE, IR, Policy, etc.
In 1952, John T. “Jack” Downey, a twenty-three-year-old CIA officer from Connecticut, was shot down over Manchuria during the Korean War. The pilots died in the crash, but Downey and his partner Richard “Dick” Fecteau were captured by the Chinese. For the next twenty years, they were harshly interrogated, put through show trials, held in solitary confinement, placed in reeducation camps, and toured around China as political pawns. Other prisoners of war came and went, but Downey and Fecteau’s release hinged on the United States acknowledging their status as CIA assets. Not until Nixon’s visit to China did Sino-American relations thaw enough to secure Fecteau’s release in 1971 and Downey’s in 1973.
Lost in the Cold War is the never-before-told story of Downey’s decades as a prisoner of war and the efforts to bring him home. Downey’s lively and gripping memoir—written in secret late in life—interweaves horrors and deprivation with humor and the absurdities of captivity. He recounts his prison experiences: fearful interrogations, pantomime communications with his guards, a 3,000-page overstuffed confession designed to confuse his captors, and posing for “show” photographs for propaganda purposes. Through the eyes of his captors and during his tours around China, Downey watched the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the drastic transformations of the Mao era. In interspersed chapters, Thomas J. Christensen, an expert on Sino-American relations, explores the international politics of the Cold War and tells the story of how Downey and Fecteau’s families, the CIA, the U.S. State Department, and successive presidential administrations worked to secure their release.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
John T. Downey (1930–2014) was the longest-held prisoner of war in U.S. history. He went on to serve as commissioner of the Department of Public Utilities for the state of Connecticut and as a Connecticut Superior Court judge. In 2013, the CIA awarded Downey the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the agency’s highest honor.
Thomas J. Christensen is the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations and the director of the China and the World Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He served as deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2006 to 2008, and his books include The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (2015).
Jack Lee Downey is the John Henry Newman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of The Bread of the Strong: Lacouturisme and the Folly of the Cross, 1910–1985 (2015).
Book Talk by Susan Shirk
For three decades after Mao’s death in 1976, China’s leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. To facilitate the country’s inexorable economic ascendence, and to prevent a backlash, they reassured the outside world of China’s peaceful intentions.
Then, something changed. China went from fragile superpower to global heavyweight, muscling its way around the South China Sea, punishing countries that disagree with China, intimidating Taiwan, tightening its grip on Hong Kong, and openly challenging the United States for preeminence not just economically and technologically but militarily. China began to overreach.
Combining her decades of research and experience, Shirk, author of the hugely influential China: Fragile Superpower, argues that we are now fully embroiled in a new cold war.
Shirk shows the shift toward confrontation began in the mid-2000s under the mild-mannered Hu Jintao. As China’s economy boomed, especially after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Hu and the other leaders lost restraint, abetting aggression toward the outside world and unchecked domestic social control. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he capitalized on widespread official corruption and open splits in the leadership to make the case for more concentrated power at the top.
In the decade following, and to the present day, Xi has accumulated greater power than any leader since Mao. Those who implement Xi’s directives compete to outdo one another in fervor, provoking an even greater global backlash and stoking jingoism within China on a scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution. To counter overreach, she argues, the worst mistake the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, can make is to overreact.
(The verbiage above is from the publisher of Overreach and is not reflective of or endorsed by CWP or Columbia University) Susan Shirk is a Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. Shirk is the author of China: Fragile Superpower, and The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China. From 1997-2000, she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia.’
Panel Discussion Following book talk:
Thomas J. Christensen is the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations and Director of the China and the World Program at Columbia University. He arrived in 2018 from Princeton University where he was William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War, Director of the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, and faculty director of the Masters of Public Policy Program and the Truman Scholars Program. From 2006-2008 he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs with responsibility for relations with China, Taiwan, and Mongolia.
Susan A. Thornton is a retired senior U.S. diplomat with almost three decades of experience with the U.S. State Department in Eurasia and East Asia. She is currently a Senior Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center. She is also the director of the Forum on Asia-Pacific Security at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
John K. Culver is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) senior intelligence officer with thirty-five years of experience as a leading analyst of East Asian affairs, including security, economic, and foreign-policy dimensions. Previously as national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2018, Culver drove the Intelligence Community’s support to top policymakers on East Asian issues and managed extensive relationships inside and outside government.
What can we expect for the US-China relationship in the aftermath of key upcoming political milestones in the two countries — the Party Congress and the U.S. Midterms? Is a Xi-Biden Summit likely to take place on the margins of the G20 and what will that likely produce?
For status quo powers interested in stabilizing the security environment, informally adapting existing law is easier and quicker than formally bargaining over new law. But policymakers and pundits routinely bemoan the inability of "thin" international institutions like arms control -- where the stakes for war and peace are highest -- to keep pace with technological change. Opportunistic actors, it is believed, see technology as both the means and motive to evade their institutional commitments, especially in institutions that lack a standing bureaucracy or dispute settlement mechanism. In practice, however, many of our "thinnest" institutions have proven remarkably resilient to technological breakthroughts that disproportionately benefit certain states. Controversy over emerging technologies is certainly common, but why is it not ubiquitous?To answer this question, legal professionals in the US and China are commissioned to write long-form advisory briefs about a legally questionable satellite technology. Decisionmakers routinely rely on legal experts to make determinations about what kinds of technologies are compliant with international obligations, though the training and role of these experts varies by country. Technological novelty, the linguistic specificity of a reference law, and fiduciary incentives are randomly varied along 2^3 factorial-controlled conditions. In the US sample, statistical and text analytic results strongly support the theory that specificity, though better at limiting deviations in the near-term, performs worse in environments where technology moves quickly and unpredictably. Since the US has traditionally advocated for more specificity in international law, the findings help explain US behavior toward recent Chinese technological advances. Pending results from a second wave, likely implications for China's approach are discussed.
What is the relationship between internal development and integration into the global economy in developing countries? How and why do state–market relations differ? And do these differences matter in the post-cold war era of global conflict and cooperation? Drawing on research in China, India, and Russia and examining sectors from textiles to telecommunications, Micro-institutional Foundations of Capitalism introduces a new theory of sectoral pathways to globalization and development. Adopting a historical and comparative approach, the book’s Strategic Value Framework shows how state elites perceive the strategic value of sectors in response to internal and external pressures. Sectoral structures and organization of institutions further determine the role of the state in market coordination and property rights arrangements. The resultant dominant patterns of market governance vary by country and sector within country. These national configurations of sectoral models are the micro-institutional foundations of capitalism, which mediate globalization and development.Speaker Bio:Roselyn Hsueh is an associate professor of political science at Temple University, where she co-directs the Certificate in Political Economy. She is the author of Micro-institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2022), China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2011), and scholarly articles on states and markets, comparative regulation and governance, and political economy of development. She is a frequent commentator on politics, finance and trade, and economic development in China and beyond. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, National Public Radio, and The Washington Post, among other media outlets, have featured her research. Prestigious fellowships, such as the Fulbright Global Scholar Award, have funded international fieldwork and she has served as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She holds a B.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Over the last decades, China has punished countries that undermine its territorial claims and foreign policy goals with measures such as restricting trade, encouraging popular boycotts, and cutting off tourism. These coercive measures have caused significant economic damage to U.S. partners such as Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea. China’s economic sanctions may also have long-term effects in deterring and shaping countries’ foreign policy interests that go well beyond the short-term economic costs.The talk will highlight how Taiwan responds to China’s economic sanctions. It demonstrates the agency of medium-sized countries in the shadow of a great power The second part of this presentation offers initial thoughts on establishing a trade pact in the Asia-Pacific region to counter China’s unilateral economic sanctions. More specifically, Taiwan and Australia have much to offer the rest of the world regarding how to respond to China’s economic coercion. Strong cooperation among Taiwan, Australia, the U.S., and Asian countries can also establish the basis for a coordinated strategy in addressing China’s sanctions.
Much work has examined the phenomenon of dispute escalation, whereby the concrete measures state actors take edge them closer to war. Less attention has been devoted to the ways in which state actors’ perceptions of what is at stake in a dispute can also change, with important consequences for the likelihood of conflict. This paper examines the phenomenon of dispute inflation— whereby a contest over an object or issue takes on ever greater stakes and significance for its protagonists—and identifies three different mechanisms that generate increasing non-material stakes. The upshot is that even a minor dispute can theoretically grow into a major conflict due to swelling stakes, especially when dispute inflation spirals. To illustrate these dynamics at work, this paper looks to recent developments in the dispute between the People’s Republic of China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.
Conceptualizing China’s increasingly active development outreach through the Belt and Road Initiative as the internationalization of China’s “developmental statecraft,” I argue that the central goal of this process is to induce alignment of state-directed development agendas in the partnering countries with China’s own, and to coordinate international collective actions toward the construction of a China-centered economic network. Such an economic grand strategy is informed by China’s own developmental state experience. Through a close examination of how the developmental state bureaucracy operationalizes the BRI in the period of 2013-2020, and a crucial case of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, I demonstrate that such “craft” involves extensive use of planning, corporatist mechanisms for interest aggregation, and platform-building. The dissecting analysis goes beyond the usual sketchy description of economic statecraft tools discussed in the literature. Effectiveness of developmental statecraft depends on the state’s capacity to 1) define and articulate a clear development agenda that makes sense to relevant actors, 2) mobilize resources, 3) coordinate among various actors to ensure the alignment of actions and goals, 4) respond to feedbacks and adapt when plans prove infeasible. I show that the Chinese state has stronger capacity in agenda articulation and mobilization, weaker capacity in coordination, and weakest in adaptation, resulting in overstretch. -----------Hong Zhang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the China Africa Research Initiative, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a fellow at the China and the World Program at Columbia University in 2021-2022. She received her PhD in Public Policy from George Mason University in 2021. Her current research revolves around two questions: how the Chinese state engages in international development cooperation in relation to its domestic political economic needs, and how China’s construction and engineering contractors serve to project Chinese state capitalism globally. She co-edits the People’s Map of Global China and the Made in China Journal.
Abstract: Why do Chinese-funded and constructed projects that are similar in nature develop into starkly different trajectories in different African states? This question sheds light on the varying state capacity of developing countries. Divergent from existing structural explanations that stress the external agency and institutional explanations that emphasise bureaucratic capacity, I propose a political championship theory to explain variances in developing states’ capacity to deliver functional infrastructure projects. I argue that perceived threats from competitive elections engineer leader’s commitment to developmental project. When the leader has strong authority, they build a coalition to push for the implementation, leading to high effectiveness. To empirically examine the political championship theory and two competing theories: the external agency and the bureaucratic capacity arguments, I trace the process of two Chinese-funded and -constructed railway projects: the Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya and the Addis-Djibouti Railway in Ethiopia. I rely on over 180 interviews conducted during field research from 2015-2019 in Kenya, Ethiopia, and China. This research contributes to the theoretical debate on state capacity by emphasizing individual agency within structural and institutional constraints, a previously understudied area in state capacity. The thorough documentation of two Chinese-sponsored projects in Africa also contributes to the understanding of Chinese infrastructure projects in developing countries in general.--------------------Bio: Yuan Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia-Harvard China and the World program. Her research interest is African state effectiveness, China’s economic and political engagement with Africa, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Her book project investigates why Chinese-financed and -constructed develop into starkly different trajectories in different African countries. Her work has appeared in Comparative Politics, Economic History of Developing Regions, etc.She received her PhD from Oxford. She also holds an MSc in Politics Research from Oxford, MPP from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in international relations from Shanghai International Studies University. She also served three years in UNDP China and Sino-Africa Centre of Excellence Foundation in Kenya.
How can the U.S. best manage its relationship with China? The country is at once a sharp competitor to the U.S., a formidable challenger to U.S.’ regional and global leadership, and an important potential partner on a range of transnational challenges. Will it be possible for the United States to cooperate, compete, and confront China simultaneously, as some American officials have suggested? Is US-China conflict avoidable, including over Taiwan? Ryan Hass, author of Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence, will address these questions and more in opening comments before engaging in an open Q&A on the future of the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship.-----Ryan Hass is a senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, where he holds a joint appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. He is also the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies. He was part of the inaugural class of David M. Rubenstein fellows at Brookings, and is a nonresident affiliated fellow in the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. Hass focuses his research and analysis on enhancing policy development on the pressing political, economic, and security challenges facing the United States in East Asia.
Professor Yeling Tan discusses her book, Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 represented an historic opportunity to peacefully integrate a rising economic power into the international order based on market-liberal rules. Yet current trade tensions between the US and China indicate that this integration process has run into trouble. To what extent has the liberal internationalist promise of the WTO been fulfilled? To answer this question, this study breaks open the black box of the massive Chinese state and unpacks the economic strategies that central economic agencies as well as subnational authorities adopted in response to WTO rules demanding far-reaching modifications to China’s domestic institutions. The study explains why, rather than imposing constraints, WTO entry provoked divergent policy responses from different actors within the Chinese state, in ways neither expected nor desired by the architects of the WTO.Yeling Tan is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon. She is also a non-resident scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center and a public intellectual fellow with the National Committee on US-China Relations. She holds a PhD in Public Policy and an MPA in International Development from Harvard University, and a BA in International Relations and Economics from Stanford University. Dr. Tan’s work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Governance, the China Journal and Global Policy. She is co-author of China Experiments: From Local Innovation to National Reform (Brookings Institution Press) and co-editor of Asia’s Role in Governing Global Health (Routledge). Her latest book is Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order (Cornell University Press). She has also written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
Abstract:Over the last year, the tempo of Chinese military operations around Taiwan has accelerated and foreign analysts have grown increasingly concerned about the prospects of China’s use of force. Yet the risks of such a conflict for the PRC would be enormous and the People’s Liberation Army continues to wrestle with key challenges. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s defense policy is gradually shifting, the U.S. military is experimenting with new operational concepts, and U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation is deepening. This talk will explore where the Taiwan issue fits within China’s larger military strategy, China’s range of options to deter Taiwan independence and lay the groundwork for non-peaceful reunification, limitations and risks facing the PLA, and implications for Taiwan and U.S. responses.Bio:Dr. Joel Wuthnow is a senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs in the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the U.S. National Defense University. His research areas include Chinese foreign and security policy, Chinese military affairs, U.S.-China relations, and strategic developments in East Asia. In addition to his duties in INSS, he also serves as an adjunct professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.His recent books and monographs, all from NDU Press, include The PLA Beyond Borders: Chinese Military Operations in Regional and Global Context (2021, lead editor), System Overload: Can China's Military Be Distracted in a War over Taiwan? (2020), Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms (2019, co-editor), and China's Other Army: The People's Armed Police in an Era of Reform (2019). His research has also appeared in journals such as Asia Policy, Asian Security, The China Quarterly, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Joint Force Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Strategic Studies, and in edited volumes.
Abstract: As part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is increasingly investing abroad and has become an important country for development financing. Many commentators have expressed concern that the country is defying the Western path of sustainable development guided by the rule of law and good governance standards. Adopting the frame of 'adaptive governance,' the presentation looks at the attitude of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) toward corporate social responsibility (CRS) in Chinese-Financed BRI Railroad Megaprojects in East Africa. Through a comparative case study of Chinese loans for infrastructure in East Africa (the Standard Gauge Railroad in Kenya and the Ethiopia-Djibouti railroad), the presentation offers a more systematic assessment of what kind of governance China is in fact practicing through the BRI and what are the reasons behind its ‘adaptive governance’ approach.
The presentation is based on the article "Adaptive Governance along Chinese-Financed BRI Railroad Megaprojects in East Africa" forthcoming in World Development.
Bio: Maria Adele Carrai is an Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai. Her research explores the history of international law in East Asia and investigates how China's rise as a global power shapes norms and redefines the international distribution of power. She completed a Ph.D. in Law at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining NYU Shanghai, she was a Marie-Curie fellow at KU Leuven and a fellow at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, European University Institute of Florence's Max Weber Program, and New York University Law School. More information can be found on her website www.mariadelecarrai.com.
Abstract: How and why do similarly situated smaller states respond to big power-backed infrastructure projects differently? Why do these smaller states demonstrate varying forms of agency? This talk addresses these questions by examining Southeast Asian countries’ engagement with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing on extensive fieldwork and sources, Kuik will share the key findings of his co-authored (with David Lampton and Selina Ho) book, Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2020) and a Special Issue project on “Asymmetry and Authority: Theorizing Southeast Asian Responses to China’s BRI” (Asian Perspective, Spring 2021). While China, as a stronger power, will always push the envelope in BRI partnerships, smaller states do have agency. Southeast Asian states’ engagement with the BRI show different types of host-country agency, e.g. proactive initiation (small-state pulls), active involvement, active renegotiation, and passive resistance (denying, delaying, or distancing from a stronger power’s initiative). These patterns are the result of two-level dynamics: while asymmetrical power relations (i.e. power gaps with China, alongside presence/absence of credible alternatives) condition smaller states’ external policy choices, these structural effects are filtered through the states’ internal dynamics. Elite legitimation – the governing elites’ efforts to justify and enhance their authority to rule – is the key explanatory variable. While all elites seek to maximize their authority chiefly by attempting to win the “hearts and minds” of their targeted constituencies, they do so by pursuing, with different emphasis, three pathways of inner justification: (a) performance-related rationales (e.g. ensuring growth, managing national problems); (b) particularistic narratives (e.g. identity politics); and (c) procedural virtues (e.g. democratic practice, rules of law). The relative emphasis placed on these pathways compels the respective elites to play up or play down certain perceived risks and opportunities associated with the BRI, leading to varying responses.
Governing the ocean commons is a significant challenge in managing China’s rise. China’s global search for resources such as fisheries and seabed minerals raises questions of sustainability and fair distribution of resources. Moreover, China’s highly subsidized global fishing fleet—the largest in the world—increasingly acts to advance China’s geopolitical goals. With the recent passage of the Maritime Fisheries and Security Enforcement (SAFE) Act, addressing illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is now a greater priority in U.S. foreign policy. How should U.S. policy on this issue move forward in the new administration, and more generally how should the global community think about China’s increasing presence in our oceans?
Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His teaching and research interests include Chinese politics and foreign policy, the comparative study of political participation and political culture, and human rights. He is engaged in long-term research and writing on Chinese foreign policy and on sources of political legitimacy in Asia, the latter research based on data from the Asian Barometer Survey, a multi-national collaborative survey research project active in eighteen countries in Asia.
Bonnie S. Glaser is a senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project at CSIS, where she works on issues related to Asia-Pacific security with a focus on Chinese foreign and security policy. She is concomitantly a nonresident fellow with the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, and a senior associate with the Pacific Forum. Ms. Glaser has worked for more than three decades at the intersection of Asia-Pacific geopolitics and U.S. policy. From 2008 to mid-2015, she was a senior adviser with the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies, and from 2003 to 2008, she was a senior associate in the CSIS International Security Program. Prior to joining CSIS, she served as a consultant for various U.S. government offices, including the Departments of Defense and State.
Thomas J. Christensen is Professor of Public and International Affairs and Director of the China and the World Program at Columbia University. He arrived in 2018 from Princeton University where he was William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War, Director of the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, and faculty director of the Masters of Public Policy Program and the Truman Scholars Program. From 2006-2008 he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs with responsibility for relations with China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. His research and teaching focus on China’s foreign relations, the international relations of East Asia, and international security. His most recent book, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (W.W. Norton) was an editors’ choice at the New York Times Book Review, a “Book of the Week” on CNN”s Fareed Zakaria GPS, and the Arthur Ross Book Award Silver Medalist for 2016 at the Council on Foreign Relations.
How does China’s domestic governance shape its foreign policy? What role do nationalism and ideology play in Beijing’s regional and global ambitions? The Chinese leadership has been at once a revisionist, defender, reformer, and free-rider in the international system—insisting rigidly on issues that are central to its domestic survival, while showing flexibility on issues that are more peripheral. To illuminate this variation and prospects for conflict and cooperation, Weiss will discuss her new book project, which theorizes and illustrates the domestic-international linkages in Beijing’s approach to issues ranging from sovereignty and homeland disputes to climate change and COVID-19.
Bio: Jessica Chen Weiss is an associate professor of Government at Cornell University, a political science editor at the Washington Post Monkey Cage blog, and a nonresident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Weiss is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her research appears in International Organization, China Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and Review of International Political Economy, as well as in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Quarterly. Weiss was previously an assistant professor at Yale University and founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford, while an undergraduate at Stanford University. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2008, where her dissertation won the 2009 American Political Science Association Award for best dissertation in international relations, law and politics. Weiss is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.