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Event Recap: Human Rights and Refugees in Europe

 

Panel: Human Rights and Refugees in EuropePictured: Kenneth Scheve, Jenny Martinez, Emily Arnold-Fernàndez, and James Cavallaro.
Amidst the reimposition of border controls in some Schengen states, daily reports of new arrivals to Europe, and the marked rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric, the European refugee crisis poses significant challenges to Europe. In her January visit to Stanford, Founder and Executive Director of Asylum Access, Emily Arnold-Fernàndez discussed the crisis in the context of the global plight of refugees. She noted that with an estimated 20 million refugees worldwide, and an additional estimated 40 million internally displaced persons, we are witnessing the largest population displacement since World War II. Arnold-Fernàndez explained that the rights of refugees and state obligations to refugees are enshrined in international law. In addition to the protections against being returned to an unsafe country of origin ("non-refoulement"), she noted that the Refugee Convention provides refugees with many rights on par with "the most favorable treatment accorded to nationals of a foreign country" and, in some cases, on par with those granted to nationals of the receiving state. These rights include the right of association, access to courts, access to wage-earning and self employment, and the freedom of movement. She explained, however, that states frequently fail to provide many of these rights to refugees, something Arnold-Fernàndez attributes in part to insufficient enforcement. As a result, where refugees are routinely prohibited from participating in the first country of arrival, they are likely to move on to alternative destinations. This, in part, is driving the current influx of refugees to Europe. This reality, according to Arnold-Fernàndez, elucidates at least one method of both assisting refugees and alleviating the flows of refugees to Europe: promoting policy change to ensure that refugee rights are protected and upheld in countries of first arrival. This approach, she explained, is in marked contrast to the predominant approaches to refugee assistance, which include humanitarian aid and development solutions (such as on the job training). While the first is not a long-term solution, the second is only likely to be effective if refugees are first permitted to participate in society.

Following the talk, The Europe Center Director, Kenneth Scheve, led a discussion featuring commentary by Stanford Law professors James Cavallaro and Jenny Martinez. Cavallaro spoke of the need to think more broadly about human migration and the potential deleterious effects of state immigration controls on both human rights and security. Martinez noted the tension between the clarity of the non-refoulement principle and the ambiguity of safe third country principles, and questioned the ability of legal norms to compel states to change policy or reallocate resources. To watch this event in full, please visit our website.


Featured Faculty Research: Cécile Alduy

We would like to introduce you to some of The Europe Center's faculty affiliates. Our featured faculty member this month is Cécile Alduy, who is an Associate Professor of French literature and culture and the Director of the French and Italian Department at Stanford University.

Cécile AlduyCécile earned her Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Reims in France in 2003 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. Her research interests include the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance, far right ideology and rhetoric, the relations between cultural, literary, and medical discourses on gender and the body in early modern Europe, poetry and poetics, narrative forms and their discontent, French cinema, and contemporary French literature. Cécile's most recent book, Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste [Marine Le Pen taken to her words. Decoding the new national front discourse], co-authored with Stephanie Wahnich, examines the rhetoric used by the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, and compares it to that of her father and former National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Casual observation of far right politics in France suggests that there has been a significant change in the National Front program following the 2011 leadership change to Marine Le Pen from Jean-Marie Le Pen and his 2015 ouster from the party. Marine Le Pen has taken great efforts to distance herself from her father, who infamously and repeatedly characterized gas chambers as "a detail in the history of World War II." The party has also enjoyed increasing electoral support in recent years. Against this backdrop, the book examines two fundamental questions: what is Marine Le Pen actually saying, and why does her speech resonate with French society today? To answer these questions, Alduy and Wahnich have analyzed over 500 speeches given by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen. This analysis reveals that there is significant continuity between the political agenda and ideological content of the Le Pens. In contrast with her father's blatantly radical speech, however, the younger Le Pen employs careful phraseology, replete with allusions, ambiguities, and double entendres, in order to "de-demonize" the party and make its platform appear more palatable to a modern French audience. In spite of programmatic continuity, this rhetorical rebranding appears to have facilitated greater electoral support for the National Front. Marine Le Pen prise aux mots has received significant media coverage, including a feature in Le Monde [article in French] and on NPR. In her ongoing research, supported in part by The Europe Center, Cécile is building upon the methodologies devised for Marine Le Pen prise aux mots and examining the development of political discourse of French political parties across the ideological spectrum in the period leading up to the 2017 presidential election. The initial results of this study will be published by Seuil in 2017 in a book preliminarily entitled Les Mots des présidentiables. Sémantique d'une triangulaire annoncée [The words of presidential candidates. Semantics of a three-candidate race]. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this research.

Publication Details: Alduy, Cécile, and Stephanie Wahnich. 2015. Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage de nouveau discours frontiste. Paris: Seuil.


Featured Graduate Student Research: Camilla Mazzucato

We would like to introduce you to some of the graduate students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured graduate student this month is Camilla Mazzucato (Anthropology). Camilla is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Before beginning her Ph.D. studies at Stanford, Camilla earned a BA and an MA in Archaeology from the University of Bologna and an MSc in GIS and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology from the University College London.

Camilla MazzucatoCamilla is an anthropologist who is interested in using network analysis to examine the social arrangements "mega-sites" - large settlements that originated with small, settled hunter-gatherer communities - during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) and Pottery Neolithic periods. In her current research, Camilla is evaluating these social arrangements with new evidence from Çatalhöyük, a dense agglomeration of mudbrick houses occupied for 1,400 years and located in modern-day Turkey. Approximately the size of a town, Çatalhöyük lacks many of the characteristics of a modern town, including specialized areas, communal buildings, and centralized functions. Moreover, the spatial arrangement differs significantly from other PPNB settlements. In summer 2015, Camilla conducted field research, partially funded by The Europe Center, at the site of Çatalhöyük. During her four weeks at the site, she explored ways of modeling the site's networks by collecting data focused on patterns of similarity of material culture features. This data will be used to examine the site's internal organization as well as the arrangements of social relationships therein. In addition, she spent time studying some of the recently-excavated buildings, using architectural features to study ties among entities.

Reminder: The Europe Center will be accepting applications for the Graduate Student Grand Competition March 28, 2016 - April 15, 2016. For more information please visit our website.


The Europe Center Programs: Minor in European Studies

As previously announced, The Europe Center and Stanford Global Studies are offering a minor in Global Studies with a concentration in European Studies. The minor is designed for undergraduate students who have an interdisciplinary interest in the history, culture, politics, societies, and institutions of Europe, past and present. The requirements of the minor include coursework, advanced proficiency in a modern European language, and a capstone experience such as a research paper with a focus on European Studies, completion of an overseas study program in Europe, or completion of an overseas internship in Europe.

This quarter, Christophe Crombez, Consulting Professor at The Europe Center, is offering the minor's core seminar class: Introduction to European Studies. In this survey course, students are introduced to important themes in the study of European politics, economics, and culture. The course begins with a discussion of European identity and culture, focusing on what makes Europe unique and how recent history has shaped this identity. In the second section, students analyze European politics by learning about Europe's predominant political institutions - parliamentary government and proportional representation electoral systems - and examining the effect of these institutions on public policy. The course then turns to the economy and understanding the challenges and opportunities that European economies face today. The fourth section focuses on the European Union, including its history, functioning, and policies. In the final section, the class discusses transatlantic relations.

We invite you to visit our website for more information about the Minor in European Studies.


Visiting Student Researcher: Lina Eriksson

Lina ErikssonThe Europe Center is pleased to introduce to you Lina Eriksson, a Fulbright Scholar who is visiting Stanford University from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and the Center for Natural Disaster Science (CNDS), Sweden. Lina holds an MA in Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolutions, Asylum Immigration and Integration from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MSc in Political Sciences, Economics and International Development from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. She is broadly interested in the politics of natural disasters. In her dissertation, entitled Natural Disasters and National Politics, Lina examines the electoral effects of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and the 2005 Storm Gudrun on Swedish parliamentary elections. Part of this research, forthcoming in Electoral Studies, finds that the Swedish Social Democratic Party's poor crisis response to Storm Gudrun resulted in a significant decrease in support for the Social Democratic Party in the affected regions, leading to the largest change in partisan support in Swedish history. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this research.

Publication Details: Eriksson, Lina M. 2016. "Winds of Change: Voter Blame and Storm Gudrun in the 2006 Swedish Parliamentary Election." Electoral Studies 41(1): 129-142.


The Europe Center Sponsored Events

February 18-19, 2016 
8:00AM - 5:00PM 
Workshop: Heritage Bureaucracies: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives 
Stanford Archaeology Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Archaeology Center, Cantor Arts Center, Department of Anthropology, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and The Mediterranean Studies Forum.
Please visit our website for more information.

March 28, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Adam Tooze, Columbia University 
NATO Expansion and the Swap Lines: the Unspoken Geopolitics of the Financial Crisis in Europe, 2007-2013
Reuben Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall East 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 24, 2016.

April 25, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Torben Iversen, Harvard University 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Save the Date: April 28-29, 2016 
9:00AM - 5:00PM 
Conference: Networks of European Enlightenment 
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, the French Cultural Workshop, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

May 9, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Monica Martinez-Bravo, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros (CEMFI), Madrid 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

May 16, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Daniel Stegmueller, University of Mannheim 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

European Security Initiative Events

March 3, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Vygaudas Ušackas, European Union Ambassador to Russia 
Russia and the West: Handling the Clash of World Views 
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 1, 2016.

March 10, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University 
Resurrected? The Domestic Determinants of Russia's Conduct Abroad 
Room E008 (Ground Floor Conference Room), Encina Hall East 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 9, 2016.

 

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After having witnessed the beginning of the Arab Spring in December 2010, and the ouster of former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, Tunisia went through a period of intense political turbulence, including a rapid succession of governments and a paralyzing political gridlock in the summer of 2013. The Tunisian national dialogue quartet, which represented the major stakeholders in civil society and is the recipient of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, paved the way for a technocratic government that helped bring the country’s democratic transition back on track. After discussing the conditions that led to these developments, this presentation will focus on how the technocratic government managed the challenges of organizing the country’s first fully democratic presidential and legislative elections, re-establishing security, and restoring economic fundamentals. Finally, the presentation will discuss the prospects for democratic and economic development in Tunisia, one year after the appointment of the government that resulted from the 2014 elections.

 

Speaker Bio

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Kamel Ben Naceur is the Director for Sustainability, Technology, and Outlooks at the International Energy Agency and previously served as Minister of Industry, Energy and Mines of Tunisia in a government that was tasked in 2014 with leading the country’s first fully democratic elections and resorting its economic fundamentals. He has more than thirty-four years of experience and knowledge in the energy and industry sectors around the world in both public and private service. Mr. Ben Naceur served in various leading positions at the energy multinational Schlumberger, including Chief Economist in Paris, President of the Schlumberger technology organization in Rio de Janeiro, and Senior Advisor and Vice President for technology. He has served on several boards of international businesses and organizations, and is the co-author of thirteen books and more than 120 articles. A French-Tunisian dual national, Mr. Ben Naceur is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Normale Supérieure of France, with an Agrégation de Mathématiques.

CISAC Central Conference Room
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra St
Stanford, CA 94305

Kamel Ben Naceur Director for Sustainability, Technology, and Outlooks International Energy Agency
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As part of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy speaker series, Director of The Markaz: Resource Center Mona Damluji examined the impact of the US-led occupation of Iraq on sectarian-based urban segregation in Baghdad. In a talk held on February 3, 2016, she argued that the sectarian-based segregation that has shaped urbanism in Baghdad is a direct outcome of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. The "post"-occupied city is characterized by the normalization of concrete “security” blast-walls that choke urban circulation and sever communities. The notorious blast walls -- or "Bremer Walls" -- perpetuate and intensify conditions of urban segregation. As the summer's surge of anti-government protests in Baghdad demonstrate, the short-sighted nature of this militarized solution to sectarian-based violence has proven to be a superficial and unsustainable fix to the deep dilemma of sectarian segregation codified in Iraq’s political system. The presentation also examined the context for recent public dissent on the streets of Baghdad through the story of the capital city's fragmentation between 2006 and 2007.


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Under Secretary Sewall will deliver remarks on Countering Violent Extremism, the U.S. Government’s comprehensive approach for preventing the spread of ISIL and emergence of new terrorist threats. The Under Secretary will describe how the evolution of violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks necessitates a “whole of society” approach to prevent people from aligning with terrorist movements and ideologies in the first place. Drawing on recent travel to Indonesia, India, and Egypt, the Under Secretary will describe the vital role of actors outside government in this approach, including women, youth, religious leaders, businesses, and researchers. She will also elaborate on new steps the U.S. Government is taking to intensify its CVE efforts around the world. The Under Secretary will also take questions from the audience.

Speaker bio

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Dr. Sarah Sewall is the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights at the U.S. State Department, and is a longtime advocate for advancing civilian security and human rights around the world. Dr. Sewall was sworn in on February 20, 2014. She serves concurrently as the Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues. Over the previous decade, Dr. Sewall taught at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she served as Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and directed the Program on National Security and Human Rights.

Dr. Sewall has extensive experience partnering with the U.S. armed forces around civilian security. At the Kennedy School, she launched the MARO (Mass Atrocities Response Operations Project) to assist the U.S. military with contingency planning to protect civilians from large-scale violence. She was a member of the Defense Policy Board and served as the Minerva Chair at the Naval War College in 2012. She also led several research studies of U.S. military operations for the Department of Defense and served as the inaugural Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance in the Clinton Administration. Prior joining the executive branch, Dr. Sewall served for six years as the Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to U.S. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell and earned a Ph.D at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

This event is co-sponsored by Stanford in Government and CISAC

 

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Dr. Sarah Sewall Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights U. S. State Department
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On Wednesday, February 24, CDDRL, in partnership with the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), hosted...

Posted by Stanford Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) on Friday, February 19, 2016

On Wednesday, February 17, The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford, The Center for International Governance Innovation, and the Research Advisory Network of the Global Commission on Internet Governance will present an all-day conference entitled "New Alliances in Cybersecurity, Human Rights and Internet Governance." The conference will discuss the challenges of creating a regime of internet governance that pays attention to security and human rights in the digital context. 

Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister & Foreign Minister of Sweden, and Chair of the Global Commission on Internet Governance (GCIG) and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz are the scheduled keynote speakers. Other speakers for the event include Michael McFaul (Director FSI), Eileen Donahoe (Human Rights Watch/FSI), Sir David Omand (former Director, GCHQ, UK), Michael Chertoff (former Secretary of Homeland Security, USA) and Marietje Schaake (Member of the European Parliament.)

 

Admission will be closed at 120 guests - only those who have sent an rsvp will be admitted. 

 

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616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305

Carl Bildt Former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Sweden Keynote speaker Global Commission on Internet Governance
Marc Andreessen Founder, Andreessen Horowitz Keynote speaker Founder, Andreessen Horowitz
Conferences

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
 

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Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2015-2016
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Julia Dahlvik is a sociologist and interpreter. She earned her PhD in Sociology in 2014 as an external fellow to the Initiative College "Empowerment through Human Rights" (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Human Rights) at the University of Vienna. Her thesis investigated everyday professional and bureaucratic practices of administrating asylum applications in Austria and was honored with the Dissertation Prize for Migration Research of the Austrian Academy of Science and the Dissertation Prize of the Austrian Sociological Association. She is currently editing her thesis into a publication Inside Asylum Bureaucracy with IMISCOE Springer.

Julia currently holds a lecturer position at the University of Vienna and is a project researcher at the Austrian Academy of Science in a project on "Interethnic Coexistence in European Cities". Before that, she coordinated a project on "Health Literacy of Migrants in Austria" at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Health Promotion Research. From 2009 to 2014, she coordinated the "Platform on Migration and Integration Research" at the University of Vienna. Julia is the local program coordinator for the Research Committee Sociology of Law for the ISA Forum 2016.

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Beatriz Magaloni, director of CDDRL's Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov), and Zaira Razu, a research associate and project manager at PovGov, recently released a piece in Current History on Mexico's ongoing drug war and the rise of violence. Although democratic structures have helped improve certain freedoms throughout the country in the past decade, institutionalized injustice is slowly jeopardizing stability and security for much of the Mexican population.

Click here to read their piece.

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drug war Diego Fernández/Agencia de Fotografía AP México
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To mark five years since the onset of the January 25 Revolution, five Egypt scholars examined the evolving political landscape in Egypt as part of a panel titled “The Containment of Politics in Egypt,” organized by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD). The panel featured Stanford Historian Joel Beinin, Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford Lisa Blaydes, ARD Visiting Scholar Amr Hamzawy, Executive Director of the Tahrir Institute on Middle East Policy Nancy Okail, and ARD Associate Director Hesham Sallam. The discussion revolved around a number of key issues, including the recent legislative elections, the cohesion of the ruling coalition, the regime’s responses to various economic challenges, and the impact of state repression on spaces for political contestation and resistance.

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After five years of political support for the regime of Bashar Al-Asad in its war against the opposition, Russia intervened militarily on his behalf in September 2015 and suddenly later this year Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Syria. While Moscow claims that its intervention was aimed at destroying ISIS and other terrorists groups, but the vast majority of its air strikes seem to target the moderate armed opposition, which has fought ISIS on the ground. This presentation assesses the outcome of Russia’s intervention, arguing that it neither achieved its goal of destroying ISIS nor did it tip the balance favor of Asad. Instead, the intervention had resulted in the killing of Syrian civilians, complicated the conflict in Syria, and constrained the prospects for a political solution by empowering Asad on the ground.

Speaker Bio

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Radwan Ziadeh is a senior analyst at the Arab Center in Washington D.C. He is the founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies in Syria and co-founder and executive director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, and Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) in Washington D.C. Ziadeh was the managing editor of the Transitional Justice Project in the Arab World, and the Head of the Syrian Commission for Transitional Justice, which was established on November 14, 2013 by the Syrian Interim Government. He was also involved in the Syrian political opposition. He was elected in October 2011 as director of the Foreign Relations Office of the Syrian National Council until he resigned from the position in November 2012. He wrote more than twenty books in English and Arabic. His most recent book is Syria's Role in a Changing Middle East: The Syrian-Israeli Peace Talks (I.B.Tauris, 2016). Ziadeh holds a D.D.S in Dentistry from Damascus University, Diploma in international Human Rights Law from College of Law at the American University in Washington D.C, an MA in Democracy and Governance from Georgetown University in Washington D.C, and an MS in Finance from Kogod School of Business at the American University in Washington D.C.


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CISAC Central Conference Room
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra St
​Stanford, CA 94305

Radwan Ziadeh Arab Center, Washington, DC
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Abstract

After nearly five years since the start of the uprising, Syria finds itself divided and embattled, with no end in sight. More significantly, more than half of the Syrian population is displaced and the death toll surpassed 300,000 by all counts. The Syrian tragedy persists and, more than any other case of mass uprising in the region, continues to be shrouded in political power-plays and contradictions at the local, regional, and international levels. Defined increasingly by an absence of a clear favorable outcome, considering existing parties to the conflict, the logic of the lesser evil reigns supreme. This lecture is an attempt to understand the roots and dynamics of the tragic Syrian uprising, with particular attention to its background and to the recent Russian intervention.

Speaker Bio

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Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, and is Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011). Haddad is currently editing a volume on Teaching the Middle East After the Arab Uprisings, a book manuscript on pedagogical and theoretical approaches. His most recent books include two co-edited volumes: Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012) and Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Haddad serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the critically acclaimed film series, Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. More recently, he directed a film on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The "Other" Threat. Haddad is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report. He is the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for five organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East and Founding Editor of Tadween Publishing.

 

This event is co-sponsored by The Markaz: Resource Center at Stanford University.


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CISAC Central Conference Room
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra St
Stanford, CA 94305

Bassam Haddad Associate Professor George Mason University
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