Matthias Englert is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. Before joining CISAC in 2009, he was a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Group Science Technology and Security (IANUS) and a PhD student at the department of physics at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.

His major research interests include nonproliferation, disarmament, arms control, nuclear postures and warheads, fissile material and production technologies, the civil use of nuclear power and its role in future energy scenarios and the possibility of nuclear terrorism. His research during his stay at CISAC focuses primarily on the technology of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, the implications of their use for the nonproliferation regime, and on technical and political measures to manage proliferation risks.

Englert has participated in projects investigating technical aspects of the concept of proliferation resistance with topics including the conversion of research reactors, uranium enrichment with gas centrifuges, reducing plutonium stockpiles with reactor-based options,  spallation neutron sources and fusion power plants. Additional research topics have included fissile material stockpiles, fuel-cycles and accelerator driven systems.

Although a substantial part of his professional work recently has been technical he is equally interested in and actively studies the historical, social and political aspects of the use of nuclear technologies. Research interests include the dispute about Article IV of the NPT, the future development of the NPT regime, possibilities for a nuclear weapons-free world, preventive arms control, and the history and development of proliferation relevant programs. By studying contemporary theory in philosophy through the interaction of science, technology and society, Englert has acquired analytical tools to reflect on approaches describing or addressing the problem of ambivalent technology.

Englert is a vice speaker of the working group Physics and Disarmament of the German Physical Society (DPG) and a board member of the  German Research Association for Science, Disarmament and Security (FONAS).

Brenna Marea Powell is a 7th year PhD candidate in the department of Government at Harvard University, and a doctoral fellow at the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. She received her AB from Stanford in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research interests include inequality, civil conflict and political violence in divided societies. Her three-article dissertation research explores the role of political institutions in redefining ethno-racial boundaries and social hierarchy. This includes work on post-conflict policing in Northern Ireland, racial policy in Brazil, and the politics of ethno-racial classification in the United States.

About the Speaker: Kaitlin Shilling has spent most of her career working in the non-governmental sector in post-crisis development. At Stanford, she now researches post-crisis reconstruction with a focus on incorporating natural resource management into program design. Before beginning her PhD at Stanford, Shilling spent over a year and a half working for DAI, a development consulting company, on two USAID-funded projects in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. She began as the Director of Finance and Operations for the Afghanistan Immediate Needs Project, and then moved to the Alternative Livelihoods Project to run the Gender and Micro-Enterprise Department. Her work on both of these projects involved collaborating with other NGOs, donors, and UN agencies working in the region. Before moving to Afghanistan, Shilling worked in the home office of DAI for almost two years in the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group. As part of the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group, she worked on projects in Indonesia, East Timor, and Liberia.

Before moving to Afghanistan, Ms. Shilling worked in the home office of DAI for almost two years in the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group at DAI. Ms. Shilling's work included projects in Indonesia, East Timor, and Liberia, in addition to writing proposals to win new business. While at Stanford, Kaitlin will pursue research relating to post-crisis reconstruction with a focus on incorporating natural resource management into program design

This talk reviews three decades of Indian nuclear decision-making. It argues that India’s slow pace of weaponization in the face of Pakistani nuclearization and Sino- Pakistani nuclear cooperation in the 1980s, the slack in building an institutional capacity to wield nuclear weapons after they came into existence in the 1990s, and the reluctant attempts at developing an operational arsenal even after formally claiming nuclear power status and almost going to war with a nuclear Pakistan in the last decade, constitute puzzling behavior. Existing proliferation models explain facets of Indian nuclear behavior. However, they don’t explain it in its totality. The different facets of Indian nuclear decision making in the last three decades can be collapsed into a single dependent variable: the lag in strategic decision-making. This talk operationalizes the concept of ‘lag’, critically reviews existing explanations of Indian nuclear behavior, and offers an alternative framework for understanding Indian nuclear decision-making.

Gaurav Kampani is a sixth year doctoral student at Cornell University's Department of Government. His major and minor fields are International Relations and Comparative Politics. Kampani's research interests cover international security and focus on the relationship between domestic institutions and strategic policy, military strategy, operations planning, and weapons development.

Kampani's dissertation project studies Indian civil-military institutions and nuclear weapons-related operational practices in the decade prior 1998 and the decade since.

Between 1998-2005, Kampani worked on South Asia-related nuclear and missile proliferation issues at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey CA.

John Downer received his MA/MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, his MA in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh, and his doctorate in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His dissertation was on "The Burden of Proof: Regulating Ultra-High Reliability in Civil Aviation." Downer then worked at the London School of Economics' Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR), where he began re-working his dissertation for publication as a book titled "Black Box/Check Box: Assessing Critical Technologies" (forthcoming from MIT Press's Inside Technology series). Downer brings the sociology of knowledge to bear on discourses about technology policy and governance, taking insights from a close empirical study of technological knowledge-production-the US Federal Aviation Administration's assessment of new aircraft designs-and drawing out implications for broader questions about risk and governance in a world of pacemakers and nuclear power-stations. At CISAC, Downer is exploring the sociology and epistemology of failure and its implications for the governance of nuclear technologies.

5:00 pm: Reception
6:00 PM: Screening of “Coffee Futures” (2009, 22 minutes), followed by a discussion with:

• Zeynep Gursel
  (Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan- Ann Arbor; Director & Co-producer of “Coffee Futures”)
• Hakan Tekin
  (Consul General of the Republic of Turkey in Los Angeles)
• Cihan Tugal
  (Department of Sociology, University of California- Berkeley)

Panelists will focus on political, historical and cultural issues surrounding Turkey’s accession to the European Union.

Coffee Futures (2009, 22 minutes) weaves together the Turkish custom of coffee fortune-telling with Turkey’s attempt to join the European Union since 1959, revealing the textures of a society whose fate has long been nationally and internationally debated often in relation to Europeanness. It aims to encourage a dialogue born from openness, and explores what kind of a place one wants Europe to be in the future.  Coffee Futures received 2009 Special Jury Award for Originality from EurActiv Fondation. In 2010,  it received Best Documentary Short Award in MiradasDoc Festival, Audience Award in !f Istanbul International Independent Film Festival, and Audience Award in Ann Arbor Film Festival. For more information, please visit http://www.neysehalimfilm.com/

Zeynep Gursel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor, and director & co-producer of “Coffee Futures.” She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley. Her research focuses on how things become imagineable both for individuals and groups, and how forms in which the past and today are narrated are shaped by, and in turn shape, expectations of the future. She was introduced to the documentary world when she worked on Damming the Euphrates(Paxton Winters, 2001) in Southeast Turkey. She is currently completing a book manuscript, Image Brokers,  on the culture of the international photojournalism industry. 
 
Hakan Tekin is Consul General of the Republic of Turkey in Los Angeles. He received his B.A.in International Relations from Ankara University in 1989 and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey in 1990. He served in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) and Sofia (Bulgaria), attended the NATO Defense College Senior Course in Rome, and worked at the Permanent Mission of Turkey to the United Nations in New York. He assumed his post in Los Angeles as Consul General in April 2007.

Cihan Tugal is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California- Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor. His research focuses on the role of religion in political projects and how the interaction between religion and politics shapes everyday life, urban space, class relations, and national identity. His book Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism was published in 2009 by Stanford University Press. His works also appeared in Economy and Society, Theory and Society, Sociological Theory, the New Left Review, the Sociological Quarterly, and edited volumes.

Co-sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, The Europe Center, The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Turkish Student Association,  Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies.

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It is now widely recognized that a rigorous, policy-relevant impact evaluation embeds the counterfactual analysis of impact in a wider analysis of the underlying program theory (theory of change) of the intervention, also referred to as causal chain analysis. Unpacking the causal chain requires a combination of factual and counterfactual analysis. The seminar will present examples of causal chains. The types of data collection and analysis – both quantitative and qualitative – to analyze the different links in the chain will be discussed. A major challenge in mixed methods is to truly integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches.

About the speaker

Howard White formerly led the impact evaluation program of the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, where he was responsible for impact studies on basic education in Ghana, health and nutrition in Bangladesh, rural electrification, rural development in Andhra Pradesh and a review of impact studies of water supply and sanitation.

Egyptian activists made history in February 2011 when they overturned a thirty-year dictatorship, in part thanks to their mastery of social media.

On April 4, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University together with the Cloud to Street Initiative, will be holding a Digital Townhall meeting to connect activists who were leading the protest movement in Cairo with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of British Columbia. This will be an opportunity to hear directly from activists about their experiences leading protests, using social media to influence events, and what assistance they could use to increase their influence going forward. 

The format will include a panel of four activists speaking by live video feed, with participants in North America sending questions by chat. You may log in to the conversation from any internet connection, or you may join us in person from the CISAC conference room in Encina Hall.

Participant Profiles

Sabah Hamamou is one of Egypt’s most acclaimed new media journalists.  A 36-year-old whose Youtube channel has some 370,000 upload views, she is also a deputy editor at Al Ahram, the country’s most prestigious newspaper. Sabah initially joined the protests as a reporter, but when the protesters came under attack on the first evening of the revolution, she posted the videos she had taken from Tahrir Square, and instantly had 90,000 hits.  Sabah then led an in-house revolt at Al-Ahram over the newspaper’s insistence on reporting regime propaganda about the revolution.  When Al Ahram started reporting the truth about the protests in early February, people throughout Egypt began to realize how much the Mubarak regime had lost popular support.

Mona Shahien is a founder of the Revolutionary Youth Union, a group formed out of the masses in Tahrir Square that sparked initiatives to treat wounded protesters and to clean up the Square, two activities that went viral and demonstrated the new sense of civic engagement that underlies Egypt’s revolution.  She recently founded Tahrir Lounge as a space to bring activists together to communicate, train and collaborate.

Abdel Rahman Faris is a one of three independents on the Revolutionary Youth Council, the coordinating group of youth movements that planned the January 25 protests that set off the revolution.  Frustrated by censorship in the mainstream media, Faris set up the blog www.abdofares.blogspot.com, which he uses to mobilize online communities to engage in political activity.