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.
Along the Silk Road explores the vast ancient network of cultural, economic, and technological exchange that connected East Asia to the Mediterranean. Students learn how goods, belief systems, art, music, and people traveled across such vast distances to create interdependence among disparate cultures.
This paper was discussed at the Global Justice workshop on December 15, 2006.
Excerpt from page four of Sebastiano Maffettone's "Universal Duty and Global Justice":
We could uphold that, as a rule, cosmopolitans subscribe to the global distributive justice model, reducing the socio-economic rights to a corollary of their theorems on justice. Statists, instead, always as a rule, fully reject the idea of a global distributive justice and, sometimes, even the possibility that the socio-economic human rights might have considerable soundness and effectiveness. In short, this third option of mine recognizes that, in this historical time, a comprehensive ideal of global distributive justice - founded on the domestic distributive justice model - is not yet theoretically justifiable, although it entails a lower degree of skepticism that the statist thesis about its progressive establishment. However, my thesis dwells above all on the fact that a broad and convinced interpretation of socio-economic rights may do much to lessen social injustice in today's globalized world, being sufficientist in the way above defined, starting from a reduction of extreme poverty and, over time, enabling peoples to decide their fate. It may be affirmed that this thesis, moving our attention from relative inequality to radical deprivations, is based on a more modest ideal than global equality, an ideal inspired to 'weak global distributive justice.'
In my opinion, this intermediate option meets another requirement of some significance, at least for a political theorist with a liberal background. Cosmopolitans have a propensity for a radical moralization of international politics, whose institutions are considered at the service of their favorite moral ideals. Statists, on the contrary, tend to cut to a minimum the space of morals in international politics. I believe that, for a liberal, both positions should prove scarcely convincing. This is the reason why I have called this third position of mine - based on a weak ideal of global justice and being neither moralistic nor skeptical - 'liberal conception.'
About the Author
Sebastiano Maffettone is professor of political philosophy at Luiss University, Rome. He specializes in political philosophy, ethics, bioethics, business ethics, philosophy of international relations, environmental ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, history of philosophy, and analytic and continental philosophy.
This talk will discuss the study of a new factor that makes civil war more likely: the inability of political actors to make credible promises to broad segments of society. Lacking this ability, both elected and unelected governments pursue public policies that leave citizens less well-off and more prone to revolt. At the same time, these actors have a reduced ability to build an anti-insurgency capacity in the first place, since they are less able to prevent anti-insurgents from themselves mounting coups. However, while reducing the risk of conflict overall, increasing credibility can, over some range, worsen the effects of natural resources and ethnic fragmentation on civil war. Empirical tests using various measures of political credibility support these conclusions.
About the speaker:
Philip Keeferis a Lead Research Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Since receiving his PhD in Economics from Washington University at St. Louis in 1991, he has worked continuously on the interaction of institutions, political economy and economic development on issues ranging from the impact of insecure property rights on economic growth to the effect of political credibility on the fiscal and monetary policy choices of governments. His work has appeared in journals ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the American Review of Political Science.
CISAC Conference Room
Olivier Roy is research director at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research). He holds a state Agrégation in philosophy (1972), a Master's in Persian
language and civilization from the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (1972), a PhD in political sciences from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Paris (1996) and has been qualified to supervise PhD candidates since 2001. He currently lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the IEP and has acted as consultant to the French Foreign Ministry (Center for Analysis and Forecast) since 1984. Olivier Roy was also a consultant with UNOCA on Afghanistan in 1988, special OSCE representative to Tajikistan (August 1993 to February 1994) and headed the OSCE Mission for Tajikistan from February to October 1994.
Among his many publications is Globalised Islam: The search for a new ummah (London: Hurst, 2004).
Sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Minister Chung is one of the few to have had extensive discussions with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il. Following their meeting in June 2005, Kim rejoined the Six-Party talks the following month. Chung will discuss the various proposals in dealing with North Korea made by the US and Korean governments. He will offer his personal views on how to deal with the North Korean nuclear problem and suggestions for future cooperation between the United States and the Republic of Korea.
After graduating from Seoul National University with a degree in history, Mr. Chung began his career as a journalist at Munwha Broadcasting Company (MBC). He was MBC's correspondent in Los Angeles and eventually the anchor for the evening news.
He left broadcasting for politics and was the spokesperson for President Kim Dae-jung and was elected to the National Assembly. In 2004 he co-founded and served as the first chairman of the Uri Party. He later served as minister of unification and also chairman of the National Security Council. Mr. Chung has a master's degree in communication from Cardiff University in Wales. He has often been mentioned as a contender for South Korea's presidency in next year's presidential election.
Philippines Conference Room
The Society for the History of Technology has awarded its 2006 Brooke Hindle Fellowship to Sonja Schmid, a CISAC social science research associate and lecturer in Stanford's Program on Science, Technology and Society.
Schmid accepted the $10,000 award at the society's annual conference on Oct. 14. She will use it to support additional research in Russia for a book she is completing on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster on the Soviet and Russian nuclear power industry.
Tentatively titled "Producing Power: The Construction of a Civilian Nuclear Industry in the Soviet Union," the book begins with the Chernobyl explosion of April 26, 1986--"the worst accident at a civilian nuclear facility ever," Schmid notes.
The explosion ignited a fire that burned for more than 10 days and released radioactive materials over a large area of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Some 116,000 people evacuated the area that spring and another 220,000 moved later, according to a 2005 report by a forum the International Atomic Energy Agency convened to assess the accident's economic and health legacies.
The tragedy also resulted in the trial and sentencing of plant operators and "dismissal of the Chernobyl-type reactor design as 'inherently unsafe,'" Schmid explains. Her research examines the development of institutional structures and professional cultures within the Soviet civilian nuclear industry and the history of Soviet reactor design choices.
Schmid has done extensive research in Russian archives that opened after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, "much of this history was never written down," she said, so she also interviewed more than 20 senior nuclear specialists in Russia.
Now filling in details on her largely completed historical analysis, Schmid expects to finish the book manuscript by next summer. The fellowship selection committee called her work "a path-breaking contribution to the field" of technology history. Schmid's "study revises much of what we thought we knew about the development of nuclear power in the Soviet Union," the committee wrote.
On a trip to Russia in September and October 2006, she talked with high-ranking specialists in the Soviet and current Russian nuclear industry, some of whom she met through CISAC visiting professor Siegfried Hecker. A former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Hecker continues to work with Russian scientists in cooperative threat reduction programs to secure former Soviet nuclear materials that could be used for weapons.
A source Schmid has yet to tap is the Archive of the Russian Federal Agency for Nuclear Energy, which maintains records on both military and civilian nuclear programs. The agency "has been publishing excellent series of documents on the history of the Soviet atomic bomb, or the military program," Schmid said, "but their documents on the civilian program so far remain classified." She said she will try again and that on this last visit to Russia she "was encouraged to keep doing so."
Her painstaking research stands to illuminate technological decisions with profound consequences. "While everything about the Chernobyl accident was Soviet--the reactor design, the attitude of operators, the bureaucracy--it shook a system that was designed to be safe," Schmid said. "The system, by its own standards and norms, was normal and perfectly functional," she added.
"Chernobyl is not something that 'could only happen in the Soviet Union,'" Schmid cautioned. "It could happen elsewhere."
