About the Event:  In the wake of the racial unrest of 1968, the federal government  embarked on a series of social programs designed to  respond to the cries of Black communities demanding an end to police brutality, access to quality housing, and economic investment in schools and jobs.  Often, these cries were not fully heeded, and the marketplace became a terrain on which corporate America and the state argued that Black lives could be improved.  In this presentation on her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, historian Marcia Chatelain links the rise of black capitalism with the fracturing of the mid-century civil rights struggle and eclipsing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of economic justice.  In lieu of policies that could enhance the quality of life in America’s cities, many Black neighborhoods were offered fast food outlets, low-wage work, and an enmeshed relationship with corporate benevolence.

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About the Speaker:  Marcia Chatelain is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Georgetown University. The author of books, South Side Girls and Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Her work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, and The Washington Post.

About the Event:  Why have conservatives decried “activist judges”? And why have liberals - and America's powerful legal establishment - emphasized qualifications and experience over ideology? This transformative text tackles these questions with a new framework for thinking about the nation's courts, 'the judicial tug of war', which not only explains current political clashes over America's courts but also powerfully predicts the composition of courts moving forward. As the text demonstrates through novel quantitative analyses, a greater ideological rift between politicians and legal elites leads politicians to adopt measures that put ideology and politics front and center - for example, judicial elections. On the other hand, ideological closeness between politicians and the legal establishment leads legal elites to have significant influence on the selection of judges. Ultimately, the judicial tug of war makes one point clear: for good or bad, politics are critical to how judges are selected and whose interests they ultimately represent.

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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event: This book examines the creation and consequences of executive constraints in authoritarian regimes. How do some dictatorships become institutionalized ruled-based systems, while others remain heavily personalist? Once implemented, do executive constraints actually play an effective role in promoting autocratic stability? To understand patterns of regime institutionalization, I study the emergence of constitutional term limits and succession procedures, as well as elite power-sharing within presidential cabinets. This project employs a wide range of evidence, including an original time-series dataset of 46 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1960 to 2010, formal theory, and case studies. Altogether this book paints a picture of how some dictatorships evolve from personalist strongman rule to institutionalized regimes. 

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About this Event: In India there persists a striking gender gap in political participation. Women's political participation is important both on normative grounds of inclusion and because when women do participate, politics changes. I develop a theoretical model of political behavior arguing that women's lack of political participation is the result of the structure of women's political networks in patriarchal societies. I then evaluate the effect of expanding women's networks by leveraging a natural experiment that created as-if random variation in access to women-only credit groups. Participation in these groups had a significant and substantial impact on women's political participation - women's attendance at public meetings doubled. I provide suggestive evidence of three mechanisms underlying this effect: (1) larger networks, (2) increased capacity for collective action within networks, and (3) development of civic skills. These findings contribute to our understanding of how networks affect political behavior and underlie gendered inequalities in political participation.

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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event: Following the Allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. government and military officials revived counterinsurgency doctrine and practice—widely employed, though not invented, during the era of decolonization—in service of the nation’s ongoing War on Terror. This revival was dramatized during a widely publicized screening at the Pentagon of Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic film The Battle of Algiers (1966). What insights into (Algerian) insurgency and (French) counterinsurgency did U.S. officials hope to glean from Pontecorvo’s film? And how would these insights be mobilized, if at all, for the occupation of Iraq and other insurgent geographies? 

This talk revisits this historical moment and the questions it raises about the relationship between U.S. militarism and the uses of literature and film in the management of insurgency in Africa and Western Asia.

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