Stanford University

Society

FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.

The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.

Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.

Some Humility About Transparency

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Daphne Keller
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I am a huge fan of transparency about platform content moderation. I’ve considered it a top policy priority for years, and written about it in detail (with Paddy Leerssen, who also wrote this great piece about recommendation algorithms and transparency). I sincerely believe that without it, we are unlikely to correctly diagnose current problems or arrive at wise legal solutions.

So it pains me to admit that I don’t really know what “transparency” I’m asking for. I don’t think many other people do, either. Researchers and public interest advocates around the world can agree that more transparency is better. But, aside from people with very particular areas of interest (like political advertising), almost no one has a clear wish list. What information is really important? What information is merely nice to have? What are the trade-offs involved?

That imprecision is about to become a problem, though it’s a good kind of problem to have. A moment of real political opportunity is at hand. Lawmakers in the US, Europe, and elsewhere are ready to make some form of transparency mandatory. Whatever specific legal requirements they create will have huge consequences. The data, content, or explanations they require platforms to produce will shape our future understanding of platform operations, and our ability to respond — as consumers, as advocates, or as democracies. Whatever disclosures the laws don’t require, may never happen.

It’s easy to respond to this by saying “platforms should track all the possible data, we’ll see what’s useful later!” Some version of this approach might be justified for the very biggest “gatekeeper” or “systemically important” platforms. Of course, making Facebook or Google save all that data would be somewhat ironic, given the trouble they’ve landed in by storing similar not-clearly-needed data about their users in the past. (And the more detailed data we store about particular takedowns, the likelier it is to be personally identifiable.)

For any platform, though, we should recognize that the new practices required for transparency reporting comes at a cost. That cost might include driving platforms to adopt simpler, blunter content rules in their Terms of Service. That would reduce their expenses in classifying or explaining decisions, but presumably lead to overly broad or narrow content prohibitions. It might raise the cost of adding “social features” like user comments enough that some online businesses, like retailers or news sites, just give up on them. That would reduce some forms of innovation, and eliminate useful information for Internet users. For small and midsized platforms, transparency obligations (like other expenses related to content moderation) might add yet another reason to give up on competing with today’s giants, and accept an acquisition offer from an incumbent that already has moderation and transparency tools. Highly prescriptive transparency obligations might also drive de facto standardization and homogeneity in platform rules, moderation practices, and features.

None of these costs provides a reason to give up on transparency — or even to greatly reduce our expectations. But all of them are reasons to be thoughtful about what we ask for. It would be helpful if we could better quantify these costs, or get a handle on what transparency reporting is easier and harder to do in practice.

I’ve made a (very in the weeds) list of operational questions about transparency reporting, to illustrate some issues that are likely to arise in practice. I think detailed examples like these are helpful in thinking through both which kinds of data matter most, and how much precision we need within particular categories. For example, I personally want to know with great precision how many government orders a platform received, how it responded, and whether any orders led to later judicial review. But to me it seems OK to allow some margin of error for platforms that don’t have standardized tracking and queuing tools, and that as a result might modestly mis-count TOS takedowns (either by absolute numbers or percent).

I’ll list that and some other recommendations below. But these “recommendations” are very tentative. I don’t know enough to have a really clear set of preferences yet. There are things I wish I could learn from technologists, activists, and researchers first. The venues where those conversations would ordinarily happen — and, importantly, where observers from very different backgrounds and perspectives could have compared the issues they see, and the data they most want — have been sadly reduced for the past year.

So here is my very preliminary list:

  • Transparency mandates should be flexible enough to accommodate widely varying platform practices and policies. Any de facto push toward standardization should be limited to the very most essential data.
  • The most important categories of data are probably the main ones listed in the DSA: number of takedowns, number of appeals, number of successful appeals. But as my list demonstrates, those all can become complicated in practice.
  • It’s worth taking the time to get legal transparency mandates right. That may mean delegating exact transparency rules to regulatory agencies in some countries, or conducting studies prior to lawmaking in others.
  • Once rules are set, lawmakers should be very reluctant to move the goalposts. If a platform (especially a smaller one) invests in rebuilding its content moderation tools to track certain categories of data, it should not have to overhaul those tools soon because of changed legal requirements.
  • We should insist on precise data in some cases, and tolerate more imprecision in others (based on the importance of the issue, platform capacity, etc.). And we should take the time to figure out which is which.
  • Numbers aren’t everything. Aggregate data in transparency reports ultimately just tell us what platforms themselves think is going on. To understand what mistakes they make, or what biases they may exhibit, independent researchers need to see the actual content involved in takedown decisions. (This in turn raises a slough of issues about storing potentially unlawful content, user privacy and data protection, and more.)

It’s time to prioritize. Researchers and civil society should assume we are operating with a limited transparency “budget,” which we must spend wisely — asking for the information we can best put to use, and factoring in the cost. We need better understanding of both research needs and platform capabilities to do this cost-benefit analysis well. I hope that the window of political opportunity does not close before we manage to do that.

Daphne Keller

Daphne Keller

Director of the Program on Platform Regulation
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Q&A with Daphne Keller of the Program on Platform Regulation

Keller explains some of the issues currently surrounding platform regulation
Q&A with Daphne Keller of the Program on Platform Regulation
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In a new blog post, Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Cyber Policy Center, looks at the need for transparency when it comes to content moderation and asks, what kind of transparency do we really want?

Facades of Youth Engagement in Sisi’s Egypt

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Introduction and Contribution


Large parts of the Arab world were convulsed by mass protests between 2010 and 2012. The protests were fueled by decades of authoritarian rule and economic mismanagement by corrupt political parties and entrenched bureaucrats. Many of the region’s autocrats saw this as evidence that prior ways of “managing” politics — such as through unfree elections or parliamentary debate among relatively loyal politicians — were no longer reliable. Indeed, elections could serve as spaces to mobilize collective opposition while debate could quickly turn chaotic, stalemated, or critical of the autocrat. 

Accordingly, Arab autocrats became ever more reliant on two broad strategies. The first is repression: brutalizing, surveilling, jailing, and exiling their opponents, both real and suspected. The second is a more tightly controlled kind of management: creating parallel political institutions to produce a façade of genuine political engagement. This second strategy has been especially clear under Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi (2014-) in his embrace of youth-led propaganda initiatives.

In “Youth and the Reinvention of State-managed Politics in Sisi’s Egypt,” Hesham Sallam shows how what he terms the “New Youth Project” has helped Sisi bypass elections and parliaments, groom a new class of pro-military civilian leaders, and portray his regime as modern and inclusive. These projects include highly choreographed youth forums and conferences, organizations to build support for his regime within political parties, and publications by purportedly independent national security experts. As a consequence, Sisi has effectively co-opted key segments of Egyptian youth in hopes of avoiding the fate of his predecessors. Sallam carefully unpacks the New Youth Project’s history, varied functions, and embeddedness within Sisi’s domestic and foreign policy agenda. 

Background to the New Youth Project


At the time of the Arab Uprisings, Egypt was ruled by President Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011). His National Democratic Party and cadre of corrupt bureaucrats played a key role in igniting the public outrage that led to his downfall. Mubarak was succeeded by the civilian President Mohamed Morsi, who then-General Sisi ousted in a military coup after just over a year in power. For Sallam, these years were formative for Sisi, convincing him that ruling parties and entrenched “political classes” were serious impediments to regime survival, as was cooperation between civilian and military authorities. As such, Sisi did not build a party of his own. Yet he understood the need to groom new cadres and deepen his administration’s legitimacy.

Sallam dates the New Youth Project to 2014, when the Nasser Military Academy began organizing programs to socialize young civilian leaders in military propaganda. The following year, Sisi founded a Presidential Youth Leadership Program that holds regular forums. Meanwhile, the regime tacitly supported the youth-led Nation’s Future Party until it was internally overtaken by Mubarak-era elites. Sisi responded by creating a Coordination Committee of Parties’ Youth Leaders and Politicians, helping the regime build its influence within various parties while giving it the appearance of cross-partisan support.

Functions of the New Youth Project


Sisi’s efforts to build parallel institutions, groom pro-military civilian leaders, and construct a façade of participation can be helpfully illustrated via Sallam’s examination of the National Youth Conference (NYC). NYC is a regime-led forum where young Sisi supporters gather to discuss public policy and make recommendations to the president. 

NYC is an extravagant endeavor, involving fireside chats and Q&As between Sisi and Egyptian youths, TED-style talks by young entrepreneurs, screenings of documentaries touting the regime’s initiatives, and mock simulations of official dialogue. NYC moderators raise (likely prepared) proposals to Sisi, which he promises to take into consideration. These activities give authoritarian Egypt an air of democratic accountability: the president is responsive, public policy is effective, and the state is open and transparent. Importantly, the regime also uses NYC to respond to episodes of mass dissatisfaction. For example, during an economic downturn in 2017, NYC featured presentations justifying Sisi’s monetary policies and efforts to counter price hikes. 

NYC also serves as a reliable forum for the grooming of pro-military civilian leaders. This complements existing military training programs for bureaucrats, journalists, and university employees, which have become de facto prerequisites for government employment. The conferences consistently uphold the military’s view of national security. In 2019, for example, the regime faced protests sparked by a former contractor who accused Sisi and his inner circle of corruption; accordingly, the year’s NYC centered on how terrorists use misinformation and fake news to undermine Egypt. Such narratives and propaganda would likely be less persuasive in an electoral or parliamentary forum than in the carefully managed NYC.

During the conference, young speakers tell the audience about their self-improvement or entrepreneurial success — the implication being that anyone can be successful in Sisi’s Egypt. Meanwhile, presentations filled with data and statistics provide a sense of scientific credibility. One presentation sought to convey that NYC had been a resounding democratic success because it was attended by Egyptians across gender, age, and geography; yet no mention was made of the exclusion of opposition perspectives or those regularly victimized by state repression. 

Finally, the Egyptian Center for Strategic Studies has extended the regime’s efforts. Led by former security officials, the self-proclaimed independent think tank provides ostensibly expert analyses linking regime opponents, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, to terrorism. Ultimately, Sallam shows that Sisi’s youth project is less about empowering young Egyptians than about creating new channels through which the regime can exercise authoritarian control.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

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Are the Streets Still Talking? Protests and Evolving Repression in the Middle East

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Are the Streets Still Talking? Protests and Evolving Repression in the Middle East

Although the Middle East/SWANA region encompasses a diverse range of authoritarian regimes, protests are surprisingly common across much of it. Mass mobilizations such as the Arab uprisings and Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement attract international attention, yet less is known about the thousands of smaller protests that precede and follow them. This talk will examine patterns of protest across the region and explore how repression is changing in the age of mass surveillance and artificial intelligence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jillian Schwedler is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for the Middle East at Brandeis University. She has served in elected leadership positions for the American Political Science Association and the Middle East Studies Association. She has been a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and is currently Chair of the Editorial Committee for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), publishers of Middle East Report.

Prof. Schwedler’s books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (2006), Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (with Laleh Khalili, 2010), and The Political Science of the Middle East (with Marc Lynch and Sean Yom, 2022).  Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including World Politics, Comparative Politics, Contention, and Social Movement Studies.  Her most recent book, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (2022) was recipient of best book awards from the National Endowment for Democracy and the Middle East Institute.

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Jillian Schwedler Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College Presenter City University of New York’s Hunter College
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Monday, November 16, 4:00-5:15 pm. Click here to register.

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Leonid Gozman — After Putin, After the War: Russia’s Next Chapter

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LeonidGozmanSeminar11.18.26

Neither Vladimir Putin nor the war in Ukraine will last forever. What political order is likely to follow, and what would it mean for Russia, Ukraine and the West?

Leonid Gozman, a longtime Russian opposition politician and political psychologist, will examine the scenarios that may unfold. A Ukrainian defeat, he argues, would likely produce a new war almost immediately. The end of Putin’s rule poses its own risks, and the transition could prove more dangerous than the present. Yet Gozman contends that a post-Putin Russia would probably be better for its citizens and the international community, even if members of Putin’s circle remain in power.

That transition, he suggests, may open a narrow window for Russia to resume a path of normal political and economic development. This discussion will consider what such a path would require, what forces could close it, and what role domestic actors and Western governments might play in shaping the outcome.

The event will be moderated by Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Satre Family Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Stanford affiliates are invited to attend in person, and all others may join online via Zoom; registration is required.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Leonid Gozman was the former president of the Union of Right Forces and former co-chairman of the Right Cause Party (2008–2011). From 2008 to 2013, he served as director of humanitarian projects at RUSNANO, a state-owned enterprise that commercializes innovations in nanotechnology, and from 1999 to 2008, he was executive board member and representative for governmental and NGO relations at Unified Energy System of Russia (RAO UES). An active participant in Russia’s democratic movement who has served as political advisor to Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, he is also the author of eight books and is a lecturer at Moscow State University. He was previously a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and professor of psychology and Russian area studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and was a visiting fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC.

Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner

Only those with an active Stanford ID and access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. Others may attend virtually, via Zoom.

Registration required.

Leonid Gozman
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Special Seminar with Leonid Gozman

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The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception

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What makes someone Black in American society today? From Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity to Joe Biden’s claim that hesitant Black voters “ain’t Black,” American politics frequently brings questions of racial authenticity and belonging to the surface. Yet political science often approaches race as a fixed attribute, rather than a social construction. Here, we seek to understand how Americans define blackness in social and political life. Using a conjoint experiment with a racially diverse sample that includes Black, White, and mixed-race Black-White respondents, we evaluate how ascribed and acquired traits influence perceptions of blackness. The results show that inherited characteristics—particularly parentage and skin tone, which are the strongest determinants of racial classification—play a central role, yet sociopolitical cues such as partisanship, neighborhood context, and spousal race also influence racial classification. Using a continuous measure, we also show that respondents make graded assessments of blackness rather than purely binary classifications, with some individuals perceived as more Black than others. Black respondents are more likely than White respondents to classify a broader set of profiles as Black, consistent with a more inclusive understanding of racial membership; however, they also place greater emphasis on shared political identity. These findings clarify how racial categories are socially constructed and why that construction carries real political and social consequences.

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Sharan Grewal — The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy: Populism, Polarization, and the Perils of Power-Sharing

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The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy: Populism, Polarization, and the Perils of Power-Sharing

After the Arab Spring, Tunisia emerged as the one success story to transition to democracy, winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for its focus on inclusion and power-sharing. How, then, did its democracy collapse in 2021?

Drawing on unique interviews with senior Tunisian officials, alongside three nationally representative surveys of the population, The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy points to an overemphasis on compromise, consensus, and power-sharing. Although power-sharing institutions can be useful at the start of a transition, the book finds that extending them beyond that point can lead democracy to unravel by frustrating voters and spurring the rise of populists and extremists. The book takes an in-depth look at Tunisia's transition and then explores how far the theory travels through a quantitative analysis of all democratic transitions between 1942–2020. Overall, the book reveals the dark side of power-sharing, broadening our understanding of the causes of populism, polarization, and democratic breakdown.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sharan Grewal (PhD, Princeton 2018) is an Associate Professor of Government at American University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His research examines revolutions and democratic transitions, particularly in the Arab world. His first book, Soldiers of Democracy? Military Legacies and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2023), explores why militaries support or thwart democratic transitions. It received APSA’s Best Book in MENA Politics Award and the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award. His second book, The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy: Populism, Polarization, and the Perils of Power-Sharing, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in October 2026. His work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science, among other journals. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Defense Security Cooperation University.

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Sharan Grewal Associate Professor of Government at American University Presenter American University
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Wednesday, November 4, 4:00-5:15 pm. Click here to register.

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Book Talk: How to Survive Authoritarianism

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10.5.26BookTalk_HowToSurviveAuthoritarianism

Join the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law for a conversation with Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev, Russian journalists in exile and co-authors of How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian's Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America (Liveright, 2026). The book argues that Americans confronting a rising tide of authoritarianism don't need to invent a vocabulary for it: Russians already built one over generations of contending with illiberal rule. Kuznetsova and Storyev compile roughly 100 Russian words and phrases, from "power vertical," used to describe hypercentralized governance, to "mnogohodovochka," a term that mocks misguided state initiatives, tracing how this vernacular of double-speak helped ordinary citizens "make sense of how illiberalism takes shape." The discussion will bring that framework to the American context, examining the mechanics of authoritarian consolidation and the strategies available for resisting it, and drawing comparisons between the Russian experience and current U.S. politics. Satre Family Senior Fellow & Mosbacher Director Kathryn Stoner will be moderating the discussion.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Maria Kuznetsova is a human rights expert from Russia who tackles political prosecution and anti-war repressions. She has expertise in developing international advocacy campaigns and engaging in strategic communication with journalists and public figures on human rights issues, especially in the context of Russian war against Ukraine. Kuznetsova received a master of public policy from Harvard Kennedy School and is based in San Francisco.

Dan Storyev grew up between Russia and the US. An Oxford graduate, he has been working as a journalist and researcher for years, specialising on writing about the former Soviet space for English-language outlets. His writing appeared in the Financial Times, New York Times and Foreign Policy amongst others. Dan covers human rights and conflicts and has reported from hotspots all over the world, including Ukraine and Myanmar. Dan writes the English newsletter at OVD-Info, a leading Russian human rights watchdog, which Dan also represented at conferences, radio, TV and more. Dan had worked as a lecturer and tutor for a decade — his diverse experience includes guest lectures at Oxford, Ghent and KCL.

Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner

Only those with an active Stanford ID and access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. Others may attend virtually, via Zoom - join with passcode: 123456.

Registration required.

Maria Kuznetsova Associate Professor University of Auburn
Dan Storyev Writer & Researcher
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Milada Vachudova | REDS Seminar: Europe in the Face of War

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Vachudova REDS Seminar 2026
We are amid the greatest transformation of Europe’s domestic politics, international institutions and geopolitical ambitions since the collapse of communism three decades ago. Russia’s war, Ukraine’s steadfast response, and America’s authoritarian turn are reshaping political contestation while also transforming Europe’s security order and testing its institutions: NATO is fortifying, the OSCE is incapacitated, and the EU has started to ramp up its defense and its geopolitical power. All of this is happening as Europe and the US have become more polarized and unpredictable. 
 
Across Europe, governments that uphold liberal democracy are confronted by governments and political parties that have undermined liberal democratic institutions at home and sought favors from the Kremlin abroad. Within some European countries, elections are fought between two blocs of parties – those who vow to protect liberal democratic institutions and those who have a track record of diminishing them. In this time of polarization and war, can international institutions and transatlantic cooperation defend the democratic West? The rise of authoritarian-minded political parties in Europe and the US puts at risk fundamental interests: a shared and prosperous liberal democratic West, the stability and decisiveness of NATO, and the survival and recovery of Ukraine.


 

Milada Anna Vachudova is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her current projects include protest in defense of liberal democracy across Europe, the revival of EU enlargement, and the upending of European security amidst the transformation of European politics and institutions owing to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Her recent articles explore the trajectories of European states due to strengthening ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding – and how these changes are impacting party systems and civic participation. She is part of the core team of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on the positions of political parties across Europe. Professor Vachudova holds a B.A. from Stanford University. As a British Marshall Scholar, she completed an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford. She has held fellowships and grants from various institutions including the European University Institute, the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the Center of International Studies at Princeton University, the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.


REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY


The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

Anna Grzymała-Busse, Kathryn Stoner

Philippines Conference Room (3rd floor)

For Zoom, if prompted for a password, use: 123456

Milada Vachudova, University of North Carolina Presenter
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Jannis Panagiotidis | Racism against East Europeans in Germany: History and Present

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jannis_panagiotidis_nov_19_tec_event
Racism against East Europeans constitutes a major gap in racism research and anti-racism debates. Yet there is a long tradition of treating the region and its inhabitants as inferior, with devastating consequences throughout history. This book is the first comprehensive study of racism in the entangled histories of Germany and Eastern Europe—a racism that is not based on skin color and affects people despite their mostly phenotypical whiteness. Embedded in colonial imaginations of Eastern Europe, anti-East European racism took its most radical and brutal shape during Nazism. But racist knowledge persisted across the rupture of 1945 and the Cold War and took on new shapes after the fall of communism in 1989, when East-West migration once again became an important feature of European and German reality. This book makes a case for the long overdue eastward expansion of the contemporary racism debate. 
 
 
Jannis Panagiotidis is a historian and migration scholar. He is scientific director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His publications include the monographs The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana UP 2019), Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: eine Einführung (Beltz Juventa 2021), and Antiosteuropäischer Rassismus in Deutschland: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Beltz Juventa 2024, with Hans-Christian Petersen).
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Jannis Panagiotidis, University of Vienna Presenter
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Jana Hunter | The Child of Freedom: Temporal Sovereignty in Habsburg Bohemia

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Jana Hunter TEC event Dec 3
Who decides what time it is? In Habsburg Bohemia, that question drew in nearly every other: nation and empire, identity and sovereignty, capital and a newly connected world. Railways and telegraphs created a time shared across distance, and with it a debate over who had the power to set it. Histories of time standardization have told a story of unification; histories of Habsburg sovereignty, meanwhile, have located its conflicts in diets and parliaments. This talk brings them together, asking how an empire tried to synchronize every local clock, where authority over time was located, and why time became a question of sovereignty. After 1867, Bohemia's unresolved constitutional status moved into the infrastructure of daily life: whose observatory produced noon, which meridian ran the trains, whose clocks kept the time. At stake was not only who ruled Bohemia, but how time could be controlled at all. 
 
By the turn of the century, Bohemians called their divided time dualismus, the word for the constitutional settlement itself. This talk traces these jurisdictional disputes over four decades from railway decrees to universal time. The lines of conflict did not run simply between empire and nation: German liberals, Czech nationalists, intellectuals, and businessmen appealed to historic rights, national identity, commercial interest, and civic embarrassment. Jurisdiction over time was scalar, dispersed across ministries, railway companies, international conferences, and municipal councils, and exercised through everyday practice; sovereignty over time was claimed everywhere but located nowhere. The talk closes by asking, as the satirists of the day did, whether any authority could make a polity agree on something as basic as noon.
 
 
Jana Hunter is Assistant Professor at Stanford University, where she works on modern Central and Eastern Europe with particular interests in time, science and technology, modernity, and environmental change. Her first book project, Kingdom of Hours: The Transformation of Time in Habsburg Bohemia, 1848-1918, uses time as a lens to rethink the making of modern Central Europe. Rather than treating modern time as a single, accelerating rhythm, the study examines the coexistence of natural and industrial, religious and secular, nationalist and imperial, and mechanical and subjective temporalities that structured everyday life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bohemia. Moving from rural villages and mining towns to Prague’s municipal councils and the Reichsrat, the book reconstructs how local actors reworked temporal regimes to serve imperial, national, regional, and commercial aims, offering a new framework for understanding modernization beyond the categories of nation and empire. 
 
Her second project, Testing Grounds: From Marx to Oppenheimer—Czechoslovakia’s Global Legacy, 1918-Present, traces how twentieth-century ideologies of modernity were lived, imposed, and resisted through the uranium-mining town of Jáchymov. Once dubbed the “cradle of the atomic bomb,” Jáchymov became a testing ground for successive empires and energy regimes, its landscape transformed by extractive ambition, political violence, and environmental fallout. Bringing Karl Marx’s ecological critique into dialogue with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear physics, the project reframes the history of militarized landscapes and energy transitions, situating East-Central Europe within global histories of extraction and environmental change. Hunter received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2024 and her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Herder Institute. Before joining Stanford, she was a Lecturer in Modern European History at New College, Oxford.
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Jana Hunter, Stanford University Presenter
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