About the Seminar: In this time of great challenges, our democracies urgently need to produce citizens who can move from demanding change to making it. But the skills for doing so are not innate, they are learned. In this talk, Beth Simone Noveck will discuss how both citizens and governments can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems. Drawing on the latest methods from data and social sciences, including original survey data from around the world, she proposes a practical set of methods for public servants, community leaders, students, activists, and anyone who wants to be a catalyst for positive social change.

 

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About the Speaker: Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Family Center for Global Impact and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. The author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press 2021) (named a Best Book of 2021 by Stanford Social Innovation Review), she is also Core Faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI (IEAI) at Northeastern. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Chancellor Angela Merkel named her to her Digital Council in 2018. Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.

In addition to Solving Public Problems, Beth is the author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (Harvard Univ Press 2015) and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings 2009) and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2005).

About the Seminar: For centuries, the world’s dominant power has been the state that wielded the world’s dominant navy. More recently, globalization has been remade, as a sea-based trade—85% of all global trade moves by sea. As does nearly 2/3rds of the world trade in oil and gas, while 93% of all data in the world moves along undersea cables that line the ocean floor. The oceans are vital, too, to our changing climate. All of which highlights the drama of China’s return to the high seas, and its rapid maritime and naval build-up. The net result: a new arms race, centered in the Western Pacific but reaching out into the Arctic and the Indian Oceans, and pulling in Russia, India, Japan and Europe.  Bruce Jones, author of To Rule the Waves, will explore how our security, our prosperity, and our environment are being reshaped by the dynamics of sea power.

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About the Speaker: 

Bruce Jones is a senior fellow and director of the project on international order and strategy at the Brookings Institution. The author or co-author of several books on international order, his most recent work is “To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About the Seminar: Saumitra Jha and Steven Wilkinson's book project, Wars and Freedoms, makes the case that, throughout human history, external wars are common catalysts for political change at home, and they do so in large part because of their impact on the organizational capacity of the disenfranchised. It draws widely from across the social sciences and humanities: literature; history; biography; psychology; sociology; economics; and political science. The book draws upon these diverse ways of knowing to provide evidence from across time and around the world of the relevance of a simple framework for understanding which types of external wars are conducive to the emergence of broad-based freedoms, the building of states, and the shrinking of wealth inequalities on one hand, and when instead, others have led to the building of military castes, or an increased propensity for political polarization,  ethnic conflict, attempted coups, revolution and genocide on the other. In so doing, Wars and Freedoms provides a re-interpretation of the history of revolutions and political change, in order to make clear which lessons and episodes from history may be more germane for the future of democracy and freedoms in the twenty-first century.

Wars and Freedoms describes how there were historically three paths that connected organizational skills developed in external wars to the spread of democracy and democratic values: in the shadow of a crisis that threatened broad class conflict, through a more gradual process of state-building in response to ongoing external existential threats, and through the organizational efforts of committed military leaders. Of these, however, only the last, the most fragile and contingent, is still likely to emerge organically. Understanding the decline of other paths, however, can still help us understand both how political freedoms and democracy emerged, how our democracies may die, and what we may still be able to do about it.

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About the Speaker:

Saumitra Jha is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in Stanford's Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. His work on the historical relationship between conflict and markets has been received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best article in political economy from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in the top journals in both Economics and Political Science, including The American Political Science Review, Econometrica, and The Quarterly Journal of Economics. His co-authored work on Heroes was awarded the Oliver Williamson Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics. Also an award-winning teacher, he has shown a particular interest in communicating the results of his research to broader audiences, in the press (such as the Indian Express and USA Today) and through online policy and social media outlets (VoxEU, VoxDev, Public Books, Broadstreet, Ideas for India, AOC), and to a range of student and practitioner audiences, including cadets at West Point, members of the US intelligence community, European Union diplomats, and entrepreneurs in Africa, India and the United States.  His work has been featured in the Economist, Financial Times and the Washington Post, among others, and he has provided commentary for television and radio news, including for the BBC, ABC and CBC.

About the Seminar: What are the defining traits of an autocracy? Leading works answer this question in negative terms: autocracies are non-democracies. We propose instead a substantive definition of autocracy, which we believe better captures what scholars actually mean when they invoke the term. We define autocracy as exclusive rule. Between substantive autocracy and electoral democracy, there is a residual space, of regimes that do not fit under either concept. We call these regimes “non-autocratic non-democracies” or NANDs.  A substantive understanding of autocracy has important theoretical and empirical implications. Theoretically, it ensures that claims about the population of autocratic regimes are ontologically coherent, and that we do not end up calling barely non-democratic regimes autocracies. Empirically, our measure reveals that the post-Cold War era has been even less autocratic than it is normally portrayed, and that concerns about a global turn toward "autocratization" are likely overblown.
 

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