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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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Abstract

With the nearing of the fifth anniversary of the January 25 Revolution, this panel examines the nature of politics under the rule of the current military sponsored regime in Egypt. What implications will the recent legislative elections have for political stability and the cohesion of the ruling coalition? How is the regime responding to the various economic challenges it currently confronts? In what ways has the persistence of state repression affected and shaped the space for political contestation and resistance?

Panelists

 

Joel Beinin
Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History,
Stanford University

 

Lisa Blaydes
Associate Professor of Political Science,
Stanford University

 

Amr Hamzawy
ARD Visiting Scholar,
CDDRL, Stanford University

 

Nancy Okail
Executive Director,
The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
(via Skype)

 

Hesham Sallam
Associate Director, ARD
CDDRL, Stanford University

 

Moderator:

Larry Diamond
Senior Fellow, FSI; 
Senior Fellow Hoover Institute,
Stanford University

 

 

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Joel Beinin
Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, his M.A. from Harvard University in 1974, and his A.M.L.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978 and 1982. He also studied at the American University of Cairo and and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in Egypt in 1969, 1980-81, 1985, 1986, 1994, 2004-05, and 2006-08 and in Israel in 1965-66, 1970-73, 1987, 1988, 1993, and 1993. He has taught Middle East history at Stanford University since 1983. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. His research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East and on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Beinin has written or edited nine books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa; co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010). His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as The NationMiddle East ReportThe Los Angeles TimesThe San Francisco ChronicleLe Monde Diplomatique, and others. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout North America, and in France, Egypt, Singapore, and Australia, and has given frequent interviews to the global media. In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

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Lisa Blaydes is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011).  Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project.  Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.  She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

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Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and he continues to lead its programs on Liberation Technology, Arab Reform and Democracy, and Democracy in Taiwan.  He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His sixth and most recent book, In Search of Democracy (Routledge, 2016), explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his work on democratic development, particularly in Africa and Asia.  He has also edited or co-edited more than 40 books on democratic development around the world.

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Amr Hamzawy is a visiting scholar at the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. After finishing his doctoral studies and after five years of teaching in Cairo and Berlin, Hamzawy joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington, DC) between 2005 and 2009 as a senior associate for Middle East Politics. Between 2009 and 2010, he served as the research director of the Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2011, he joined the Department of Public Policy and Administration at the American University in Cairo, where he continues to serve today. Hamzawy also serves as an associate professor of political science at the Department of Political Science, Cairo University. His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. Dr. Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the 25th of Jan 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a daily column and a weekly op-ed to the Egyptian independent newspaper Shorouk.

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nancy okail
Nancy Okail is the Executive Director of TIMEP. She brings more than 15 years of experience promoting democracy and development in the Middle East and North Africa region to this role. Prior to joining TIMEP, Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and has managed programs for Egyptian pro-democracy organizations that challenged the Mubarak regime. She was also one of the defendants convicted and sentenced to prison in the widely publicized case of 43 non-governmental organization workers charged with using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the U.K. where her dissertation examined the power relations of foreign aid.

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Hesham Sallam is a Research Associate at CDDRL and serves as the Associate-Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Past institutional affiliations include Middle East Institute, Asharq Al-Awsat, and the World Security Institute. He is editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Sallam received a Ph.D. in Government (2015) and an M.A. in Arab Studies (2006) from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh (2003).


 

 

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

Joel Beinin
Lisa Blaydes
Amr Hamzawy
Nancy Okail
Hesham Sallam
Panel Discussions
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-This event is now full and we are no longer able to accept RSVPs-
 

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Image of the front cover of Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies
Please join us as we celebrate the publication of David Laitin and co-authors Claire Adida (UC San Diego) and Marie-Anne Valfort's (Paris School of Economics and the Sorbonne) recent book Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies which will be released in January 2016 by Harvard University Press.  

Amid mounting fears of violent Islamic extremism, many Europeans ask whether Muslim immigrants can integrate into historically Christian countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.

Book signing to immediately follow.  Copies of the book will also be available for sale.

 

David D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His specialty is comparative politics. In that field he conducts research on political culture, ethnic conflict, and civil war. His field expertise spans Somalia, Nigeria, Catalonia, Estonia and France.

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 725-9556 (650) 723-1808
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James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science
laitin.jpg PhD

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science Speaker Department of Political Science
Associate Professor of French and Director, Department of French and Italian Discussant Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Amalia Kessler Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies Discussant Stanford Law School
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The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Egyptian academic and Former Member of Parliament Amr Hamzawy as a visiting scholar for the 2015-16 academic year. Hamzawy, who teaches political science at Cairo University and the American University in Cairo, brings to the program a deep knowledge of Middle East politics and specific expertise on democratization and reform processes in the region. A former Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hamzawy’s research focuses on questions of political change, human rights, and the rule of law in Egypt. He is a daily columnist for Al-Sherouk, an independent Egyptian newspaper, and writes regularly on the role of civil society actors and parties in Egypt’s often restricted political arena. Hamzawy is a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights, and was elected to serve in Egypt’s first parliament after the outset of the January 25 Revolution before it was dissolved in the summer of 2012.

Hamzawy will spend his residency at CDDRL working on a research project on the liberal elite and reemergence of autocracy in Egypt. His residency is generously funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to support scholars from the Arab world. In the interview below, Hamzawy describes his current project and research plans. Hamzawy will be sharing his research findings with the CDDRL community in a seminar on October 27.


What are your research goals and priorities?

While at CDDRL, my research objective is to analyze contemporary liberal discourses on democracy and human rights in Egypt. The fact that the majority of Egyptian liberals called on the military establishment - prior to the July 3, 2013 coup which deposed the elected president Mohamed Morsi - to interfere in politics and terminate the emerging pluralist dynamics warrants an in-depth examination. Equally puzzling, is the readiness of Egyptian liberals to allow the former minister of defense and current president Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s rise to power, to accept a subordinate role in an increasingly restricted public space, and to tolerate without any noticeable resistance the emergence of a new autocracy in Egypt.

 

What has your research uncovered?

The research journey has been going in some fascinating directions and yielding some interesting answers. For instance, one set of factors pertains to the formation of the modern Egyptian state and the long-standing dependency of liberal elites on successive autocratic rulers and governments. Another revolves around historical legacies of mistrust and fear towards religious-based social movements and political actors. These legacies have contributed to the tendency of liberals to side with autocrats against popular opposition currents. Finally, the predominance of rent-seeking tendencies inside the state bureaucracy and among economic elites has limited the integration of liberals into Egypt’s social fabric. While there are fascinating historical analogies between the current moment and previous experiences in Egypt from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, my research will remains focused on the contemporary era.

 

How is your experience in Egyptian politics informing your current projects?

Throughout the last four years, and while putting on different institutional hats and operating in very different contexts, I have collected first-hand insights on liberal narratives on the formation of the Egyptian state and state-society relations. These experiences also deepened my understanding of liberals’ discourses on their historical encounters with religious forces, their social and political preferences, and their views on the wider public—which some key liberal figures have been willing to disenfranchise to avoid Islamist victories in the polls. These insights, as well as my own experiences as an elected member of the Egyptian People’s Assembly of 2012, the first legislature that was elected freely and without government manipulation, will inform the research.  

 

What are the most important factors that undermined the movement that supported the January 25, 2011 Revolution in Egypt?

That is a tough question. It is easy to state that neither the military establishment nor the vastly entrenched security apparatus wanted the January 25, 2011 Revolution. They feared that it could lead to a democratic transition in which their roles, benefits, and privileges would have been limited or at least subjected to greater scrutiny. Also, there is no doubt that the rent-seeking economic elites and various forces of the Mubarak regime were heavily invested in blocking an orderly transition to democracy. These are facts that have been well documented and researched.

However, no less significant is the recurrent retreat of liberal elites from pluralist processes and procedures. It appears as if Egyptian liberals have never been ready to support a democratic opening that could bring Islamists to power. Liberals have also been reluctant to shoulder the burden of standing against the autocratic ways of the military and the security establishment, or to help civil society and human rights groups garner more popular support. To explain the root causes and impacts of Egypt’s illiberal liberals is the task of my current research project.

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Amr Hamzawy. Photo from Bündnis 90/Die Grünen flickr page
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As part of a major speaking tour across the United States, author and award-winning filmmaker Bernhard Rammerstorfer will present his latest book and DVD project called “Taking the Stand: We have More to Say”.  Accompanying him will be two survivors of the Holocaust, Mrs. Reneé Firestone and Mrs. Hermine Liska, providing one of the last opportunities learn about the Holocaust from those who lived through it.

“Taking the Stand: We Have More to Say” condenses insights and experiences of nine victims of the Nazi movement and their messages to the younger generation. They are from five different countries and were persecuted for reasons of ethnicity, political ideology, or religion. For five years, Rammerstorfer collected questions directed to Holocaust survivors that were posed by schoolchildren and students all over the world. The catalog of questions, unique in the world, consists of 100 questions from 61 schools and universities in 30 countries on 6 continents.

At the event, Mr. Rammerstofer will talk about his latest documentary and present some sequences from the film followed by a Q&A session with Mrs. Firestone and Mrs. Liska, who both appear in it.  Please note that there will be a translator during the Q&A session.

Everyone is welcome to stay after the event for a book signing by the author and the two survivors.

Bernhard Rammerstorfer is an Austrian author and filmmaker who is best known for his numerous books and films about the Nazi regime, including the book “Unbroken Will” and the award-winning documentary “Ladder in the Lions Den”. Besides his work as a writer and producer, he also frequently gives lectures at schools, universities and memorial sites all over Europe and the US.

Reneé Firestone was born in 1924 in Užhorod (today’s Ukraine) into a Jewish family. In spring of 1944, she was deported to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, and later that year she was  sent to the female forced labor camp in Silesia where she stayed until the liberation by the Russian Army in May 1945. After the war, Firestone lived in Prague before emigrating to the United States with her family in 1948. She worked as a fashion designer and ran a successful boutique. In 1998, she told her story in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning documentary “The Last Days”. She regularly speaks about the Holocaust to young people in schools, at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Reneé Firestone lives in Los Angeles.

Hermine Liska was born in 1930 in Austria. As a child of Bible Students (today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses), her parents refused to raise her according to the Nazi ideology. For that reason, she was taken away from her parents in 1941 and put into a “reeducation center”. After the war, she was able to return to her home, got married and had three children. Since almost two decades she has been visiting schools all over Austria and told her story to thousands of students. In 2009, she was invited to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC to tell her story. Hermine Liska lives near Graz in Austria.

This event is co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Stanford Austria Club


 

Cubberley Auditorium
485 Lausen Mall
Stanford University

Bernhard Rammerstorfer Austrian author and documentary film producer
Hermine Liska Survivor of the Holocaust
Renée Firestone Survivor of the Holocaust
Panel Discussions
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Over the last years, a paradigm shift in Heidegger research has been gaining momentum in the United States. The paradigm shift is motivated by and strictly based on the entirety of Heidegger's works, and especially the posthumous publications from 1989 to the present. It moves beyond the "classical paradigm" established by such scholars as William J. Richardson, Otto Pöggeler, and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. This lecture lays out the main features of the paradigm shift and raises questions for discussion about how this reformulation of Heidegger's project might enter into dialogue with contemporary Chinese scholarship on Heidegger.
 

Thomas Sheehan, Ph.D., is professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, Philosophy at Stanford University. His field of specialization is contemporary phenomenology, especially Heidegger, as well as classical Greek and medieval philosophy. His doctorate was awarded by Fordham University, New York, where he studied under the renown Heidegger scholar William J. Richardson.

Thomas Sheehan Professor of Religious Studies Stanford University
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Appeared in Stanford Report, April 16, 2015

A pioneering textual analysis of French political speeches led by Stanford Professor of French Cécile Alduy reveals how Marine Le Pen, leader of France's surging far-right National Front, has made extremism palatable in a land of republican values.

French politician Marine Le Pen carried her father's right-wing fringe political party to first place in the country's latest elections for European Parliament.

Stanford scholar Cécile Alduy says Le Pen's success at the helm of France's right-wing National Front can be attributed to a combination of sophisticated rebranding and skillfully crafted moderate rhetoric that sells a conservative agenda that borders on extreme.

An associate professor of French at Stanford and a faculty affiliate of The Europe Center, Alduy conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of more than 500 speeches by Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to find out what has made their party surge in the polls. 

Alduy's word-for-word analysis of National Front political speeches, published in the book Marine Le Pen prise aux mots: Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) has become a flashpoint of political discourse in France.

The resulting research is the first study of Marine Le Pen's discourse, the first to compile a corpus of this magnitude of political speeches by a French political organization.

After sifting through the data and performing extensive close readings of the corpus, Alduy found that the stylistic polish of Marine Le Pen's language conceals ideological and mythological structures that have traditionally disturbed French voters. Her research reveals how radical views can be cloaked in soothing speech.

"Marine Le Pen's language is full of ambiguities, double meanings, silences and allusions," Alduy said.
 

Spatial layout of Marine Le Pen's speeches This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together.

Courtesy of Cécile Alduy
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together.
Image Courtesy of Cécile Alduy

But in terms of political agenda and ideological content, Alduy said the continuity between the younger and elder Le Pen is striking. "What is different is the words and phrases she uses to express the same agenda," Alduy said.

Alduy, whose research centers on the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the European Renaissance, conducted the research with the help of Stanford graduate and undergraduate students and with communication consultant Stéphane Wahnich.  Academic technology specialist Michael Widner of Stanford Libraries and the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, provided technical expertise throughout and trained students in the art of indexing the database.

With a grant from Stanford's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Alduy and her team transcribed and analyzed more than 500 speeches by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen dating from 1987 to 2013. 

Alduy's team used text analysis software such as Hyperbase or Voyant Tools to measure precisely how Marine's language differs from that of Jean-Marie.

They found, for example, that Marine Le Pen used the word "immigrants" 40 times in speeches, compared to 330 times for Jean-Marie, or 0.6 percent versus 1.9 percent, respectively. Instead, she used the more impersonal "immigration" or "migration policy" to discuss the issue and present this hot-topic issue as a matter of abstract economic policy rather than an ideological anti-immigration stance.

While Jean-Marie paired "immigrants" or "immigration" with words like "danger," "threat" or "loss," yielding phrases that scapegoat or even demonize France's large immigrant population, Marine used more technocratic pairings such as "protection," "cost," "euro" or "pay."

The effect, Alduy contended, is a repositioning of immigration from the racial and cultural problem Jean-Marie claimed it was to an economic one. Yet the actual policy agenda changed little from father to daughter, Alduy observed.

New language, same story

Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972 to unite under the same political banner several extremist groups, from royalists to conservative Catholics nostalgic of the Vichy régime and the colonial Empire.

Since 1987 and his polemical statement about the Holocaust being a "detail" in the history of World War II, Jean-Marie has employed shock value to get media coverage. When asked about his daughter's new "normalization" strategy, which smoothes out the old xenophobic rhetoric in favor of a mainstream lingua, he routinely declares: "Nobody cares about a nice National Front."

But the party polled in the low double digits until Marine Le Pen took the helm in 2011. As she rose in the polls, Alduy began studying her speeches to understand what powered the politician's steady ascent.

In May 2014, Le Pen's National Front stunned the French political establishment by pulling 25 percent of the vote in European parliamentary elections, becoming the top French vote-getter in a multiparty system. President François Hollande's Socialists came in third. Last month, the party equaled that percentage in elections for local councilors. Such results make Marine Le Pen a credible contender for France's presidency as the country looks ahead to its 2017 presidential cycle.

To demonstrate how Marine Le Pen's language presents formerly unpopular ideas in a new light, Alduy pointed to the party's policy of préférence nationale (national preference,) the cornerstone of its platform since the late 1970s. This policy would give priority for jobs, social services and benefits to French citizens, and would strip from children of legally resident noncitizens the family benefits now available to all children in France.

As touted by Jean-Marie Le Pen, however, Alduy noted, "The phrase préférence nationale has negative connotations in the French mind."

"'Preference' sounds arbitrary, potentially unfair, and goes against the republican principle of equality in the eye of the law," Alduy noted. "So Marine Le Pen has renamed this measure priorité nationale (national priority) or even sometimes patriotisme social (social patriotism). Both new phrases sound positive and don't evoke discrimination as the former did.

"'Priority' evokes action, responsibility, leadership – all the qualities one would like an effective chief executive to embody," Alduy said. "Patriotism is a noncontroversial word that can rally across the political spectrum. Who wants to be called anti-patriotic by opposing 'social patriotism'? Yet both phrases refer to exactly the same measures."

In the same vein, Alduy observed, Marine Le Pen eschews the word "race" while her father stated unequivocally "races are unequal."

"Instead," Alduy said, "Marine Le Pen explains that 'cultures,' 'civilizations' and 'nations' have a right to remain separate and different, or else risk disappearing, overwhelmed by hordes of outsiders with a different, incompatible culture.

"The word 'race' has disappeared, but the same peoples are the target of this fear of the other."

Listening between the lines

Alduy's findings hint at ways voters everywhere can critically evaluate political thought and make sound political decisions in times of stress.

She observed that other far-right European movements, such as Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, have similarly rebranded themselves to expand their base.

"Like the National Front, the Party for Freedom now adopts the posture of a champion of Western liberal values and the defense of 'minorities' – gays and women – against the alleged homophobia and misogyny of Islam," Alduy said. "Yet the Party for Freedom is a typical xenophobic, far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Europe party in every other respect.

"I hope that people will start to pay attention to the meaning of words in political speeches and in the media."

In 2015-16, Alduy said, she hopes to convey to students the nuances of political code words such as laïcité (secularism), "the Republic" or "immigration" in a Stanford course titled How to Think About the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Political, Social and Literary Contexts.

"We all have to be careful and listen to what is left between the lines," Alduy said.

"When we hear someone speak about equality or democracy, we have to pay attention not just to what we want to hear, or to what we assume these words mean, but to decipher what they mean in the context of this speaker's worldview.

"The positive or negative connotations of certain words can mislead us to think that we share the same definition of them with the politicians that use them to gain our vote."

Marine Le Pen prise aux mots is currently available only in French.  Analyses and graphs taken from the book are available in English on the website www.decodingmarinelepen.stanford.edu.

Corrie Goldman, director of humanities communication: (650) 724-8156, corrieg@stanford.edu

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

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National Front politician Marine Le Pen hugs her father, Jean Marie le Pen
France's far-right National Front politician Marine Le Pen hugs her father, Jean Marie le Pen, after her May Day 2012 speech in Paris. The younger Le Pen's meteoric rise in French politics has captured the attention of Stanford scholar Cécile Alduy, who has analyzed the differences between her speeches and those of her more polarizing father.
Francois Mori/AP
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