Race
Paragraphs

White nationalism remains an often overlooked terror threat amongst the many national security risks facing the United States and Russian Federation. While typically grounded in domestic theaters, white nationalist groups have increased the frequency and scale of their armed activities by incorporating aspects of transnational cooperation that are tactics often used by larger terrorist networks. This trend has raised questions regarding the ways in which white nationalism represents a new type of international technology-enabled terror threat toward the United States and Russian Federation and how policy makers can best address this challenge. This research paper will explore how white nationalist groups in the United States and Russian Federation have sought cooperation with one another through wider ideological and strategic alignment. This paper will also explore the respective communication techniques of these groups, which have been enabled through the internet and new technologies. This paper will conclude with a reflection on potential avenues of cooperation between the United States and the Russian Federation, drawing on previous examples of collaboration among government officials and non-state actors in combating terrorism.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Conference Memos
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
The Stanford US-Russia Journal
Authors
Number
No. 1
Authors
Nora Sulots
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

In an era marked by profound societal transformations, identity, democracy, and justice have become central to the discourse on shaping fair and inclusive societies. Recognizing the imperative to delve into these complex issues, political scientist Hakeem Jefferson is launching a new research initiative at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. The Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice (IDJ) serves as a nexus for researchers committed to unraveling the multifaceted dimensions of identity and informing tangible steps toward a more equitable future.

Against the backdrop of diverse topics such as racial and ethnic identity, gender and sexuality, religion, class, and citizenship, the IDJ program emerges as a hub for interdisciplinary collaboration. Its reach extends beyond academic circles, bringing together researchers and organizations who are thinking about how to build fairer, more inclusive societies.

“Hakeem's work on race and politics in America is an important part of the Center's expanding work on the quality of American democracy,” shared Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL. “We are thrilled to launch this new program on such a crucial issue at CDDRL.”

"This program is the embodiment of years of hard work by Hakeem Jefferson in building an innovative research agenda and a vibrant scholarly community attentive to pressing questions on struggles for recognition, inclusion, and social justice,” added Hesham Sallam, the Center’s Associate Director for Research. “I look forward to seeing the program flourish and grow while contributing to intellectual life at CDDRL and Stanford at large."

This program is the embodiment of years of hard work by Hakeem Jefferson in building an innovative research agenda and a vibrant scholarly community attentive to pressing questions on struggles for recognition, inclusion, and social justice.
Hesham Sallam
Associate Director for Research, CDDRL

On January 11, 2024, IDJ will host its inaugural event, titled Multiracial Democracy and its Future in the United States, with Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Levitsky and Ziblatt are the New York Times best-selling authors of How Democracies Die and will discuss their newest book, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (Crown, 2023). In a moderated conversation with Professors Hakeem Jefferson and Jake Grumbach (UC Berkeley) and an audience Q&A, Levitsky and Ziblatt will offer a framework for understanding the current crisis in America's democracy. You can learn more about the event and register to attend here.

In the following Q&A, Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences, shares more about the motivations and objectives of the new IDJ program and the transformative potential of identity-focused research.



What motivated the establishment of the Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice (IDJ) at CDDRL, and what specific gaps or challenges in existing research does it aim to address?


As a scholar of race and politics, it has always been clear to me that we cannot understand threats to democracy or the promise of democracy without engaging issues of race and identity more broadly. I am excited to launch this program at CDDRL because I think we have a real opportunity to bring together scholars, practitioners, and community members concerned with creating a society of political and social equals. At IDJ, we hope to expand people’s understanding of what it means to care about democracy and what the study of democracy looks like. For us, these questions necessitate a focus on difference, a focus on inequality, and a concern with democracy beyond the ballot box. To be sure, we will engage questions related to elections and the health of electoral democracy, but we also want to make the strong case in the research we platform and in the conversations and workshops we convene that being concerned with democracy means thinking quite carefully about how societies are stratified, how power is distributed, and how justice is achieved.

We want to make the strong case in the research we platform and in the conversations and workshops we convene that being concerned with democracy means thinking quite carefully about how societies are stratified, how power is distributed, and how justice is achieved.
Hakeem Jefferson
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Faculty Director of IDJ

What are some of the program's key goals and objectives?


I want to invite folks who study the program themes to be in community with one another. The hope is that these interactions will lead to more thoughtful scholarship and initiatives. We want people to share early-stage ideas, make connections with like-minded collaborators, sharpen later-stage research, and broaden their aims and interests through consuming the work hosted by the program. We want to keep researchers aware of practitioners, especially at the local level, who are working to promote democratic principles and, in parallel, keep those organizations abreast of findings relevant to our shared interest in a healthier democracy.

How does the IDJ program approach the study of identity-related issues, and what makes it distinctive compared to existing research programs?


IDJ is ideas first. Different backgrounds, training, and scholarly dispositions mean that we think about identity-related questions in different ways. IDJ seeks to bring our attention to how we are engaging the same objective — equitable democracies — whether we are concerned with different identities, different contexts, or different sorts of evidence. By pursuing common insights, IDJ aims to produce work that is interesting to a broad audience.

As the IDJ program unfolds, how do you envision its role in shaping public discourse and influencing policies related to identity, democracy, and justice, both locally and globally?


Throughout my career — and since I was a young boy in South Carolina — I have engaged in public conversations about issues of justice. In recent years, I have written extensively for public audiences about topics ranging from the January 6 insurrection and whiteness to the crisis facing multiracial democracy in the United States. As I launch the IDJ program, this commitment to public engagement remains at the heart of what we plan to do. From writing Op-Eds to engaging directly with those working on the ground to safeguard democracy, we hope to be a public-facing program whose stakeholders include those far beyond our Stanford community.

Read More

Hoover Tower at sunset.
News

New Initiative Examines Stanford’s Role in Advancing Democracy

Upon completing the inventory phase of its research, the effort released a list of the courses, research and engagement activities that it feels advance democracy. The next phase involves holding deliberations with the larger Stanford community.
New Initiative Examines Stanford’s Role in Advancing Democracy
Hakeem Jefferson
News

Welcoming Hakeem Jefferson to CDDRL

Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, will join the center as a faculty affiliate.
Welcoming Hakeem Jefferson to CDDRL
Hero Image
View of the huge crowd from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, during the March on Washington
View of the huge crowd from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument during the March on Washington.
Warren K. Leffler / U.S. Library of Congress
All News button
1
Subtitle

Led by Professor Hakeem Jefferson, the program housed at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law will advance innovative research on the multifaceted dimensions of identity and their role in democratic development, struggles for recognition, social justice, and inclusion.

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

To celebrate Black History Month and in support of this year's theme of "Black Resistance," the World House Project at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is honored to share its award-winning short documentary, When I Get Grown: Reflections of a Freedom Rider, for free throughout the month of February.

When I Get Grown, a film based on World House Project director Dr. Clayborne Carson's interviews with American civil rights activist Bernard Lafayette, explores Lafayette's experiences as a Freedom Rider and his role in the Civil Rights Movement. The film highlights the Freedom Riders' commitment to end segregation and underscores the importance of black resistance in the struggle for equal rights and justice.

Bernard Lafayette's story is deeply intertwined with the theme of "Black Resistance," and his unwavering spirit of defiance against discrimination serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration for generations to come.

You can view the film's trailer below and watch it free online here.

 

AWARDS

 

  • Best Short Documentary (Harlem International Film Festival, 2022)
  • Best Short Documentary (Coronado Island Film Festival, 2022)
  • Audience Award, Best Documentary Short (Coronado Island Film Festival, 2022)
  • Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking (The Roxbury International Film Festival, 2022)
  • Most Inspiring — USA (The NewsFest — True Stories International Film and Writers Festival, 2022)
  • Best Documentary, 15-30 Minutes — Historical (The NewsFest — True Stories International Film and Writers Festival, 2022)
  • Best Trailer — Historical (The NewsFest — True Stories International Film and Writers Festival, 2022)
  • Best News Story — Historical (The NewsFest — True Stories International Film and Writers Festival, 2022)
  • Best Animation (The NewsFest — True Stories International Film and Writers Festival, 2022)

 

OFFICIAL SELECTIONS

 

  • Harlem International Film Festival (World Premiere), 2022
  • American Documentary and Animation Film Festival, 2022
  • United Nations Association Film Festival, 2022
  • Coronado Island Film Festival, 2022
  • Studio City International Film & TV Festival, 2022
  • Social Justice Film Festival, 2022
  • Sidewalk Film Festival, 2022
  • Montreal International Black Film Festival, 2022
  • Los Angeles Black Film Festival, 2022
  • New York City Independent Film Festival, 2022
  • Pan African Film Festival, 2022
  • American Documentary and Animation Film Festival, 2022
  • Roxbury International Film Festival, 2022
  • The NewsFest — True Stories International Film and Writers Festival, 2022
  • The World House Documentary Film Festival, 2023

Read More

Hero Image
When I Get Grown
All News button
1
Subtitle

“When I Get Grown: Reflections of a Freedom Rider,” a film based on Dr. Clayborne Carson's interviews with American civil rights activist Bernard Lafayette, is available to stream for free throughout the month of February.

-
2023 World House Film Festival

A documentary film festival in celebration of the 2023 Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday featuring films that explore "The Crisis of Democracy in the World House"


Join The World House Project for a free, four-day virtual film festival in celebration of the 2023 Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, beginning Friday evening, January 13, through Monday, January 16, 2023.

The virtual event will feature over 40 documentaries, as well as interviews and panel discussions with World House Project director Dr. Clayborne Carson and special guests that explore the theme of "The Crisis of Democracy in the World House."

For registration, film listings, and festival schedule, visit our website.

Virtual

Film Screenings
Date Label
-

Join the REDI Task Force for the next event in our "Critical Conversations: Race in Global Affairs" series as we examine policing and criminalization.

Activist calls to "defund the police" have catalyzed new conversations about the function and purpose of policing. Yet the realities of policing and criminalization, as a function of a state-apparatus that protect power and private property, are varied and complex. Beyond the day-to-day experiences of traffic violations or emergency calls, policing can be expanded to analyze institutions and communal experiences of criminalization - from the military to schooling to struggles for democracy. One broad area of agreement is the disproportionate harm that policing and criminalization has on marginalized and dispossessed populations, from Black schoolchildren to vigilantism in a post-apartheid state. This panel will travel the globe, describing specific cases in Africa, the U.S., and Latin America, articulating the connections between state violence, criminalization, and policing.

This online event is free and open to the public.

Speaker bios:

Image
Didi Kuo

Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. Her recent work examines changes to party organization, and the impact these changes have on the ability of governments to address challenges posed by global capitalism. She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines the role of business against clientelism and the development of modern political parties in the nineteenth-century. 

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, which examines problems such as polarization, inequality, and responsiveness, and recommends possibilities for reform. She also teaches in the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She is a non-resident fellow in political reform at New America, where she was a 2018 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
 

Image
an image of a woman in front of a book shelf

Subini Annamma is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization through the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, how they interlock with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons. Further, she positions students as knowledge generators, exploring how their narratives can inform teacher and special education. Dr. Annamma’s book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization (Routledge, 2018) focuses on the education trajectories of incarcerated disabled girls of color and has won the 2019 AESA Critic’s Choice Book Award & 2018 NWSA Alison Piepmeier Book Prize. Dr. Annamma is a past Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, AERA Division G Early Career Awardee, Critical Race Studies in Education Associate Emerging Scholar recipient, Western Social Science Association's Outstanding Emerging Scholar, and AERA Minority Dissertation Awardee. Dr. Annamma’s work has been published in scholarly journals such as Educational Researcher, Teachers College Record, Review of Research in Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Theory Into Practice, Race Ethnicity and Education, Qualitative Inquiry, among others.

 

Image
an image of a woman smiling

Kanisha Bond is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University (SUNY). Bond earned a PhD in Political Science from Penn State University, an MPP (International Development & Crime Policy) from Georgetown University, and a BA (International Relations & Spanish) from Bucknell University. Bond's work orbits one central research question: How do organization and identity influence dynamics of political challenge in polarized societies? She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine specifically mobilization and institution-building among radical socio-political groups around the world, and particularly in North America, Latin America, and Africa. Her written work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Negotiation, Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research, and the Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. She has contributed book reviews to the American Journal of Sociology and Journal of Conflict Studies, and research-based public commentary to Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Adi Magazine.

She also co-convene the Advancing Research in Conflict (ARC) Consortium Summer Program, which provides methods and ethics training and support to researchers working in violence-affected contexts, and serve on a variety of editorial, review, and advisory boards for organizations that advocate for rigorous and accessible political science in the public interest. 

 

Image
an image of a woman smiling

Dorothy Kronick is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. She studies Latin American political economy, focusing on Venezuela and the politics of crime and policing. Dorothy completed her PhD at Stanford University. Prior to her doctoral studies at Stanford, Dorothy lived in Caracas as a Fulbright Scholar. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Conflict Resolution; her writing on Venezuelan politics has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, The New Republic, and Caracas Chronicles, among other outlets.

 

Image
an image of a man

Nicholas Rush Smith is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019) and, alongside Erica S. Simmons, co-editor of Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His work has also been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, among other outlets.

 

 

Zoom Registration required:

REGISTER

 

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

0
Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
didi_kuo_2023.jpg

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

Date Label
FSI Senior Research Scholar Moderator Stanford University
Subini Annamma Associate Professor of Education Panelist Stanford University
Kanisha Bond Assistant Professor of Political Science Panelist SUNY-Binghampton
Nicholas Rush Smith Associate Professor of Political Science Panelist CUNY - City College
Dorothy Kronick Assistant Professor of Political Science Panelist University of Pennsylvania
Panel Discussions
-

Join the REDI Task Force for an invigorating keynote speech by Professor Tracey L. Meares, weaving together the past and present linkages between racial inequality and the law.

Safety and security are critical building blocks of community vitality, but too often the state’s response to safety — especially in race-class subjugated communities — is to assume that armed first responders are coincident with public safety. This response is wrong both normatively and empirically, but it does not mean that the state ought to retreat from its obligation to address safety deprivation.  This lecture will focus on the concept of “the police power,” which has a long history outside the policing service, and what it might mean to rethink it.
 

This online event is free and open to the public.

 

Image
image of Tracey L. Meares

Speaker bio:

Tracey L. Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and a Founding Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. Before joining the faculty at Yale, she was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 1995 to 2007, serving as Max Pam Professor and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice. She was the first African American woman to be granted tenure at both law schools.

Professor Meares is a nationally recognized expert on policing in urban communities. Her research focuses on understanding how members of the public think about their relationship(s) with legal authorities such as police, prosecutors and judges. She teaches courses on criminal procedure, criminal law, and policy and she has worked extensively with the federal government having served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice, a National Research Council standing committee and the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs Science Advisory Board.

In April 2019, Professor Meares was elected as a member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December 2014, President Obama named her as a member of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Zoom Registration required:

REGISTER

Tracey L. Meares Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law and Founding Director of The Justice Collaboratory Speaker Yale University
Lectures
-

 

Image
an image of a map of the world with a U.S. and China flag with the event text details.

 

How can we understand the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China without fueling anti-Asian hate?

Join REDI's student representatives, Maddy Morlino and Miku Yamada, for an open discussion on how we can avoid contributing to racial discrimination when engaging in academic dialogues on U.S.-China competition.

This in-person event will facilitate an open dialogue with participants and invited speakers, FSI Senior Fellow Thomas Fingar and Postdoctoral Fellow, Dongxian Jiang. Since seating is limited, registration is reserved for current Stanford faculty, students, and staff only with a Stanford.edu email.

Confirmed attendees will be notified by email on February 22.

Speaker bios:

Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009. From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Dongxian Jiang is a political theorist and intellectual historian. His primary research interests lie in comparative political theory, the history of political thought, and pressing practical questions of democratic and international politics, including Western and non-Western perspectives on human rights, democracy, good governance, and political legitimacy. He is also interested in the transmission and traveling of political ideas across divergent intellectual traditions. He holds a B.A. in International Politics and Philosophy from Peking University, an M.A. in Political Science from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University (as of September 2020). Dongxian Jiang is currently Civics Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Science, Stanford University.

Registration required:

REGISTER

 

Thomas Fingar FSI Senior Fellow Speaker Stanford University
Dongxian Jiang Political Science Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker Stanford University
Seminars
0
Assistant Professor, Political Science
HakeemJefferson_Headshot2023.png

Hakeem Jefferson is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University where he is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. During the 2021-22 academic year he was also the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Hakeem’s work focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. His in-progress book project builds on his award-winning dissertation to consider how Black Americans come to support punitive social policies that target members of their racial group.

In other projects, Hakeem examines the causes of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings; works to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification among Black Americans; and considers how white Americans navigate an identity that many within the group perceive as increasingly stigmatized. In these and other projects, Hakeem sets out to showcase and clarify the important and complex ways that identity matters across all domains of American life.

A public-facing, justice-oriented scholar, Hakeem is an academic contributor at FiveThirtyEight and his writings and commentary have been featured in places like the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and other major outlets. He is also active on Twitter, and you can follow him @hakeemjefferson.

CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
CV
Authors
Nora Sulots
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

We are delighted to announce that Hakeem Jefferson, Assistant Professor of Political Science, is a new faculty affiliate at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Professor Jefferson’s research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. He is especially interested in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. In other research projects, he examines the psychological and social roots of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings and works to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification, among Black Americans.

"I am delighted that Hakeem Jefferson is joining the CDDRL community” shared Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL. “Hakeem's work on race and politics in America is a welcome addition to the Center's expanding work on the quality of American democracy. I look forward to supporting his important work on the role that identity plays in the United States and elsewhere in structuring political behavior and social policies."

Hakeem's work on race and politics in America is a welcome addition to the Center's expanding work on the quality of American democracy.
Kathryn Stoner
Mosbacher Director of CDDRL

Professor Jefferson is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and African American Studies from the University of South Carolina.

In 2020, his dissertation, "Policing Norms: Punishment and the Politics of Respectability Among Black Americans," was a co-winner of the Best Dissertation Award from the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science Association.

Hakeem Jefferson

Hakeem Jefferson

Assistant Professor, Political Science and CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
Read more about Hakeem
Hero Image
Hakeem Jefferson Photo by Andrew Brodhead
All News button
1
Subtitle

Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, will join the center as a faculty affiliate.

Subscribe to Race