Alumni Confidential: Francesca Giovannini

You are the executive director of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Belfer Center. Tell us about the career journey that landed you here—what first got you interested in the global security and international affairs space?

I started my career as a UN junior political officer, and was deployed immediately, first in the Gaza Strip, then in Lebanon. I was serving under Ambassador Staffan de Mistura, the personal representative of the UN Secretary General for South Lebanon. This was in 2002–2003, when the entire region was consumed by discussions about the potential consequences of an imminent U.S. military intervention in Iraq. Concerns about weapons of mass destruction were at the center of regional and international debates, while growing questions were also beginning to emerge regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions and their implications for regional security.

Although the United Nations in Lebanon did not have a direct mandate regarding Iraq’s weapons programs, we were asked to assess the potential implications of the conflict for regional stability and security.

These experiences sparked my interest in strategic security and weapons of mass destruction. In 2005, I decided to pursue formal studies in the field, enrolling in a master’s program at the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently completing a PhD focused on strategic and nuclear issues.

To think—20 years ago when your career was starting, the conversations that were taking place about potential nuclear weapons in the Middle East seem very similar to the state of affairs today. Has the world changed since then, or not really?

In many ways, the nuclear field is characterized by remarkable continuity. Some of the fundamental questions that emerged in the 1950s remain just as relevant today: What is the minimum level of nuclear forces required to maintain credible deterrence? Is nuclear superiority necessary for security, or is a smaller arsenal sufficient? What drives states to pursue nuclear weapons, and under what conditions can proliferation be prevented?

But there are other factors that are increasingly shaking up the way we address these questions. Of course, there’s the emergence of new technologies. It’s not that in the 1950s they didn’t have new technologies. What is different today is the convergence of multiple technologies whose combined effects amplify one another, creating new risks and opportunities that cannot be understood in isolation. We have artificial intelligence on top of quantum computing; biotech. The technological field has accelerated very differently from before.

The global political environment is also profoundly different today. In the 1950s, the international system was largely defined by the bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Countries such as China and India faced significant domestic development challenges and played a much more limited role in global discussions on strategic stability and international security. Today, both of those countries are indispensable players in the international system.

So things have grown more complex and multidimensional, but the underlying questions about the role of nuclear weapons have remained very similar.

IGCC’s Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Boot Camp was part of your career journey. What did you learn from you experience at PPNT?

PPNT was a groundbreaking opportunity for at least two reasons. I came from the University of Oxford in the UK, which doesn’t have the depth of expertise on nuclear studies that many American campuses have. PPNT was the first time I spent quality time with peers who had been exposed to much deeper debates about nuclear deterrence. The European debate on nuclear weapons focuses on norms, nuclear restraint, nuclear disarmament, human rights. It’s a very different debate than in the United States.

Number two, many of the scholars in this field are not exposed to the technical discussions. When I came to PPNT, I had no idea what uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing was. I had no idea what the core of the reactor looked like. PPNT was the first time in a really interdisciplinary setting that I was able to study these things without being judged because I was a policy person and didn’t have the very basic knowledge of physics that others had. The experience of PPNT made technical discussions less frightening and more accessible to me.

I remember especially the role play that Linton Brooks ran. At the time, I was consumed by the question of nuclear terrorism—non-state actors gaining access to nuclear material. The role play was about how you would extract information from non-state actors that might actually have access to nuclear material: how would you think about managing a nuclear power plant? What would be the security protocols? It was a very eye-opening experience because it showed me [that] nuclear security is a lot about technology, but it is also especially about humans. It’s about the competence that humans need to possess in order to manage that technology.

At the last PPNT bootcamp, we had representatives from six countries outside the U.S. enrolled. You’re right that it creates a great learning environment.

Another central part of IGCC’s mission is research to policy impact, and you have led multiple initiatives in your career that focus on leveraging academic knowledge to inform better policies. Why do you think this type of work is so important? Do institutions like IGCC still have a role to play?

Yes! After the [PPNT] boot camp, I ended up in three roles that were about bridging the gap between research and policy. My very first job was at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I was the director of global security, and the entire point was to leverage what the academy fellows were producing, and then distill them into policy recommendations for policymakers. At Harvard, this is also what I do most of the time, this bridge-building role.

So why is it important? One thing I say often to my students is that, in policy, there is a lot of emphasis on policy recommendations, policy solutions. But if you don’t get the questions right, the policies that you are going to design are going to be pointless or misplaced.

Let me give you an example. In Europe today, there is a deep push to strengthen deterrence against Russia through hard capabilities and military defense procurement. There is almost no discussion about what deterrence actually means. Research doesn’t immediately provide the right policy recommendations; it helps policymakers understand how to frame questions. This is particularly important in being able to create the right strategy with China, a country vastly different from the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation today. China comes from a completely different strategic mindset than the West and Russia. This means that concepts we take for granted like “stability” or “transparency” have different meanings in China. Research can help illuminate these differences.

I also think that spaces like IGCC and the Belfer Center have become even more important because of changes in the more traditional political science departments. Some disciplines, like political science, have grown increasingly theoretical and quantitative and are in many ways detached from policy conversations. The policy space is now being filled by research institutes like yours and mine that are able to reflect both the academic depth and the policy urgency.

Do you have any personal stories of getting your research into the hands of a decision-maker, or having policy impact?

The biggest impact I’ve had was when I produced the edited volume Insider Threats through the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We convened experts on nuclear security to question some of the premises that governed the U.S. approach to nuclear security at a time when concerns over non-state actors getting access to nuclear material was growing.

One premise was that strengthening physical protection of nuclear facilities was the most important strategy to prevent terrorists from gaining access to nuclear material. The Insider Threats work challenged that premise by arguing that the threat can also come from the inside. You can end up having staff who might be radicalized, and that can turn into a huge threat to the facility, even if the external protections are solid.

Insider Threats was adopted by the Livermore National Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory as one of their training manuals.

I also have done a lot of work recently in Italy. I’ve always believed that it was completely absurd for a country like Italy to be the largest tactical nuclear weapon repository of NATO, and not have a deep understanding of nuclear deterrence. For two years, since Italy chaired the G7, I’ve set up a series of strategic dialogues within Italy to improve the knowledge and expertise of the Italian policymakers on nuclear weapons. A lot of this work is now paying off because there is more understanding of nuclear weapons and deterrence, that is very helpful, especially with Russia.

The final impact has been in the education sector. I lead a research team, but I also am responsible for fellowship programs. We have had incredible success educating and nurturing people who have ended up working in laboratories, in government, and in nuclear policy in the U.S. and NATO and in other countries.

With the recent expiration of the New START treaty, what do you think the future of arms control holds?

Let me give you a couple of ideas that I think are a bit non-conventional. First, until a few years ago, nuclear risks were so intangible, that nobody was really taking into consideration the reality of a potential war with nuclear weapons. Today, more people are convinced that nuclear risks are in fact real, and that is creating a critical mass that wants to work in earnest towards de-escalation and diplomacy.

Second, there is a lot of interconnectedness today that you didn’t have during the Cold War. China and the United States are deeply interconnected. Third and related, you are seeing the rise of a third category of actors that is emerging gradually, but is really important, which is what at the Belfer Center we call the middle powers. You have seen Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, South Africa—countries that for a long time were pushed around by great powers and now feel they have a stake in the stability of the world order. You have the creation of trans-regional networks between South America and East Asia that make power centers more diffused. This is really important because what we were missing for a long time were bridge builders who were able to organize dialogue.

These three dynamics make me believe that there are opportunities to de-escalate and potentially create the conditions for nuclear restraint in the future.

I don’t believe, however, that there will be any significant arms control opportunity per se in the future. There will be opportunities for dialogue. There will be opportunities for unilateral actions of political goodwill. But I don’t see the infrastructure of arms control returning to the way it was in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

We will have to live in a world that has fewer tangible commitments from states. In addition, actors like technology companies are clearly emerging as a new power center. The way in which they will be able to influence international political and security dynamics is still unclear, but they are already having an impact that cannot be dismissed.

What advice would you give to young scholars who want to enter into this field?

The scholar of the future will have a command of at least one or two foreign languages. Knowing Mandarin, knowing Russian, knowing Farsi will be very important. The idea that we can get by with only English will limit enormously our ability to access important debates in these countries.

Number two is to have competence in understanding the technologies that will impact the future of the field. The integration of artificial intelligence in nuclear, for example. The quantum computing question vis-à-vis nuclear deterrence.

Third, and this is perhaps the most difficult of all, I feel that the field is still in a very silly way divided among three communities: the nuclear deterrence community, the arms control and nuclear restraint community, and the nuclear nonproliferation community. This is just silly, because the dynamics in each camp all influence each other.

My concern is that, in order to secure funding, there is a push towards becoming extreme and fundamentalist about nuclear deterrence. There is an idea that embracing arms control is weak. But nuclear deterrence without guardrails and exit strategies is just pure madness. So I hope that future scholars will engage with all three fields.